Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide

When was the last time you thought about what kind of work jazzes you ? Not what you’re qualified to do. Not what someone would hire you to do. Not what you’ve already spent 10, 15, or 20 years doing. I’m talking about the kind of work that makes something in you come alive. The problem you can’t resist trying to solve. The conversation you could have for hours. The thing someone asks for your hel...

Have you ever had a reaction to your boss that felt much bigger than what was actually happening in the moment? I have. I had been with the company for almost 22 years when a manager told me she wanted me to start accounting for my time. By that point in my career, I was a tenured senior leader. I knew how to manage my workload. I knew how to get my work done. No one needed me to account for how I...

Do You Remember Darth Vader? From the moment Darth Vader appears in Star Wars , there is no question that he is someone to be reckoned with. He doesn’t have to announce his power. You can feel it. The black helmet. The cape. The mechanical breathing that lets you know he’s coming before he even enters the room. He is intimidating. Commanding. Driven. Powerful. He walks into a room and people respo...

Sometimes the hardest part of the workday isn’t the work. It’s the deadline that suddenly gets moved up. The meeting where you’re expected to present without much notice. The manager who checks on your progress for the third time today. The project that changes direction after you’ve already spent hours getting it right. The performance review sitting on your calendar next week. The disagreement w...

Have you ever thought, “Maybe I should just work for myself”? Maybe it came after another difficult interaction with your boss. Or after leaving a workplace that had become unbearable. Maybe you were exhausted from constantly managing triggers, personalities, expectations, office politics, and trying to hold yourself together while still doing your job. Maybe you lost a job and couldn’t imagine pu...

Last week I had a discovery call with a man who has spent almost three decades in the financial sector. He's the kind of person people trust in a room. Steady. Reliable. The one everyone assumes has it together. He was diagnosed with CPTSD last year. He told me that in the months since, nothing has felt safe. Not the people he works with, not the meetings he used to walk into without a second thou...

"He's been a little fussy lately," the mom said, handing her baby over to me in the church nursery like it was nothing. I’ve rocked six grandbabies to sleep over the years, so by the time she passed him to me, I was confident I could handle it. I know the bounce that works, the hold that works, the lullaby that buys me another ten minutes. And this baby was normally the calm one, the one who’d smi...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett uses a simple but honest metaphor to open the conversation: the moment you realize the house you loved no longer fits. That same tension, loving where you are and knowing you have outgrown it, is exactly what a lot of people are feeling in their careers right now. Cyndi gets personal here too, sharing what hitting the ceiling of her own knowledge with this po...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett gets honest about something she lived herself: building an entire program management office from scratch, watching new hires with bigger titles walk into the room she built, and waiting for her manager to speak up for her. She didn’t. This episode is built around the question that moment forced Cyndi to ask herself, and that she now asks every client who come...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett gets personal. She shares what it was like to leave a difficult manager behind and still spend hours reviewing work before sending it to a new one who never once suggested anything was wrong. This episode is about what happens when one relationship, one loud, repeated, authoritative voice, becomes the lens you view every workplace interaction through afterwar...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett tackles something most networking advice completely skips over: what it actually looks like to identify safe people at work when the broader culture does not feel safe to begin with. The standard advice about building relationships and getting face time assumes trust is the default setting. For anyone who has come out of a workplace where it was not, that adv...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett gets practical. No deep processing today, just the specific thinking that goes into building a resume when the job you are describing stopped being the job you agreed to take. Most resume advice assumes a clean, stable role with a clean exit. This episode is for everyone whose role shifted underneath them, whose responsibilities changed without support, or wh...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett speaks to everyone who has ever stood in front of a real opportunity and had absolutely no idea what to do with what they were feeling. The problem is not a lack of information. It is not knowing whether to trust the signals coming from inside, because for many trauma survivors, that trust was worn down long before this decision ever arrived. This episode bre...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett names something most leadership development never teaches: the specific, functional capacities that come from navigating hard things professionally, not despite your history, but because of it. While formal programs are built around frameworks, competencies, and idealized organizations, there is a category of professional knowledge that can only be acquired t...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett digs into the very specific kind of silence that shows up right before you ask for more money. The moment you have done the research, rehearsed the words, and then something tightens and a voice says, “Who do you think you are?” This is an honest exploration of where that voice comes from, what is happening physiologically in those moments, and how to build t...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett talks about something she sees constantly: talented, capable people doing genuinely good work who are still being passed over, overlooked, and left out of conversations where they belong. The reason, more often than not, comes back to visibility. Or more specifically, to the ways that being seen feels like a threat. This episode is an honest look at why the p...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett speaks directly to the people who know they need to do something about their job situation and yet cannot seem to make themselves start. This is not an episode about productivity hacks or applying to more jobs. It is an honest look at what is actually happening when burnout meets a job search, why the standard advice feels almost absurd when you are in it, an...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett tackles something that most career advice completely misses: what happens in your body when an interviewer asks you to explain a gap, a difficult departure, or a stretch of time you are still making sense of. This is not an episode about polishing your talking points. It is an honest, practical conversation about why narrating a complicated career history is...

Summary In this solo episode, Cyndi Bennett takes on a topic she has been sitting with for a while: power, and what happens when someone gets it and uses it the wrong way. This is not a political episode or a narcissism episode. It is an honest, grounded conversation about what misused authority actually looks like in the workplace, what it costs the people around it, and why, for trauma survivors...

Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett gets personal. She shares what happened after she did the hard work of getting regulated and reached out to repair things with a difficult coworker, and what his silence taught her. Drawing from her own experience and a conversation with mentor and dear friend Kimberly Weeks from episode 51, Cyndi walks through five specific behaviors that show up in narcissi...

In this episode, Cyndi Bennett sits down with Resilient Career Academy member Jenny Gardner, a 30-year social work veteran who reached her breaking point and made the brave decision to choose herself. This is a candid, heartfelt conversation about what happens when a toxic workplace finally takes everything you have left, and what the road back to yourself actually looks like. Jenny's story is not...

Nobody warned me that building my own business wouldn't automatically feel safe. 💙 If you left the traditional workplace to build something of your own — or you're planning to — this episode is for you. Cyndi Bennett names the four specific ways trauma shows up in entrepreneurship that nobody in the business world is talking about. 🎙️ What You'll Learn: ✅ Why visibility feels genu...

Are you building your career or business the way YOU actually want to? 🔍 Cyndi Bennett gets radically honest about the audit she'd been avoiding — and what she found when she finally looked. If you've ever stayed too busy to ask whether what you're building is actually working, this episode will resonate deeply. 🎙️ What You'll Learn: ✅ Why trauma survivors avoid honest self-a...

"I don't know what I want" — What if that's not a flaw, but a survival response? 💙 If you've ever gone completely blank when someone asks what you want to do with your life, this episode is for you. Cyndi Bennett gets deeply personal about why trauma survivors feel disconnected from their own desires — and why it was never your fault. 🎙️ What You'll Learn: ✅ Why tra...

Have you ever walked into a work meeting and suddenly felt like a child again — shrinking, people-pleasing, or reacting in ways that surprised even you? You're not imagining it. Narcissistic workplace dynamics can mirror the family systems many trauma survivors grew up in, and your nervous system knows it even when your conscious mind doesn't. In this episode, I sit down with Kimberly We...