What workplace trauma actually does to your brain. And what you can do about it.
When I was seventeen, I started an apprenticeship at a small arms factory in a small country town. In my first week we were introduced to a drill press. A machine ten, twelve feet tall with a drill the size of your forearm. It was huge and quite frankly, intimidating. One hundred and sixteen first year apprentices gathered around it for the safety briefing. Three of us were girls.
Because we had long hair, they made a point: we had to wear a hairnet. All of it tucked in. The drill press will rip your hair clean out of your head.
It was 1983. There were three of us girls in a sea of blokes who made it fairly clear we weren’t entirely welcome. But it was 1983, so we didn’t have much choice about that either.
Behind the machine was a poster. A young woman, maybe twenty, with long blonde hair on one side of her head. On the other side: completely bald. Red. Bleeding. Her skull exposed.
That image stopped us cold. Not because of a warning label. Because of consequence. Because it was real.
We have these images everywhere for physical injury. Cigarette packets. Factory floors. Before-and-afters that are impossible to unsee. We understand in our bones what happens when we fail to protect people from physical danger.
But psychological injury from a toxic workplace? We talk about that in language so soft it slides right off.
Let’s Talk About That Word
There’s a word we use a lot in workplaces right now. Burnout. We talk about it constantly: in leadership meetings, in HR policies, in LinkedIn posts. And burnout is real. The World Health Organization defines it as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. It’s exhaustion. A running-out-of-fuel feeling that rest alone won’t fix. Sometimes burnout is just burnout. But sometimes it’s the start of something way more serious.
The early symptoms of burnout and the early symptoms of developing psychological injury look almost identical. The exhaustion. The disengagement. The Sunday night dread. The physical symptoms starting to creep in. Most people hit burnout and think they just need a holiday, a long weekend, a break. They don’t realize that if the source of the damage is still sitting in the same office, burnout doesn’t stay burnout. It deepens into something that two weeks of annual leave won’t fix. Something that takes years, not days, to climb out of.
Burnout is the moment you realize you forgot to put your hairnet on. Psychological injury is what happens if you don’t stop the machine.
I didn’t recognize psychological injury when it was happening to me. Not at first.
I grew up tough. World War Two grandmothers who taught me to stop whining, pull my socks up, get on with it. I traveled internationally alone from nine years old. I was independent. Fierce. The strong one in the family. The one people came to when things got hard.
So when things started going wrong at work, I didn’t name it as injury. I named it as stress. Just stress. Everyone works for a difficult boss at some point. Everyone has bad weeks and 3AM moments they’d rather forget. I told myself I just needed to push through.
But the 3AM waking didn’t stop. The nightmares didn’t stop. The heart palpitations before routine meetings didn’t stop. I started taking notes obsessively. Not because I’m disorganized, but because I’d learned that what was said in a meeting could come back to me months later in a completely different form, and I needed proof of the original conversation. I was on guard constantly. That relentless, exhausting, never-off alertness that your body goes into when it no longer feels safe.
I still didn’t call it injury.
Because the thing about psychological injury from workplace manipulation is that it doesn’t announce itself the way a drill press does. There’s no poster. There’s no clear before-and-after image. There’s just a slow, creeping erosion that you keep explaining away. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I’m hormonal. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this anymore. Maybe I’m just too old.
And the person causing the harm? They’re not yelling at you. They’re not obviously cruel. They’re smiling. They’re encouraging you in meetings. They’re giving you new titles and bigger portfolios. There’s nothing you can point to and say — there. That’s what’s hurting me. So you start to wonder if you’re being paranoid. If you’re the problem.
I was not the problem.
In his book Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek argues that the primary job of a leader is to create what he calls a Circle of Safety: an environment where people feel safe enough to actually do their jobs instead of watching their backs. When that circle exists, oxytocin flows. People trust each other. They do better work. When it doesn’t exist, when the threat is coming from inside the organisation, from the person who is supposed to protect you, cortisol takes over. And as we’ve already established, cortisol doesn’t switch off just because you leave the building at the end of the day. What I was living in wasn’t a leadership failure. It was the deliberate dismantling of safety by someone who understood exactly how to use fear as a tool.
