Healing our career wounds

Why we all have these and what we do about them

Recently, a friend shared a fantastic video by Mandy Tang titled, “a career wound is an emotional injury that hasn’t been processed. here’s what to do next.”

Let that sink in.

(By the way, this is not promoting her per se, but I just love her content, so yeah, maybe? Good stuff is meant to be shared.)

I never thought that a job could inflict wounds. What is it, really? It’s just a job, you’re being so dramatic! But apparently, it’s more than what it looks like. Over time, it becomes intertwined with our entire identity and self-esteem.

When I started my career, I was careless in the best way. I did not associate a job with my identity or my personal growth. This applied right up until around the tenth year, when a nagging question crept in: “Why are my colleagues getting promoted and I’m not?”

That question brought me into a quest of envy, despair, and bitterness. From that point in time, I thought I could just ask, assuming my longer tenure with a team or company would guarantee me a promotion. Obviously, that’s not how it works. Talk about visibility, impact, communication skills, and culture fit—these play a much bigger role in the ways you advance.

But this is where Mandy Tang’s concept of the “career wound” begins to explain so much. Why do we seek this promotion so desperately? Tang points out that our workplace behaviors often mirror our earliest relationships with authority figures. The ways we were taught to seek validation as children often dictate how we behave in the office.

This push to be perfect and the journey to be promoted is only one side of the story. The flip side is just as powerful: the fear of failure.

Especially in moments when I lost my job, was interviewing, or starting a new role, the baseline was always scary: What do people expect of me?

The majority of my time switched from proving myself so that I could go up, to proving myself so that I wouldn’t get fired. These two spectrums—the desperate chase for validation and the exhausting run from failure—are painful, to say the least. Tang’s video highlights that these behaviors are actually survival skills. The coping mechanisms we developed growing up become our professional superpowers (like the hyper-responsible person who becomes the team “fixer”), but they also keep us in a constant state of anxiety.

And you know what? Each of these spectrums carries its own traumatic events.

Getting laid off or terminated for any reason is probably the biggest wound. People always say “it’s just business,” and that is exactly what’s horrible about it.

After pouring your heart, time, and energy toward a team or a product, and you still get terminated somehow—what does it say about your worth? People will tell you that a corporate decision doesn’t define your worth. But how about all the effort we did individually and as a team to make it work? We spend eight hours a day working; how can we expect people to just accept that this massive investment of life doesn’t reflect our worth?

Tang explains this perfectly: we suffer these massive emotional injuries because we subconsciously look for personal safety and family-like loyalty in corporate structures. When the corporation inevitably acts like a business, the emotional injury goes entirely unprocessed.

My career wound is the need of validation and how I fell down because I did not get them. I don’t usually care about it, but when your job and livelihood is on the line, you can’t help but seek for it, until it hurts you.

But hey, this is just an example of my own personal wound — the need of validation. Of course, everybody is different.

Layoffs are the loudest career wounds, but there are quieter, chronic wounds that happen on both spectrums of the career journey.

You might find yourself constantly bending over backwards for a manager who is emotionally distant or impossible to please. Tang notes that we subconsciously seek out what feels familiar, recreating toxic dynamics from our past by seeking approval from a “cold boss” the way we might have from a parent.

You could also have the “eldest kid” syndrome. Taking on everyone else’s emotional and operational baggage at work until you break. Your wound is the belief that if you aren’t fixing everything for everyone, you have no value to the team. You will tend to please everyone

Then you had a micromanaging boss. Working under a boss who scrutinized your every move, leaving you with a lingering wound of self-doubt. Even years later, in a healthy environment, you might find yourself over-explaining your work or paralyzed by the fear of making a minor typo, waiting for a punishment that isn’t coming.

We cannot break these patterns until we identify them. Healing a career wound starts with recognizing that our identity and our safety were never meant to be held by a corporation. It’s time to process the injury, untangle our self-esteem from our job titles, and redefine what it means to go to work.

Some might argue that these are either necessary evils or they will make us stronger in a way that we will have better “corporate” survival skill, so-to-speak.

But I heard once that even the most seasoned professional carry some kind of trauma in the past that either propelled them or hindered them from achieving success. The supposedly ridiculous story was a CEO who still have trauma of being scoled by his boss back in his teenage years working part-time in a shop. One simply can’t decipher how this is logical if then he has grown up and progressed to the highest rank in a company.

But there it is. Trauma and wounds never really heal by themselves.

Let’s speak about layoff for one second.

When a layoff hits, it feels like an existential crisis because, for most of us, it is. The journalist Derek Thompson coined a perfect term for this: “workism.” It’s the modern belief that our jobs aren’t just a way to pay the bills, but the absolute centerpiece of our identity and purpose. We are conditioned to seek community, validation, and even a sense of family in the office. So, when the company inevitably decides to “restructure” and you’re handed a cardboard box, it’s not merely a loss of income. It’s an unceremonious excommunication from your community. It’s a direct strike to your sense of self. That’s exactly why “it’s just business” is such a devastating phrase… it completely invalidates the very real, deeply personal identity we were encouraged to build.

And it’s not just the big, explosive exits that leave scars; the everyday grind is a breeding ground for quieter, chronic wounds. Remember that emotionally distant manager you keep bending over backwards for? In organizational psychology, this isn’t just you trying to be a stellar employee, it’s a phenomenon called transference. Scholars point out that we bring our “inner theater” straight into the boardroom, subconsciously casting our bosses in the roles of our early authority figures. We aren’t just trying to secure a year-end bonus; we are desperately, unknowingly trying to rewrite our pasts and finally win the approval we felt we lacked growing up. No wonder it exhausts us to our core.

This is exactly why that seasoned CEO is still haunted by a teenage scolding. It sounds completely illogical until you realize that the human brain doesn’t differentiate between a physical threat and a profound threat to our social standing or livelihood. Being severely micromanaged or humiliated at work keeps our nervous systems locked in a prolonged state of fight-or-flight. It leaves actual neurological scars. Years later, even in a wonderfully supportive environment, catching a minor typo in an email can trigger a full-blown physiological panic. You sit there, bracing for a punishment that isn’t coming, because your body hasn’t forgotten the past threat. Trauma doesn’t care about your new job title, your corner office, or how much you’ve grown; it just waits for you to finally process it.

I sincerely wish that you don’t have any career wounds or traumas, but if you do, I also wish that you can recover from them, either fully or partially. I wish that you have the resources to take action, either to heal them or to leave them.

Stay safe and be well.

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Consider subscribing, you will get at least a weekly update on things related to alternative views on UX. This blog is an attempt of me to refute, challenge or refresh what I’ve learned and observed about UX design as a career and industry, throughout my 15+ years career as a product designer. Read more about me, or visit my UX portfolio site.