When Work Becomes Trauma

I was diagnosed with PTSD recently. Not from war. Not from disaster. From work.

I spent more than a decade in federal service. It was supposed to be security. Instead it became a place where silence was survival. Every choice carried risk. If I pressed too hard against the system, I could lose my clearance, my job, the stability I had been told to count on. If I stayed quiet, I lived with decisions that clashed with my own ethics. There was no neutral ground. Day after day, year after year, I carried the weight of that tension.

The harm was not sudden. It was slow and steady. At first it looked like stress. Sleepless nights. A body wound tight even on weekends. A mind that could not stop scanning through problems because it had learned that anything left unattended could explode. Those patterns became permanent. It was no longer a temporary state that would ease with rest. It was the way my nervous system had been rewired.

There are flashbacks. They do not come from one defining moment but from many small ones. Meetings. Conversations. Paperwork that looked routine but carried weight. I see them as if they are happening now, and my body reacts before I can remind it that they are over. Sometimes a single detail, the look on someone’s face, the phrasing in a document, pulls me straight back into a room I thought I had left years ago.

There are triggers too. A certain tone of voice. A phrase that sounds like it came straight out of a briefing. Even the shape of a room can pull me back. My nervous system responds the same way it did inside the job. Tight chest. Shallow breath. A readiness for confrontation that never comes. Even outside of work, those responses ignite without warning, as if the system still has a claim on my body.

There are dissociative episodes. Moments when I feel detached from myself or the room I am in, as if I am observing instead of living. I can be in the middle of a conversation and feel the edges blur, the sense that I am no longer fully present. The body keeps going but I am not entirely inside it.

There are intrusive thoughts and images tied to what I experienced. They appear without invitation, phrases from a meeting, the memory of a choice I should not have been forced to make, the sense that I am about to be called to account for something I no longer control. These are not passing distractions. They are interruptions that seize attention and refuse to let go. Proof that the system has left its imprint on how I move through the present.

The diagnosis is not weakness. It is clarity. It says the harm was real, that it left scars no less permanent because they were invisible. And it names the system for what it is. These jobs do not just take time and energy. They take integrity, conscience, and health. They demand compliance at the expense of everything else. The damage is the natural outcome of a structure that farms people until nothing is left.

That is why I left. Farming was not a retreat into comfort. It was survival. I had already given the system enough. Staying would have meant losing the rest of what I had left. Leaving meant putting my body into work that produced instead of work that consumed. The exhaustion of real labor was easier to carry than the hollowness of ethical compromise.

If work has left you carrying weight you cannot name, you are not alone. PTSD from work is not imaginary. It is the scar tissue of survival inside systems that are designed to extract and discard. The question is not whether I could adapt. I already had, and that adaptation was the wound. The real question was how long I would let myself be farmed before I found my exit.

A Note

Sean wrote a book about this. About what it means to be farmed by systems that promise security but take your health, your conscience, and your time. About how years of compromise and pressure left scars, and about the choice to walk away and build something real instead.

Exit Farming: Starving the Systems That Farm You is not a manual or a manifesto. It is a record of what work inside those systems does to the body and the mind, and of what it takes to step out.