What was happening, and I can see it clearly now, was a pattern. Incremental meetings where the outcome was predetermined but you were walked to it step by step so that by the end, you owned it. Standard one-on-one conversations about normal business that would suddenly, at the very end, veer into something that left you blindsided and unsteady. A management philosophy used to shut down critical thinking and dissent under the guise of positivity. A restructure of my role that removed the tools I needed to succeed, and then holding me responsible when the results suffered.
I came from nearly two decades with a leader who was the opposite of this. Someone who surrounded himself with people smarter than him and meant it. Who saw potential in you before you saw it in yourself. Who built people up because that’s what good leaders do. I knew what good leadership felt like. Which made the contrast impossible to ignore. Eventually. It just took me far too long to trust what I was seeing.
That’s what psychological injury looks like. Not weakness. Not drama. A four hour dinner plan for steak and salad.
I became someone I didn’t recognise. I, who had always been the glass half full person, the one who believed we’d hit the target even when the odds were against us, was now being told I was negative. That I was a problem. After nearly two decades of building my career in this industry, I couldn’t make a decision about what to cook for dinner. I’m not being metaphorical. It would take me four hours to plan a simple meal for two people. My husband, steady and patient and not putting any pressure on me whatsoever, would come home and I’d be paralysed.
I resigned. I thought I would recover the way I’d always recovered. By pushing through, applying for the next job, moving on. I gave myself permission to be upset for a little while. Then I expected to be fine.
I was not fine.
The nightmares continued. The rumination continued. I couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t stop the thoughts from spinning. I withdrew from almost everyone. Friends would call and I’d say I’m alright, getting there, and leave it at that. I didn’t burden my husband. He was carrying enough. I just got quieter and smaller and more isolated, and I told myself that was fine too. That this was just what recovery looked like.
Your Body Knows More Than You Do
What I didn’t understand at the time is that what I was experiencing wasn’t weakness or an inability to cope. It was my nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. When your body perceives sustained threat, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the HPA axis, the central command system that governs your stress response. The hypothalamus signals the pituitary, the pituitary signals the adrenal glands, and the result is a flood of adrenaline and cortisol. Heart racing. Blood redirected away from digestion and toward survival. This is a brilliant biological system. It works perfectly when the threat is a predator, or a car accident, or something you can run from. But when the threat is your direct manager, and you can’t fight him and you can’t leave without losing your income and your career and two decades of work, and when the threat just keeps coming, day after day, meeting after meeting, your HPA axis doesn’t get to switch off. It stays activated. Constantly.
That was my nervous system. On. All the time. Not stress. A body that had forgotten how to feel safe.
Most people never connect the physical fallout back to where it started. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s landmark research, first demonstrated in primates and since confirmed in human neuroimaging studies, showed that chronically elevated glucocorticoids, the class of stress hormones that includes cortisol, physically damage the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for memory, learning, and concentration. Dendritic branching retracts. Neurogenesis slows. The structure literally shrinks. That’s why I couldn’t read anymore. That’s why a scientist who had spent decades processing complex data couldn’t hold a simple thought. At the same time, chronic cortisol increases the reactivity of the amygdala, the brain’s threat detection centre, while simultaneously impairing the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rational thinking, planning and decision-making. Psychologist Daniel Goleman called this the amygdala hijack: the moment your emotional brain overrides your rational one. Under sustained threat, that hijack stops being a moment. It becomes your baseline. Which is why the 3AM waking wouldn’t stop. Why the replaying of conversations wouldn’t stop. Why my prefrontal cortex, the part of my brain I had built an entire career on, couldn’t decide what to cook for dinner. The broken sleep made everything worse. Research consistently shows that chronic sleep deprivation triggers the same inflammatory immune response as physical injury, raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, and further suppresses the very cognitive functions already under attack. My body wasn’t falling apart because I was fragile. It was falling apart because it had been under sustained biological attack and nobody, including me, had called it that.
Karen, the psychologist who worked with me through WorkSafe, put it better than I could.
“As a Psychologist it is always so very inspiring to see someone take that courageous step of seeking to connect with therapy. That takes strength and courage. By taking that step you are giving yourself an improved opportunity to heal and restore what is yours and what should never have been taken away from you: your personal safety and well-being. Whilst the person stepping into therapy does the work, taking those steps alongside a Psychologist can allow an unpacking and re-sorting of the trauma which in turn gives space for recovery and healing.”
