When Your Job Exploits Your Childhood Wounds

In Episode 72 of the Choose Courage Inc. podcast, Vivianne Castillo, founder of Choose Courage Inc., leans on her former training as a therapist and unpacks the career advice she wishes she'd given her 20-something self, the four childhood setups that corporate reward systems quietly cash in on, and why starting therapy sooner would have changed how she read every hard job she stayed in. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

There is a genre of performance review that reads less like an evaluation and more like a thank-you note for endurance: handles pressure well, stays calm in chaos, we can always count on her. I spent about six years working as a therapist in human services before I ever set foot in tech, and I've come to read those phrases the way I once read an intake form, since so much of what corporate America praises as resilience is childhood trauma in the workplace wearing a company lanyard. The person those reviews describe is usually fine on paper. Behind closed doors she is tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch.

Earlier this week I posted on LinkedIn about the career advice I'd give my 20-something self, and my answer had nothing to do with networking or salary negotiation. I would tell her to start therapy sooner, so she could recognize when her childhood wounds were being exploited by an employer and its reward system. I'm not here to diagnose anyone. I want to name a pattern I've watched play out in the people I've coached and in my own body, and the honest version of it is harder than "set better boundaries." The thing being exploited is the same thing that once kept us safe, which means walking away from it can feel less like self-respect and more like abandoning the kid who built it.

Why Do I Stay in a Toxic Job? Endurance Was the Original Survival Skill

When we grow up enduring difficult things, we become more likely to normalize toxicity as adults and to stay inside experiences that are actively harming our health, since the nervous system learned long ago that enduring is the correct response to pain. For many of us, endurance kept the peace in the household and got us through years no child should have had to get through, and in that context it was intelligent and deeply adaptive. Little you built that skill for a reason. The trouble is that nobody ever came back to tell the skill the emergency was over.

So we grow up, get the degree and the badge, and walk into workplaces that start to hurt us, and we read the hurt as a typical Tuesday rather than a signal to leave. The reorg that erased six months of your work, the manager who presents your thinking as his own, the stretch goal that quietly doubled your scope, the Slack message at 9:00 p.m. that spikes your heart rate before you've even opened it: the body registers every one of them. Then the old training kicks in and says you've survived worse than this. That voice sounds like strength, and for a lot of us it is a survival reflex still running on firmware that was installed in a different house, for a different threat.

How Childhood Trauma Shows Up at Work: Four Setups Employers Reward

As you read these, notice which one your body reacts to, and don't do anything with it yet. Most people recognize themselves in more than one, and none of them is a diagnosis or a character flaw.

Setup 1: You grew up with emotionally unavailable or emotionally immature parents. You became fluent in other people's moods before you learned your own. Lindsay C. Gibson describes this kind of childhood well in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and Alice Miller made a similar observation decades earlier in The Drama of the Gifted Child, where the "gifted" kid is the one who developed an uncanny sensitivity to what the adults around them needed. At work, that sensitivity looks like reading your manager's face like a weather report and rewriting a two-line Slack message four times before sending it. It looks like managing the emotional temperature of every room you walk into while nobody, including you, checks yours. Employers call it "great at stakeholder management," which is part of what makes it so hard to see.

Setup 2: You had to parent your parents. You were the responsible one long before you had any business being responsible for anything, and psychologists have a name for it (parentification) that a lot of eldest daughters only learn in their thirties. At work, that history shows up as over-functioning. You absorb problems nobody assigned you and become the person who catches whatever the rest of the team drops. When a project fails, it feels like yours even when the org chart clearly says otherwise, and since the fixer role carries real status in most companies, the pattern gets reinforced every time someone says "thank goodness you were on this."

Setup 3: Life made it hard to feel like you were enough. No title ever settles the question. The promotion buys you about a week of peace before the proving starts all over again, so overwork becomes your evidence. The job turns into a courtroom where you're permanently on trial and the only one who showed up to argue the case.

Setup 4: You learned you had to prove your value to be kept. This one is sneaky because it teaches you to confuse being needed with being safe. Plenty of us have lived it in our dating lives too. In the workplace it turns into volunteering for everything and making yourself indispensable. Indispensable feels like security right up until the layoff list comes out and you realize the company never made you the promise you made it. Four different doors open into the same room, a workplace where your talent gets extracted and your wounds do the extracting.

The Company Doesn't Have to Be Evil for This to Work

The part that took me longest to accept is that none of this requires a villain, since corporate reward systems are built to reinforce whatever behavior produces output, and wounded endurance produces a lot of output. The person who can't say no gets called a team player, the person proving her worth every single day gets flagged as high potential, and we write the whole arrangement into the values deck as "bias for action" and "whatever it takes." The raise and the praise land in the exact spot where the wound lives, because the company is paying you in the currency little you was starving for, which is approval. Of course it works. It would work on anyone with your history.

"Nobody in HR designed a system called Exploit the Eldest Daughters. They didn't have to." — Vivianne

I want to hold the next part carefully, because the fear of losing those rewards is real. You might be the sole provider, and the paycheck might be what's keeping your family afloat, so I am never going to tell you that fear is silly or that the stakes are small. What I will say is that the fear and the wound are tangled together. Until you can tell them apart, every career decision you make is being made by committee, and some of the loudest members of that committee are about eight years old.

How to Stop Letting Childhood Wounds Run Your Career

I'm not going to hand you a ten-step plan, since that would just give your proving reflex a new assignment. Start instead with two questions to carry around this week rather than answer. The first is whether you're staying because this job is good for you, or because leaving feels like failing a test you've been taking since childhood. The second is whose approval you're actually working for in this meeting (or in this job, or this role), because sometimes the person across the table isn't really your manager but a stand-in for somebody much older.

Then, sometime this week, notice a single moment where you endure something at work out of pure reflex, like swallowing the pushback in a meeting or accepting another project while your calendar is already screaming. Don't fix it and don't confront anyone. Write it down in your own words, with the date, and that's the whole assignment. You can't renegotiate a pattern you haven't caught in the act, and after decades of your endurance insisting none of it was a big deal, the dated record is how you start believing yourself. If you want to go further, the Life Audit widens the lens from one moment to your whole setup.

Naming this pattern doesn't mean you quit tomorrow, and it doesn't mean your job is evil or your manager is your mother. What changes is who's making the decisions. Once you can see the reflex, you get a choice where there used to be a reaction, and the adult you are gets to run the meeting instead of the kid who had to earn safety. The 9:00 p.m. Slack message still arrives, but now there's a pause between the ping and the panic, and inside that pause you get to ask whether this actually needs you tonight.

What Changes When You Stop Enduring

Over time, we stop measuring ourselves by our capacity to absorb harm, and our tolerance for toxicity drops way, way down, which is one of the clearest signals of recovery I know. There's a whole other conversation waiting on the other side of that, about growing our capacity for imagination and joy as deliberately as we once grew our capacity to endure, and it's one I'll be picking up in a future episode. Until then, the intuition vs. anxiety post helps with telling the old alarm apart from a real signal, and why we stay stuck picks up where this one leaves off.

The LinkedIn post ended with what I'd tell my 20-something self: "Vivianne, you don't have to endure anymore, and everything will be okay. Now go design the life and career that you want." Put your own name in that sentence and say it out loud if you're somewhere you can. Notice whether your body relaxes or argues back, since both responses are telling you something. If it argues, you're probably still sorting out what's off, and How to Audit Your Life Before It Falls Apart is the free guide I'd hand you next, with simple exercises for spotting the misalignment and the golden handcuffs before they make the decision for you.

Originally aired as Episode 72 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.