I used to think I was bad at dealing with stress.
Every Sunday night I was anxious about the week ahead. My chest tightened when certain emails appeared in my inbox. Before meetings, I rehearsed what I wanted to say over and over to avoid saying the wrong thing.
At the time, I blamed myself.
I told myself that I had to be tougher, calmer, better, more persistent. Everyone else seemed to be dealing with it, so I assumed the problem was mine.
At the time, I didn’t understand how deeply a toxic workplace could affect your sense of self.
Everything was fine from the outside. The organization was respected. The management team was “successful” and admired. The person at the center of most of my stress was charismatic, confident, and highly regarded by others.
This made it even more difficult for me to trust my own experience.
There was no obvious harassment. No yelling. There are no dramatic events that I can point to and say, “This is what I’m fighting for.” Instead, it was a slow build-up of smaller things.
Conversations that made me feel strangely ashamed. Criticism disguised as “advice”. Moments where I walked away confused, wondering if I had misunderstood what had happened.
Sometimes I was warmly praised. Other times they were ignored or subtly undermined. The team dynamic made me feel paranoid and left out. I was constantly trying to prove myself because of the inconsistency.
I became more careful, more adaptable, more self-critical. I thought if I communicated perfectly and performed well enough, things would improve.
Eventually, I realized that I was starting to lose confidence. Secondly, I guessed simple decisions. I was constantly apologizing. I was emotionally drained from monitoring other people’s moods and avoiding conflict.
Then one day in a team meeting, I remember having a moment when I realized that my work environment replicated my home environment when I was growing up. Different people, of course, but the same characters. The charismatic boss is the narcissist, surrounded by “enablers”—all trying to minimize, justify, or excuse toxic behavior. In that the moment I saw what it was—narcissistic abuse in the workplace.
Looking back now, I see that an unhealthy environment often causes us to disconnect from our own instincts. We are so focused on keeping the peace, pleasing others or avoiding criticism, or even our own aspirations, that we fail to notice what our minds and bodies are telling us.
Mine has been trying to tell me for a long time.
The turning point came when a friend of mine asked me, “Do you really feel safe there?”
I remember being surprised by the question because I had never thought about emotional safety in the workplace before. I assumed that professionalism meant tolerating discomfort. Push through. Adaptation.
But deep down I knew the answer.
No, I didn’t feel safe.
Not physically, but mentally.
I did not feel able to speak openly without consequences. I didn’t feel comfortable making mistakes. I no longer felt calm, grounded or safe. Everyone was competing for the approval of the boss, which in retrospect I see was used strategically.
It was painful to admit, but it was also the beginning of something important.
For the first time, I stopped seeing my anxiety as a personal failure and began to recognize it as information.
My body reacted to an environment that constantly doubted me.
Healing did not happen overnight. It took me time to rebuild my confidence and reconnect with my own voice. But I slowly stopped trying to minimize what I was experiencing.
And I stopped blaming myself for affecting me.
I think a lot of people carry workplace experiences that they haven’t fully recognized because the damage doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it just seems like he’s slowly getting smaller, quieter and more unsure of himself. Professional experience should increase your confidence…not decrease it.
After I left, I felt almost immediate relief and my confidence and self-confidence quickly returned. It renewed the feeling that it wasn’t me or my fault. I got an understandable answer that I was in a toxic situation, full of toxic, narcissistic dynamics.
And this experience only helped me to understand and realize that later, talk to others who feel the same at work. It is not uncommon to find ourselves in a “familiar dynamic” – even at work. But what looks familiar isn’t necessarily healthy.
If you recognize yourself in this, I hope you know this:
You are not weak to be influenced by an unhealthy environment.
All of us humans are deeply affected by the spaces and relationships in which we spend our lives. And sometimes the first step to healing is simply allowing yourself to tell the truth about what those spaces or situations did to you.
