How my perception of hard work activated my CPTSD

2024 was a great year for me, I want to say that first and foremost. It was a great year for a number of reasons, but mostly because I chose to enforce a boundary with myself regarding how I perceive the term “hard work”.

Let’s talk about how I had understood the notion of ‘hard work’. I had been conditioned to believe that ‘hard work’ meant a few things; working until exhaustion, exerting a lot of energy for a little result, doing things I didn’t really want to do, and probably the worst of all, actively abandoning my own needs, and justifying the behavior in the name of ‘hard work’.

What I learned was that ‘hard work’ is actually the practice of stepping back, observing, and making meaningful changes toward moving forward- not the limiting beliefs I had been previously taught. Hard work is the practice of putting myself first, pausing my reactive tendencies, and knowing that the world is going to keep spinning regardless of what the political climate -or actual climate for that matter- is.

The only thing in this world that I actually can control is myself, and the times where I had felt the most unstable and dysfunctional, were the times where I was not in control of me- because someone else was.

And learning that lesson? *That* was hard work, and continues to be the hardest work I’ve done in my life.

When someone is using you to do their bidding, they’re going to find the most effective way to encourage you. They’re going to become your biggest supporter and loudest cheerleader, and you’re going to likely enjoy that, because validation and support feel good. They want you to succeed for sure, because then they are getting what they want out of you.

In my experience, when I began to realize the encouragement was part of a larger problem- one of manipulation and control- I started questioning things. I started to identify that the results I was being directed to achieve were not results that I wanted. They were results that my abuser wanted. These results were not aligned with my goals, they were aligned with my abuser’s goals, who was gaslighting me to believe they were my goals. My asking questions posed a problem to the achievement of the results my abuser desired, which eventually resulted in retaliation from my abuser, to manipulate me out of the questioning, and to become more compliant. It left me feeling exhausted, confused, and not really having an idea of my own preferences. The only thing I knew I wanted was to not be treated badly, so I would do whatever I needed to ensure my safety.

A specific thing they said to me often was this:

“Do you want there to be more problems? Because not doing what I ask will contribute to more problems”. Which was both a threat and a promise.

Usually ‘doing what they asked’ was things like going to work at the club, where they would then message me throughout the shift asking how much money I was earning, and then making plans with what we were going to do the following day to spend it. (Notice how the word used in reference to spending was ‘we’ when in actuality, it was ‘they’ who was doing the spending.)

This abuse and manipulation has affected me in the many years since my detachment from my abuser. The coercion and conditioning I was exposed to has made it incredibly difficult for me when trying to set goals, and put in the ‘hard work’. Yes, the words of encouragement they provided were effective, but the motive was abusive. Even still today, when I try to encourage myself, many of the phrases and approaches to ‘work harder’ are interpreted by my body as abuse. More on that later…

When I first left my abusive relationship, I had a lot of damage control to do. I had to get out of the debt they settled me with, pay a lot of back taxes, and literally recover from years of psychological, physical, and financial abuse. That was also ‘hard work’, and I burnt out pretty badly after 4 years of working purely out of rage. I burnt out to the point where I worked on average of .79 shifts per week for all of 2023 (that’s 41 shifts). I spent all the funds I had accumulated, refused to leave my home, and essentially went into power saving mode. My Therapist called it “Functional Freeze”.

When it came to changing this pattern at the beginning of 2024, I had to make a full stop on the abusive narrative that had been living rent free in my head for so long. Things like giving myself ultimatums, fear mongering, denying myself gifts, threatening instability and financial ruin, all had to go. Especially removing the limiting belief that I had to earn my rest.

Those changes took the entirety of 2024 to take place. I started with taking the entire month of January off. I didn’t work a single day. I told myself that beginning in February, I would show up for Friday and Saturday only, and I would give it everything I had, because I could rest for the remaining 5 days. No one was going to make me do anything I didn’t want to do, and no one was going to spend my money. I also decided I was going to spend those 5 days working on a project that a deeply cared about- my book. If I was entering this mindset of becoming My Best Stripper Self, I needed to keep a record on how I was doing it, so that I could share it with others.

I did a pretty good job with my two days a week, and even caught myself tracking three days a week a couple times toward the end of the year and holiday season. I’ve been doing well enough that I want to regularly add one extra shift to my workweek moving forward in 2025. I’m finding however, that adding a third consistent day is proving to activate my CPTSD.

Here’s what’s happening:

I tell myself that if I add another shift to my workweek, it will alleviate the pressure on my two existing shifts, and will give me a little wiggle room to both do something nice for myself, and to add to the cushion of my financial security. That thought process is interpreted by my body as a scam. My body remembers that in the past, these ‘promises’ have not been kept, and wants to protect me from what it perceives as the inevitable let down. My body will fight me on this to the point of making me ill. Because again, historically, getting sick was the only way I would be able to get out of working just to fund my abuser’s lifestyle.

This cycle makes it incredibly difficult for me to set large goals, and while I have become very comfortable in my lifestyle, and doing quite well, I am aware that I am capable of more. There’s also something to be said about being comfortable. Yes, there’s that colloquial term that no growth comes from the comfort zone, but for someone who has lived in a state of scarcity, survival, and fight or flight for a large chunk of their life, the ‘comfort zone’ has been the most stable I’ve been in my lifetime.

I feel like I have spent so much of my energy on accomplishing things for undeserving others, that I have run out of energy to do it for myself. Which, oh no, is that whole ‘self-abandonment’ pattern all over again.

So I went to my journal. I asked it;

What unhealed wounds am I grasping onto? What is my body trying to protect me from that I don’t need protection from anymore? What am I trying to control? How can I work on building the trust within myself to a place of security where I know that I’m not going to do to me what my abuser did to me? Why am I perceiving work as a punishment? What do I need to be able to accept that if I want to level up, a certain amount of effort is necessary to do so?

I don’t have all of the answers yet, as I’m certain this will be a year-long lesson to learn, at least. I have identified that the abusive narrative is still making its rounds in my thoughts, and I do remind myself frequently that ‘they can’t hurt me anymore’. I am working on building self-trust by consistently aligning my words and my actions, and reprogramming the relationship I have with the word ‘work’. I am more than capable of providing myself with anything I want, the obstacle is overcoming all of the projected and trauma-induced beliefs on the way there. But I am taking it one week at a time, and trying out different approaches. It’s so much more than ‘showing up to work’, it’s showing up for me, and doing the work to go bigger places.