The Body Keeps the Score

When I lived with my roommates in Pasadena during my early and mid 20s, I came to realize I was more easily startled than most people. A loud noise, like a dish breaking on the counter, or a book falling from the table onto the wooden floor of our bungalow, would result in me jumping out of my seat, often with a yelp or bleat of surprise. Even when I realized I was the only person I knew who was likely to have this severe reaction to this type of stimuli, I chalked it up to my own individual personality. There are lots of unique things about me and this was just another one of those things, like the dreams I would have that resulted in me waking up screaming in the middle of the night. Personality quirks.

It wasn’t until I started going to counseling in my late twenties that I realized these reactions were a marker of the post traumatic stress disorder I developed growing up in an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive environment. Since then, I have been working to deal with managing these types of physical stress reactions through a number of methods. Some of the management techniques are about grounding yourself in a moment of stress (I like tapping my fingers together on each hand, or tapping my fingers on a table or chair). Some steps I have taken to deal with my PTSD are bigger picture items, like managing my personal relationships and environment to reduce stress and/or negative stimuli.

I did not realize how accustomed I had become to chaos in my living environment until Basil and I moved in together. He asked for us to not yell across the house at each other unless absolutely necessary, to play calmer/quieter music before bedtime, and for a myriad of other things I now take for granted but at the time seemed like big changes to me. My living environment is now calm and noise volumes are reasonable ones. Don’t mistake my description here as implying we live in a library: we still play David Bowie at high volume, laugh loudly at episodes of Saturday Night Live, and have boisterous dinner parties. But we have quiet mornings and calm evenings too. It has had a profound positive impact on my physical well-being and sleep quality.

Being with Basil has also helped me realize that some movies or television shows also awaken my anxiety: if something gets especially scary or tense I’ll likely start to fidget with my finger nails or start scratching my arms, back, or other skin. Basil checks in when he sees me doing this and asks if I am okay: should we watch something else? Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is no, but having a husband who recognizes when I am starting to get amped up and wants to make sure I am okay is a blessing.

Even now I am tempted to try and ignore these symptoms rather than to admit I need to do something to deal with them, even if it is as simple as changing the program we are streaming on the television. This is because I was either willing to deal with an inhospitable environment for many years of my life or, when I was younger, I had no choice but to deal with one. Despite all I have learned I am still occasionally inclined to ignore my own inner voice when it is tell me it is scared or uncomfortable: I just want to power through.

I was thinking about my PTSD this week because on Wednesday my boss started yelling at me in the middle of a meeting. I do mean literal yelling, as in the raising of one’s voice. It was not just the yelling itself that was unsettling, but also how it came about. We were having a standard meeting and we working through a standard business process we do on a monthly basis. The other attendee for this meeting besides myself and my boss was the senior manager I co-lead our regulatory compliance practice with at the firm. This is a meeting my boss usually attends and half-listens to, as the senior manager and I do all of the actual work and mostly discuss between the two of us how we will be handling the different items on the agenda.

This week, however, my boss asked why we were handling some items a certain way. I explained that, because of the business process, there were one of two approaches we could take with these items. In order to not bore my readers with the intricacies of the process we were actually dealing with, I’ll summarize this way: as far as I knew, our choices in this scenario were either to walk over a bridge or not walk over a bridge. This is what I said to my boss.

My boss responded by saying, “I don’t want to walk over the bridge and I don’t want to not walk over the bridge.” At this point, we were still having a normal meeting and talking in a normal tone.

But I was not aware of any other options besides the two options I had given to my boss. So I asked him, “What do you think we should do?” This was a genuine question, as I was truly unaware of any other options available to us. It was said in the normal, conversational polite tone I use with my boss on a regular basis.

It was at this point that, out of nowhere, my boss started to yell at both myself and the senior manager. Why is everything his problem to deal with? Why don’t we care about our practice? How can we just take everything for granted? The senior manager and I were stunned. After that point, when we tried to respond or otherwise intervene in my boss’s rant, he would just get angrier and continued with his accusations of neglect of our business. The senior manager and I sent each other variations of “WTF?” via instant message and remained stunned until the call was ended by our boss shortly thereafter.

