Once you finally get out of a toxic workplace, the negative experience you had in that job can linger. There’s a psychological and emotional aftermath. And it can interfere with your enjoyment of and success in your new job.
To illustrate with an example, imagine a woman who gets very stressed every time she has to speak on a team conference call with the boss. Even though her co-workers and boss are very nice, respectful and professional, she has a lot of fear. While for some this could be coming from a fear of public speaking, for her this isn’t the case - she’s an extrovert and generally outgoing. Instead, her fear is coming from her experience at her last job where the employees were often managed by fear and conference calls were an opportunity to be publicly embarrassed, ridiculed, and disrespected.
She’s since left that job and found a place where that isn’t the case and conference calls are nothing to be afraid of, but her brain and physiology are still responding like they are - hence the continued fear she experiences when she sees a conference call scheduled on her calendar.
Learned Responses
What’s likely happening here is that when we have a negative experience, we learn from it. Our brain takes in all the information about that situation and primes us to the environmental cues so we can possibly prevent it from happening again. We develop a learned response - thoughts, feelings (most often fear) and behavior - in response to the stimuli we perceive as a threat. It’s part of our human survival system.
Unfortunately, when we’ve been through a rough time in a toxic work environment we may have developed a lot of learned responses that come up for us in common work situations.
So, even when we’ve moved on into a new job where the situation is different, we can bring our learned responses from the past with us. They can interfere with how we are in our new role. And they could even get in the way of our performance if they're preventing us from being our best self.
So, besides saging your office to try to release this energy, what can you do you let go of this old stuff? How can we approach these learned responses and retrain our mind and body to be in and respond to the present?
Here are some things those I coach (and myself) have applied and found helpful.
1. Identify when it’s happening
This may seem obvious, but our learned responses are often automatic and unconscious to us. We may not be noticing when we’re responding to a situation as if we’re in the past. So step one is to identify and develop awareness of the situations where this is happening. Observe when you’re stressed or having strong emotions and reflect on whether this could have to do with stuff that happened in your past job. Also watch for where you may also be avoiding things (ex. trying to avoid conference calls).
It’s also common that when we experience a toxic workplace our spirit can become crushed, we can feel very small and powerless and we can lose the faith in ourselves and abilities that we once had. These too are things we have learned to think and feel due to past events. If this is the case for you, identify when you’re thinking negative thoughts about yourself and undermining or undervaluing what you can do and what you have to offer.
2. Focus on the current facts
Once we have awareness of what’s going on for us inside we have a choice in how we will handle the situation at hand.
Based on our past experiences our mind is trying to tell us a story about the current situation we’re in and what is going to happen, but we can take a good look and ask ourselves, “Is it true?” This question, “Is it true?” is the foundation of The Work of Byron Katie. She illuminates that many of the thoughts we have that cause us pain and stress simply aren’t true. And once we can see that a thought isn’t true a situation that just a few minutes ago was clouded by emotion can be re-approached with greater clarity.
So, focus on and ground yourself in the current facts of the situation. Ask yourself, “Is what my mind is telling me true?” and, “What is actually happening right now?” Remind yourself of what is real in this situation you’re in right now.
And if you’re experiencing negative thoughts about yourself or your abilities, remind yourself of the truth; that you are fully capable, that the environment in the past was not conducive to your best work, that those past events no matter how unpleasant or terrible do not mean anything about your intellect, skills, talents and ability to excel today. That’s the truth.
First through awareness, and then focusing on the current facts and what you know to be the truth, you can respond to the situation from more clarity.
3. Accept how you feel and have compassion for yourself
Once you do the above, you may logically assume that your stress or feelings will immediately disappear (ex. that the conference call induced fear will go away once you remind yourself your new boss is very nice and you’re no longer in your past job). But unfortunately, in my experience and that of the people I coach, this isn't always the case. It may take some time to teach your brain you’re in a new job and new environment now.
So, what can we do with our feelings?
As psychotherapist Megan Bruneau, a Women@Forbes contributor, says, “You don’t have to ‘deal’ with it, you just have to ‘be’ with it - at first, anyway. Some things we have to ‘feel to heal,’ and attempts to get rid of, numb, suppress or fix our feelings may just create an additional layer of suffering.” Instead, Bruneau suggests we notice the fear, anger, hurt, resentment, shame, sadness, and so on and validate said feelings by saying what we might say to a friend.
So when we’re at work and these feelings start coming up we can try to just notice them there and let them be felt. We can breathe into the feeling and instead of resisting or doing anything to push it away, let it be there. Notice your tendencies to want to push it away and let them be there too. Remember that emotions are impermanent and just ride the wave.
Offer yourself patience and loving with yourself. Know that your learned responses are a normal way humans adapt to situations and may just need some time to change.
To summarize, we want to pay attention to our thoughts and feelings to gain awareness of when we may be having a learned response to stimuli that we picked up in our past job. Then, focus on the facts - what’s actually happening right now and what is the truth of the current situation. Make choices and behave based on the facts. Then, let our thoughts and feelings just be. They'll shift on their own time.
