Having a tough childhood can affect a person's work and career as an adult, expert suggests

We often don't realize that having a tough childhood affects our adulthood in several ways. Our childhood behaviors are hard to let go of, whether it is social life, inter-personal relationships or money and finance. Mandy Tang, a career coach—who goes by @careercoachmandy on TikTok—talks about how having a difficult childhood affects one's career specifically. She begins by saying that while healing from a "career wound" one needs to "identify and name the patterns that you are repeating consciously and unconsciously in your life."

Tang goes on to give an example. She says if one had a narcissistic mother the person becomes "very good at anticipating her needs, being in a chaotic environment and being the person who could get things done, smooth things over, getting everything done on schedule because the mother could not be relied on." So, she explains that if one grew up in such an environment then the person would have a strong coping mechanism but also it would lead them to look for a toxic environment. "I know that sounds so sick and crazy but this is what happens," the career coach says. She also adds that she is not trying to blame anyone and that we all try to "find comfort in the chaos that we grew up with."

The woman then talks about how that behavior plays out in our adult lives. "You know how you will go home and regress, text childhood friends like I feel like I'm regressing to when I was 15, I'm acting like I'm 15 and all that behavior and patterning comes back and I feel like someone's tripped a wire and I've just like got pulled back into some way less cool version of myself," Tang explains. After this, she speaks about how similar things happen at our jobs. She says that when a person is used to being someone's "crutch" it comes out as people pleasing and being overly scrutinizing about something. The career coach says that one might be over-scrutinizing because as a child when the person was not overly stressed about something they got into trouble. "Like this is hypervigilance translated to the workplace," Tang states.

She then goes on to list the symptoms that one sees in themselves including burnout, imposter syndrome, people-pleasing, feeling like they are not seeing their worth, or are constantly being laid off, etc. Tang then asks an important question: "Why do we need to do this? Why do we have to sit here and write in a silly journal about our feelings about work? Because when you make the unconscious conscious, when you shine a light on all this weird shit that you do because of unresolved trauma from your teenage years, stuff gets untangled, it loses its power." She concludes that 80% of the healing is just understanding why we keep doing the same thing again.

People in the comments shared that they could resonate with what the career coach spoke. @thisisyourmotherspeaking commented, "If I had a dollar for every time I managed others' needs over my own in the workplace." @frankie_dominiguez wrote, "Successfully calming the chaos makes you feel competent which is why we subconsciously seek it out, sadly." @tootinbootin also made a valid point. "I’m so glad this is finally being discussed. If we were raised in abuse, we were groomed as children to accept abuse." @antfromseaview shared, "I ended up having to take extended time off. My mental health was shattered. I was the strong one. The hardworking one. The one there fit everyone else. I was so burned out. I’m crying." @ktalkstoyou commented, "The day I realized that the things that made me good at being a social worker were skills I gained through trauma my whole worldview shifted. I quit in October and I am trying my best to not find myself back in one of those types of roles." The video hit home to many and it is quite evident in the way people responded in the comments.

You can follow Mandy (@careercoachmandy) on TikTok for content on career advice.