— Karen, Psychologist
A few months after I resigned, I went back to the office to meet some colleagues for lunch. I knew he wasn’t there. I was still on an internal WhatsApp group and knew exactly where he was. So I thought it was safe. I walked in and was surrounded by people who genuinely loved me. Hugs, smiles, warmth. And I had a panic attack.
That was the moment I stopped pretending.
I told my family what happened and that was when we all understood that what I was dealing with was not stress I could push through. It was injury. Real injury. The kind that needed real help.
I was referred to a psychologist through WorkSafe. I won’t pretend I embraced it.
The truth is, I was terrified. Not just of what talking to a psychologist would uncover, but of what it would mean about me. In my generation, we weren’t taught that mental health injury was something that could happen to anyone. We were taught that strength meant handling everything alone. Needing help felt like admitting I was weak. That I was a failure. And worse, I genuinely believed that seeking help would erase everything I’d built. Eighteen years of career progression, respect in my field, the person everyone knew me to be. I was convinced it would all be wiped away the moment I said out loud that I couldn’t handle this alone. That felt like shit. Because at what point do you go from being the capable, independent person you’ve always been to being someone who can’t even feed herself without falling apart? Mental health injury carried a stigma that said: if you need professional help, then you were never actually strong in the first place. Your entire life becomes a lie. That fear kept me isolated longer than the injury itself. Because at least if I suffered in silence, I could pretend I was still that person. Admitting I needed help felt like admitting I’d never been that person at all.
But she did something I desperately needed: she named it as trauma and gave me the vocabulary for it. And once I had the words, I could start talking about it. To my husband. To my daughters and close friends. And the response was overwhelming. Not judgment, not skepticism. Just love. Support. Relief that I’d finally said something.
Three Deep Breaths Were Not Going To Unfuck My Nervous System
Going through the whole recovery process made me realise that I’d spent my whole life being busy. Always on the go, always moving. I moved from houses, states, countries. Had three kids under four in my twenties. University as a mature age student. Building a corporate career while renovating a house. International travel. Long hours. High stakes. Constant motion. I’d never actually stopped to look at who I was beneath all that. What did I really value? Why do I now not feel so strongly about the things that I always thought were so bloody important.
When the injury forced me to stop, I had nowhere to run. My daughters were grown and had their own lives. My husband was managing his business. I had nothing to fill my days but myself. And for the longest time, that was unbearable. But eventually, it became the thing that changed everything.
Working with my psychologist, I had to sit with the anger. The guilt. The shame. But “sitting with it” is one of those phrases that sounds meaningful until you’re actually in it and you realise you have no idea what it means in practice.
Here’s what it actually looked like for me.
If this was one of my daughters, what would I say to her?
When the self-talk started — and it always started the same way, a loop of I should have seen it sooner, I should have been better, I just wasn’t good enough, I let this happen to me — my psychologist gave me one question to ask myself. If this was one of my daughters, what would I say to her? That question didn’t fix anything immediately. But it created a crack in the loop. Because I would never say those things to my daughters. Not in a million years. So why was I saying them to myself?
Sometimes the rumination was so bad I couldn’t interrupt it with a thought. It was like watching a movie on fast forward, flashes of scenes just firing through my head one after another, relentless. On those days, sitting with it wasn’t an option. I had to move. Sometimes that meant walking up and down the staircase a few times. Not a mindful walk in nature. Just the stairs. Up and down until my brain stopped replaying and my body remembered it was in the present.
Sometimes it was avoidance, and I had to learn not to judge that either. Going for a walk. Cleaning something. Doing some gardening. Getting out of my own head for an hour so I could come back to it when it wasn’t so loud.
And slowly, I learned to distinguish between the emotions. When I thought I was angry, I started sitting with that long enough to ask: am I actually angry? And most of the time, when I got honest about it, I wasn’t angry. I was ashamed. Ashamed because somewhere underneath all of it, I believed I had allowed this to happen to me. That was the hardest thing to sit with. And it took the longest to move through.
I’m not the same person I was before this happened. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I am a better one. More grounded, more certain of what I actually value. Clearer about what good leadership looks like because I’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum.
