Work Is Not Family: A Lesson I Never Wanted but Need to Share

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“The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.” ~Peter Levine

I was sitting in the conference room at work with the CEO and my abusive male boss.

The same boss who had been love-bombing and manipulating me since I started nine months earlier, slowly pushing my nervous system into a constant state of fight-or-flight.

When I was four months into the job, this boss went on a three-day bender during an overnight work conference at a fancy hotel in Boston.

He skipped client meetings or showed up smelling like alcohol, wearing yesterday’s clothes.

When I texted him to ask where he was, he replied, “I f**king hate you.”

When my CEO found out and called me five minutes after I got home, I told him I trusted him to handle it however he saw fit.

I really believed he would. But over the next five months, the abuse didn’t stop. I just didn’t know it was abuse yet.

He was over-the-top obsessed with me. He regularly told me:

• “You’re going to make so much money here.”
• “You have the ‘it’ factor.”
• “You know how I feel about you.”
• “I’m going to fast-track you.”
• “You’re such a good culture fit.”
• “This has been your home all along.”

He told me everything I wanted to hear.

I had spent the prior fifteen years in corporate America, wondering where I belonged. Wondering where my work family was.

At first, I felt like I had finally found it.

Then the attention escalated. What started as friendly check-ins became constant interruptions. The group Teams chats turned into direct messages. The work texts turned into personal texts—at night and on the weekends.

He asked to go to dinner with me and my husband. He offered to buy me lunch while ignoring my coworkers. He brought in cookies for the office but made sure I knew they were for me. He singled me out in meetings and asked how I was doing while ignoring everyone else.

I told myself, “There are worse things than your boss liking you.” But over time…I started to feel unsafe.

My body started to send signals. I was having panic attacks on Sunday nights. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself using PTO just to get away from him. My fight-or-flight response was fully activated, and I finally had to admit I wasn’t in control anymore.

Eventually, a coworker reported it to the CEO. Which brings me back to the conference room.

I sat across from the CEO, body tense, heart racing, but filled with hope. I was ready for resolution. Support. Justice.

That’s not what happened.

Whatever the CEO said that day affected me in a way I didn’t expect. I felt minimized. Judged. Dismissed.

Then my body reacted.

The pressure in my chest started to build until I couldn’t control it anymore. I started shaking—full-body, uncontrollable shaking. I tried to sit still, tried to pretend nothing was happening, but it was too late.

There was no hiding it. No escaping it.

Just a forty-two-year-old corporate woman, uncontrollably shaking in a conference room across from the CEO.

I excused myself and ran to the restroom.

I lay on the floor of the public bathroom and cried harder than I ever had. My body was forcing the energy out of me. There was nothing I could do but let it come out.

Once the tears slowed, I left the building as fast as I could.

What had just happened to me?
Why did it feel like a gaping wound had opened in my chest?
Why did I feel physically damaged?

It would take almost a year before I understood: that was trauma. That was new trauma layered on top of old trauma.

Almost exactly twenty years earlier, I had been sexually assaulted by a coworker.

I reported it to the police, and they didn’t even take a statement. I was sent away. Dismissed. Minimized.

My brain had filed this memory away. But my body remembered.

That moment in the conference room—being in a position of vulnerability, being ignored, unheard, unprotected—triggered a trauma response that had been waiting quietly inside of me for decades.

My brain couldn’t tell the difference between past and present. It just knew I wasn’t safe. So it mobilized. It tried to protect me. And it left me raw, shut down, and checked out from the world—including my own kids—for a long time afterward.

It was the worst time of my life.

Several months after the conference room incident, I got a new job.

It wasn’t easy to leave despite everything that had happened. I liked my job. I was good at it. My coworkers were my friends, and we had been through so much together. But I had become a shell of myself, and leaving seemed like the only way to get myself back.

Even so, the first six months at my new job were not easy. I remained hypervigilant and emotionally reactive. Standard feedback and performance reviews brought me right back to that conference room, no matter what was said.

That’s when I learned: trauma doesn’t stay with the toxic job. It comes with you. And this was trauma.

What I Learned About Trauma

I needed to learn everything I could, so I enrolled in a trauma-informed coaching program and studied my experience through that lens.

From a trauma perspective, I learned:

• The brain constantly scans the environment for safety and danger, a process called neuroception.
• My brain perceived danger in countless ways during my employment and alerted me through my nervous system.
• I rationalized those signals away, telling myself I could handle it.
• But the signals—racing heart, insomnia, panic, emotional reactivity—only got louder until they could no longer be ignored.

