Managing while being affected by trauma
To be candid: it’s not been easy to be a Jewish manager since October 2023. It’s radically different from being a queer manager after the Pulse massacre. In stark contrast with my previous experiences, I struggled with how to express my feelings. I struggled with how to support my reports, so that they feel safe to express their feelings or their needs. I struggled with finding a balance between work-as-escape and identifying when it was time for me to step out and care for myself. And I’ve felt alienated from places that I’d otherwise have gone to for renewal.
Do vs Don’t
A TLDR of what helped me navigate being a people manager while being affected by trauma:
Do:
- Express your feelings — with care: Acknowledge that you’re emotionally affected, and state your intent to provide awareness rather than ask for support.
- Find support from peer managers and from outside of your company
- Manage your batteries: If you don’t have spare emotional energy to support your reports or to navigate challenging management situations, step out and be clear that you won’t be available to provide that.
- Set boundaries: If you know your triggers or would like to ensure that a sensitive topic is an opt-in conversation for you as well as for your reports, name that explicitly as a boundary. In the past, I’ve asked colleagues not to bring up my cat while I was grieving, and not to discuss graphic details of hamburgers while that was a trigger for me.
- Ask your manager for what you need: Ask your manager to support your needs. Note the distinction between “setting boundaries” and “asking for support” with reports. Your reports may volunteer support, which can lead to rewarding conversations so long as you engage mindfully.
Don’t:
- Don’t dump on your reports: Even if your reports want to provide support, the manager-report power dynamic can interfere with reports genuinely signaling if you’ve crossed a boundary or exceeded their capacity. This is one of few exceptions to “Comfort in; Dump out”.
- Don’t assume your reports aren’t affected: They may not share that they’re affected, or they might not realize. (Especially for hate crimes — and notably for queer people, who may not have come out to you, and also may not yet have recognized their own queerness.)
- Don’t follow boundaries dogmatically: Crossing boundaries can be good! Boundary crossing can provide a lifeline at a critical moment — such as hugging a crying report, sending flowers to someone grieving, or sharing a personal story to help someone feel less alone. Generally lean towards explicit consent here, unless there are strong and clear signals or you know this person well.
Expressing feelings
For me, integrity means expressing what is important to me. I believe there is always a path to express that while being mindful of my impact. For example: being silent is not neutral in the face of human suffering. It shouldn’t be debatable to state that human rights are paramount and that human suffering is bad.
However, as a manager, even in expressing a simple statement, I have to be careful that I’m not expecting non-managers to manage my feelings, and be careful not to share or imply political statements or other things that a non-manager might feel uncomfortable confronting me about. Simple statements or even words can be misinterpreted — even in good faith! There’s dog whistles, assumptions about intent (e.g., statehood, genocide), assumptions of a false binary, and assumptions around actual binaries.
Let’s clear the air here: my existence is considered “political”, both as a queer person and as a Jewish person. Regardless of whether queerness or civil rights or anti-racism is considered “political”, my freedom to openly acknowledge those in the workplace is a prerequisite for any job that I would take.
Note: The onus of care in communication is on us as people managers. Part of the job is to take the lion’s share of the emotional energy in both non-judgmental active listening and in speaking with thoughtful, empathetic regard for the perception and impact of our words. Beyond people management, I strongly believe this is the responsibility of anyone holding relative power.
Silence can be harmful
The common, “simple” recommendation for people managers is not to talk about politics, to the extent of generally not acknowledging current events beyond a bland “be aware that people may be affected by current events”. I’d like to convince you that this is often harmful, both to the people around us, and to people managers from marginalized communities.
I’ve gone the path of staying silent. It ain’t pretty. Powerlessness is intensified when our voice is suppressed, regardless of whether we repress our own voice or whether we are silenced.
This is tricky in a management role, because we hold a form of power via management, alongside experiencing powerlessness in some aspect of our lives. These aren’t independent: our powerlessness doesn’t negate holding structural power as a manager, and holding that power doesn’t negate our powerlessness.