The senior manager and I are two of the top performers in our division of the firm. Our practice, the one we were being accused of neglecting, has had one of its best years ever under our leadership, despite all of the constraints placed on us by the COVID environment. We had just sat through recent performance review conversations, where we were lauded for our leadership and stewardship of our practice. In short, not only was what our boss saying untrue, but as recently as the day before (seemingly even hours before) he himself had felt quite differently about us and our role in the practice.

My boss has never acted this way at all in the four plus years I have worked with him. Before this week, I had an immense amount of professional and personal respect for him. I thought of him as someone with a high level of emotional intelligence. I thought he was someone who knew what battles to fight and when to reach across the aisle. He has always been kind to me and my husband and has been a big proponent of mine within the partner group at the firm. He has never raised his voice at anyone in any meeting I have attended, and I have not heard of any such behavior from him through the interoffice grapevine. These factors are all part of why I felt especially blind-sided by this eruption at a standard monthly process meeting.

I knew I was upset but had barely had time to take an inventory of just how upset I was. After the call with our boss concluded, the senior manager assured me this was not our fault–something not work related was clearly going on with our boss. In order to further reassure me, he said, “Please do not take this personally. I know I am not.”

After the senior manager and I made the attempt to go about our day, I realized how I was feeling: my heart was pounding. I was clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth. As I tried to move onto the next thing on my to do list, I found my mind racing, as it does when my anxiety is full-throttle. Despite my employment of various grounding techniques, talking to Basil, and finally logging off for the day at work, these physical symptoms stuck with me through the night and into the next day. It impacted my sleep quality. It took me nearly three days to be able to return to a baseline of physical normalcy.

I suppose there are some lines of work on this planet where a supervisor may be entitled to yell at an employee. I will not spend time coming up with possible examples here, but I imagine it would be something having to do with life or death situations. I have often said there is a reason I got into the financial services field: nothing is ever a life or death situation. No one is ever going to expire from a regulatory compliance emergency. And even if one were to argue there could one day exist a situation in my current line of work where my boss would be justified to yell at me on the job, I am confident in saying the exchange this week did not meet those criteria.

There were times in my life where I was on the receiving end of abusive behavior. In many instances, I either did not actually have the power to do anything about it (my childhood) or I didn’t realize I had the power to do anything about it (late teens and beyond). Now that I have come to understand what abusive behavior is and the power I have to not be subjected to it, I never want to be put in that place again. That place where I am scared, where my heart is thudding in my chest, where my mind is scrambling to wonder what I have to say to make the aggressor stop, to make the aggressor go away.

When it comes to abusive behavior, I don’t have the option to “not take it personally” because of the experiences I have been through over the course of my life. To use the phrase coined by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, my body keeps the score: it recognizes when I am being subject to a situation where I feel threatened or unsafe and it responds to those situations. Even if the senior manager I work with didn’t have the same physical experience I did as a result of this interaction, our boss’s behavior was still inappropriate and uncalled for. He employed tactics to intimidate and insult two people who he understands work tirelessly for him and the business.

Since Wednesday, my boss has gone out of his way to avoid interactions (verbal or otherwise) with either myself or the senior manager I work with. This behavior signals to me he is not sorry for what he did. He cannot carry on this way for much longer because of my role in our practice, but even if we can get back to “business as usual”, our relationship will remain permanently altered because of this interaction and his response to it.

As a result of my personality and my upbringing, when I encounter a problem, I am inclined to take immediate action steps to address the issue. When I cannot take steps right away to change something, I feel powerless, even when waiting/doing nothing can sometimes be the best action to take. There are several factors which warrant me waiting through the next few months at work to see what happens next, but I am furious to have been put in this position. I am angry that someone I trusted treated me this way. I am angry that I grew up in an environment which made me turn out this way. I am angry that I may have to eventually choose to walk away from a job I love and a business I played an integral role in building in order to preserve my sanity and self-worth.

But I am also glad I recognize that I deserve not to be treated badly. I am glad I have a wonderful husband that has been integral in teaching me I have the right to be treated kindly and with respect. I am an intelligent, strong person, who will definitely come out on the other side of whatever this brings with it. I will continue to succeed, have a wonderful life, and will do my best to keep my body and mind safe.