I’m not telling this story for sympathy. I’m telling it because I want you to recognise the signs, in yourself, in someone you love, or in someone you work with.
If any of this sounds familiar, you already know what I’m talking about. You don’t need me to list the symptoms. You’ve been living them. And your body has been trying to tell you something for longer than you’ve been willing to listen.
Psychological safety is the latest corporate buzz phrase. The ideas behind it aren’t new. People have been naming this for years — just not in language that made it into boardrooms.
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant has written that in toxic cultures, dissenting opinions are consistently silenced, and that this silencing is not accidental. It is a feature, not a bug. When you can no longer speak up, when critical thinking is managed out of the room, when every meeting ends at a predetermined conclusion, that’s not just poor leadership. That’s a system designed to keep you compliant and keep you quiet. And it’s not your job to fix it from the inside. That’s worth saying plainly, because many people stay far too long trying to do exactly that. I did.
Brené Brown has written about shame as a management tool, and she’s right. In Daring Greatly, she writes that when shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. It also, I would add, quietly destroys the person on the receiving end of it. Shame is a particularly effective weapon in the hands of a manipulative leader because it doesn’t need to be delivered overtly. It can be delivered through a raised eyebrow. A predetermined meeting outcome. An accusation delivered at the end of an otherwise routine conversation. Shame works because it makes you believe the problem is you. And once you believe the problem is you, you stop fighting back. You just try harder to be good enough. Until you can’t anymore.
And if you see these signs in yourself: please don’t do what I did. Don’t minimize it. Don’t push through alone. Don’t wait for the panic attack.
We have safety posters for drill presses. We have graphic images on cigarette packets. We make the invisible visible because we know that without it, people don’t act until it’s too late.
This is me making the invisible visible.
If any of this resonates, please speak to someone. A trusted colleague, a GP, a psychologist. You are not weak. You are not making it up. You are not being dramatic.
Why I’m Being Loud About This
I took my case to WorkSafe. I named what happened as formally as the system allowed. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Three different psychiatrists evaluated me. Private investigators examined every detail. I felt scrutinised in ways I’d never experienced, and if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would do it again knowing what I know now about the cost of that process.
But I needed it. I needed something that said officially, formally, on record: this was real. This was not okay. And whoever caused it needed to know that it mattered enough to be named.
Whether a formal process exists for you depends on where you live and what systems are available. But if it does, and if you need it the way I needed it, it’s there.
Here’s what I’ve learned since: naming it formally doesn’t fix the person. He still does this. I’ve watched him do it to others, mostly women, since my case was won. That knowledge makes me angry. Controlled anger, because I’ve learned that anger can be useful when you point it in the right direction. And I’m pointing mine here, in being loud about what happened, in naming the pattern, in making sure at least one person reading this knows they’re not alone and not crazy and not the problem.
That’s my accountability now. Not just for my own recovery, but for the ones still in it.
You are injured. And injured people deserve help.
About the Author
Sharon Guffogg PhD MBA DipPC
Founder, SPG Coaching
Sharon Guffogg is the founder of SPG Coaching, a coaching and consulting practice for women in the life sciences across Australia and New Zealand. She holds a PhD in microbiology, an MBA, and a Diploma of Professional Coaching, and is working toward her ICF ACC credential.
With nearly two decades of commercial life sciences experience across sales, marketing, technical support, and leadership, Sharon brings both deep industry knowledge and lived experience of the systems she now coaches others to navigate.
She is a WorkSafe claimant who won her case. She came out the other side. She is still rebuilding. And she is loud about it.
🌐 spgcoaching.com.au 📧 sharon@spgcoaching.com.au
💼 Coaching packages: The Launchpad | Poised & Powerful | The Breakthrough | New Manager Mentorship
References
Sapolsky, R.M., Uno, H., Rebert, C.S., & Finch, C.E. (1990). Hippocampal damage associated with prolonged glucocorticoid exposure in primates. Journal of Neuroscience, 10(9), 2897–2902.
Sapolsky, R.M. (1996). Why stress is bad for your brain. Science, 273(5276), 749–750.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
Cleveland Clinic. (2024). Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis. Retrieved from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-hpa-axis
Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books.
Sinek, S. (2014). Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Portfolio/Penguin.
Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Viking Press.