Another tricky aspect: There are times when saying nothing is in itself harmful to the people around you. If I don’t say anything now as a Jewish person, many will assume my Jewishness to have a “default” stance. I am marked as inherently non-neutral. In a somewhat different sense, your silence around homophobia marks you as someone who cannot be trusted by queer people. As people managers, we can severely damage psychological safety through silence alone — worse than by misspeaking in good faith.
On a societal scale, inaction is more harmful than silence. But as people managers, we often take actions in silence with the expectation that our actions speak for us — and I want to encourage you to reconsider the impact of silence. Crises are not a time to lead with actions and not words. When we are unable to take highly visible and impactful actions during a crisis, our words may be the only supportive things that someone may hear.
Please approach “silence” and “neutrality” with care, compassion, and thoughtfulness. And if you can’t find genuine words to speak out against forms of oppression, maybe you shouldn’t manage humans.
Psychological safety for reports
Silence within powerlessness is also relevant to our reports: If they don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves, that can exacerbate powerlessness and intensify trauma response. C-PTSD is particularly exacerbated when someone feels silenced, unheard, or unsafe to express themselves — and signals intensifying those feelings can be triggering.
I’ve written extensively about Supporting Reports through Trauma, so I won’t repeat myself, but the most important aspect here is maintaining and reinforcing psychological safety.
Learn, listen, demonstrate humility, and validate.
Don’t assume they aren’t affected — even if they themselves believe that they aren’t.
Encourage them to find and do what’s best for them. Work could be what they need, and it could be a particular type of work. Lay out a few options for them: e.g., continuing familiar work, picking up something straightforward and atomic, or digging into a challenging problem.
Be explicit about what you can provide as far as time off. I tell my reports that they can drop everything and disconnect 100% for a day, a week, or a month, and that I’ll handle taking care of any handoffs, on-call coverage, or anything else that’s going on. Some organizations and some managers may have different expectations.
Work-as-escape
In previous challenging experiences, I’ve found work to be a valuable comfort. Whether writing code or supporting my team, working provided me with a sense of competence and usefulness — which countered the feeling of helplessness.
It’s important to have choice and some degree of autonomy. Many traumatic events center around control and power over someone or a group of people. We facilitate recovery from “power over” by providing a space for someone to feel a sense of control over their environment (not over people!). Through encouragement or through autonomy, they can exercise agency and rebuild a sense of confidence and self-worth (Starhawk describes this as “power-from-within”).
Although writing code was particularly gratifying to recover from powerlessness, similar opportunities in leadership roles are few and far between. For me, people management inherently provides an alternative route to counteract the powerlessness of traumatic experiences: We experience a collaborative form of power in helping our team to achieve their goals. As Hannah Arendt defines, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”
When to disconnect
Don’t get lost in work-as-escape. If you don’t have spare emotional energy to support your reports or to navigate challenging management situations, step out and be clear that you won’t be available to provide that.
If you are at work as a people manager, your reports should be able to assume at all times without question that they can call on you for any work-relevant form of support that they need — and in some cases it’s not only reasonable but expected for us to cross boundaries and support the wellbeing of a colleague in crisis. Take care to ensure that you have the capacity to provide that. Notable examples include providing emotional support, working through a hard conversation, or engaging in a hard conversation on their behalf — potentially involving biases, volatile topics, or decisions with controversial cross-functional tradeoffs. In other words: high stakes, opinionated, emotional conversations. That is not the time for your batteries to reach empty.
The consequences of running empty go beyond the direct impact on the immediate situation (those people and whatever high-stakes conversation you just failed in): you lose trust from everyone in the vicinity, and you will no longer be seen as reliable.
I can’t tell you how to gauge your emotional reservoir, but a good start might be thinking about whether you can reach the end of your day and still be able to jump into a challenging conversation on a sensitive topic with high impact to your reports.
References and Resources
Traumatic invalidation:
- PTSD and the Danger of Downplaying Trauma
- Traumatic Invalidation: Mental Health Effects, Examples, and More
Feelings and behaviors
- BICEPS Core Needs — PALOMA MEDINA
- Primary and Secondary Emotions: Recognizing The Difference
- How to Do a Behavior Chain Analysis
Navigating trauma:
See additional resources in Supporting Reports through Trauma — e.g., crisis support, leading through crises, and self-care.