It felt like my body was attacking me. In reality, it was trying to save me.

Trauma is what happens when your system struggles to cope with overwhelming distress, leaving a wound behind. Those wounds don’t need your permission to exist; they only need a trigger.

That day in the conference room, multiple unhealed wounds surfaced all at once—sexual trauma, financial trauma, friendship trauma, life purpose trauma, and institutional betrayal trauma.

The new trauma stacked on the old was simply too much for my system to manage. So my body did what it was designed to do: protect me.

Learning this allowed me to release the shame I was carrying. It allowed me to have compassion for myself and others.

It made me stop looking backward and start looking forward.

What I Learned About Work

While I was learning about trauma, I started asking bigger questions in my new role as an HR consultant.

I had never worked in HR before, so I studied every conversation, policy, and process to understand how the system works behind the scenes and to view my own experience through the employer’s lens.

Who really has the power?
What rights do employees have?
What responsibilities do employers have to protect them?

Here’s what I learned:

• The employment agreement is simple—employees agree to perform the duties on their job description, and employers agree to compensate them for performing those duties.
• Both parties can end the agreement at any time.
• HR and employment attorneys are paid to protect the company from risk. Period.

That’s it. Anything beyond that is optional, unless required by law.

Work is a contract. It is not a family. It is a system built for labor, not love.

And this system is not immune to abuse. It is not immune to trauma.

Just because it’s a professional setting doesn’t mean it’s a safe one. And just because you’re a high performer doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable to harm.

The idea that work is a family, that it should provide belonging, meaning, and loyalty, didn’t come from nowhere—it reflects how work itself has changed over time.

In the past, belonging came from many places at once: tight-knit communities, extended families, faith traditions, and work that was often woven into local or family life.

When industrialization pulled people into factories, corporations, and offices, many of those community anchors began to lose influence. To fill the void, workplaces leaned into family language—promising connection and loyalty in exchange for more of people’s time, energy, and devotion.

For a time, many companies did try to live up to that promise with pensions, long-term employment, and mutual loyalty between employer and employee.

But as work has become more globalized and transactional, that loyalty has faded. Today, organizations still borrow the language of family, but the commitment is one-sided. When it serves them, they lean on employees’ devotion; when it doesn’t, the illusion disappears.

That’s how we know work is not family—because families don’t withdraw love, belonging, or loyalty the moment it no longer serves them.

What Helped Me Heal

The good news is healing is possible.

For me, healing meant more than just learning about trauma in a classroom and HR policies in an office. It meant implementing daily practices into my life that rebuilt my sense of safety and helped me trust myself again. This included:

Monitoring my nervous system and honoring my body’s responses to triggers.

I started noticing the small cues—a clenched jaw, a racing heart, a stomach that wouldn’t settle. Instead of pushing through, I learned to pause, breathe, and respond with care. These moments of noticing became the foundation of feeling safe in my own body again.

Exploring my past experiences with compassion instead of judgment.

For years, I believed I had compassion for myself, but it was shallow—more like telling myself to “let it go” than honoring what I had lived through. It wasn’t until I became aware of the experiences that shaped my patterns and behaviors that I finally understood real self-compassion.

Recognizing the subconscious behaviors that put me at risk.

Perfectionism, rationalizing red flags, unhealthy coping strategies—these were patterns I had carried for decades. Becoming aware of them gave me the power to make different choices, rather than repeating the same painful cycles.

Setting boundaries at work to protect my energy and healing.

I learned how to say no without guilt, how to step away from people who drain me, and how to handle the frustrations of work without getting emotionally activated. Boundaries have become an act of self-love.

Honoring the complexity of the human body and lived experience.

This was the hardest lesson of all. I carry a body, brain, and nervous system that remember everything I’ve been through, even the parts I’ve tried to forget. My responsibility now is to honor that complexity in every environment I step into—including work.

That doesn’t mean molding myself to whatever the workplace demands. It means protecting my well-being first and remembering that I am more than a role, a paycheck, or the approval of others.

It took time, but these practices slowly closed the wound that had once left me gasping for air on the floor of that bathroom. The open wound in my chest has now been closed for over a year and has been replaced with peace.

That day in the conference room broke me. But it also cracked me open. I put myself back together, stronger than ever.

And you can, too.

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