Full Transcript for Interviewing after coercive control or trauma

00:00:00 Speaker 1: This episode of Shortlisted does deal with questions of trauma and in particular, violence and coercive control. Please know that there is support available for you, and if you need to, you can always skip this episode, if it's not relevant for you, or if it just doesn't feel right to listen. 00:00:16 Speaker 1: Right now. I also wanna make the note that Helen and I, while very skilled people, we're not psychologists, so we're not best placed to support you with formal therapeutic advice. So take this for what it is, it's helpful, but go and make sure you're talking to someone with the right skills to help you if that's what you need. 00:00:34 Speaker 1: Nothing makes a person go weak at the knees quite like a job interview. Enter Shortlisted, a podcast by Future Women where Helen McCabe and I hold your virtual hand, walking with you every step of the way, right to the interview door and straight onto the shortlist. 00:00:52 Speaker 1: Last week, we talked about how to explain a traumatic employment gap in your resume. This week, we're going to approach the same subject, but from a different angle. We're going to be looking at how trauma can change your response to the job interview scenario entirely. So, a little bit of context first. 00:01:09 Speaker 1: If you're someone who has lived through coercive control, or perhaps a serious workplace psychological injury, then your nervous system can treat any workplace as an active threat matrix. That means that when you're showing up for an interview, you might be actively scanning for danger that may not be there, and that can inhibit your performance. 00:01:32 Speaker 2: Research confirms this can be a challenge. Trauma rewires threat detection. 00:01:38 Speaker 2: After trauma, the body becomes hyper vigilant, and fires fight, flight, freeze at lower thresholds. Repeated exposure shrinks the window of tolerance over time. Even after starting a new job, a manager's tone or an ambiguous email can feel really dangerous. People are now more aware of trauma and how it shows up. For example, 00:02:04 Speaker 2: For example, coercive control is now criminalized in parts of Australia. This has sharpened public understanding of how control and fear can shape a person's wellbeing and perspective. A history of coercive control can fracture your sense of safety in all sorts of situations, especially high stakes settings like an 00:02:24 Speaker 2: interview. 00:02:25 Speaker 1: And workplace psychological injuries are. 00:02:27 Speaker 1: Now recognized, this isn't like a fringe concept. Australian work health and safety regulators now treat psychosocial hazards as a formal duty of care for employers, and trauma informed practice has moved into the mainstream, workplace investigation guidance. So, what all of this means is that, the experience that you might be having, ahead of or during an interview, 00:02:50 Speaker 1: Is not something that is foreign to every employer now. This kind of language, this kind of understanding is something that employers more and more have to think about, because we know that there are employees who have been through traumatic experiences that are going to affect how they show up at work. 00:03:05 Speaker 1: So let's start in terms of thinking about the interview setting with distinguishing hypervigilance, which might be the result of having experienced trauma, from sensible caution. So, I wanna say first up, that a psychologist is going to be the best tool for you if you're someone who is having this experience of hypervigilance. They are the person who is gonna help you overcome these feelings. But we're gonna share a couple of quick questions that maybe are gonna just help you to reframe in the moment. 00:03:34 Speaker 1: Firstly, if you're in an interview situation and you are starting to feel that hypervigilance come in, you're feeling panicky, you're seeing threats left, right and center, bring yourself back to evidence. What is happening right now versus what am I predicting is about to happen. Then, you're gonna go to some pattern recognition. You're gonna say to yourself, is the response that I'm having to this specific person, this specific place, is that about them or where I am? Or is this an alarm that sounds in my head a lot of the time? 00:04:03 Speaker 1: And is part of what makes me see threats or danger everywhere, because of what I've been through. 00:04:09 Speaker 1: And then you're gonna ask yourself about proportion. 00:04:12 Speaker 1: You're gonna say to yourself, I'm gonna think of one of my most trusted and calm friends, and if they were in this situation, how would they reassure me that actually, I'm safe? 00:04:24 Speaker 1: Now, if your fear in an interview setting survives all three of those questions, maybe you are flagging a real problem. But most likely, it's not gonna pass all those three tests and genuinely be a case for alarm. Most likely this is an old piece of trauma that is sitting in your head. That means that you now need to take some steps to regulate your panic. This is not a situation where a real threat is present. It's just that your body and brain is telling you that that's what's going on. 00:04:54 Speaker 2: So what to do immediately before the interview? Stop trying to feel calm? The goal isn't calm, it's functional. Give the adrenaline somewhere to go, a brisk walk around the block, running up a flight of stairs, even fast arm swings in the car park. Hypervigilance is energy with nowhere to discharge, so burn some off physically, right before you go in. 00:05:20 Speaker 2: Get there early enough to acclimatize, but not so early you marinate. 10 minutes in the actual space, the lobby, the waiting area, lets your threat radar log, nothing bad is happening here before the stakes go 00:05:36 Speaker 2: up. 00:05:37 Speaker 1: Really good practical advice, probably for anyone that gets super nervous, right? Those are all just great regulating activities,