Professional Jealousy – Why It May Be Rooted in Trauma
- Brainz Magazine
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Written by Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady) is a multi-award-winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach, and hypnotherapist.
Professional jealousy is one of those experiences we rarely admit to but almost universally feel. That sharp pang when a colleague receives recognition we coveted, the bitter taste when someone else's success seems to diminish our own, the compulsive comparison that leaves us feeling inadequate, these aren't merely character flaws or signs of insufficient gratitude. Increasingly, psychological research suggests that intense professional jealousy often has roots that extend far deeper than the workplace itself, reaching back into unresolved trauma and the fundamental wounds that shape how we perceive ourselves and our worth.
Understanding professional jealousy through a trauma-informed lens doesn't excuse the behavior or make it less problematic when it manifests destructively. Rather, it offers a pathway toward healing and transformation. When we recognize that our disproportionate reactions to others' successes may be echoes of earlier pain, we can begin to address the real source of our suffering rather than simply trying to suppress uncomfortable feelings or, worse, acting on them in ways that damage our relationships and careers.
The architecture of early wounds
Trauma, in its psychological definition, extends beyond the dramatic events we typically associate with the word. While major traumas, abuse, neglect, significant loss, certainly play a role in shaping our adult responses, developmental psychologists increasingly recognize that more subtle but persistent experiences in childhood create lasting imprints on how we relate to achievement, recognition, and competition.
Children who grew up in environments where love and approval were conditional on performance often develop what's known as an anxious attachment to achievement. If a parent's warmth was noticeably greater when you brought home good grades or won competitions, your young mind learned a dangerous equation: my worth equals my accomplishments. This isn't conscious learning but deep, neurological patterning. The brain's reward systems become wired to seek validation through external markers of success, and any threat to that success, including someone else's superior performance, triggers the same fear response as the original threat of losing parental love.
Similarly, children who experienced scarcity, whether material or emotional, often develop what psychologists call a "scarcity mindset" that persists into adulthood. If resources in your family were limited, whether that meant money, attention, praise, or opportunity, you learned to compete for what was available. Success became a zero-sum game. In this framework, someone else's win necessarily means less for you because the pie was always too small in your formative years. Professional jealousy, then, becomes a reactivation of that childhood survival strategy, even when, objectively, your colleague's promotion doesn't actually take anything away from your own potential.
Shame as the hidden engine
Beneath most intense professional jealousy lies a deep reservoir of shame. This is perhaps the most crucial connection between trauma and workplace envy. Shame, as researcher Brené Brown has extensively documented, is the intensely painful feeling that we are fundamentally flawed and unworthy of love and belonging. Unlike guilt, which says "I did something bad," shame says "I am bad."
Traumatic experiences, particularly in childhood, are the primary source of internalized shame. A child who was criticized harshly, compared unfavorably to siblings, emotionally neglected, or made to feel they were too much or not enough absorbs these messages into their core sense of self. The shame becomes part of their internal narrative, often operating below conscious awareness.
When we carry unhealed shame, other people's success becomes intolerable because it seems to confirm our worst fears about ourselves. If you fundamentally believe you're not good enough, then someone else being good becomes evidence of your inadequacy. The jealousy isn't really about them, it's about the shame they inadvertently activate in you. Their light seems to make your darkness more visible. Their achievement appears to validate the critical voice that has always told you that you don't measure up.
This shame-based jealousy often comes with a particular cognitive distortion: the belief that recognition and worth are finite resources. If someone else is receiving praise, there must be less available for you. If someone else is talented, it somehow diminishes your own gifts. This zero-sum thinking is characteristic of a shame-based worldview where there isn't enough goodness to go around, and you're perpetually at risk of being left without.
The trauma of comparison
Many people who struggle with professional jealousy grew up in environments where comparison was a constant feature of life. Perhaps they had siblings who were held up as examples, or parents who explicitly compared them to other children. Maybe their school environment was intensely competitive, or their cultural context placed enormous emphasis on relative achievement rather than individual growth.
When comparison becomes the primary lens through which your worth is evaluated during your formative years, it creates a kind of relational trauma. You learn that you don't have inherent value, your value is always relative and conditional. This sets up a lifelong pattern where you can't simply enjoy your own accomplishments or exist in your own lane. Everything becomes about where you stand in relation to others.
This comparison trauma often manifests in professional settings with particular intensity because workplaces naturally involve evaluation, ranking, and competition for limited resources like promotions, raises, and high-profile assignments. For someone whose early experiences taught them that comparison equals threat, these everyday workplace realities can feel like constant retraumatization. Each time a colleague is recognized or advances, it doesn't just feel like missing out on an opportunity, it feels like a fundamental threat to their sense of self.
Attachment wounds and professional relationships
Attachment theory, which describes the patterns of bonding formed in early childhood, provides another crucial lens for understanding professional jealousy rooted in trauma. People who developed insecure attachment patterns, particularly anxious attachment, often bring those patterns into their professional relationships.
Anxious attachment typically develops when caregiving is inconsistent. Sometimes the parent is available and responsive, sometimes not, creating uncertainty about whether needs will be met. Children in these situations become hypervigilant to signs of rejection or abandonment and often develop people-pleasing behaviors to secure the love they need.
In professional contexts, people with unresolved anxious attachment wounds may develop intense relationships with mentors, supervisors, or even peers, investing these relationships with more emotional weight than they can healthily bear. When someone else appears to be gaining favor with an important figure in the professional context, it can trigger the same panic that the anxiously attached child felt when they feared losing their caregiver's attention. The jealousy that emerges isn't really about the promotion or the project assignment, it's about the activation of that primal fear of being left, abandoned, or replaced.
Avoidant attachment, which typically develops when emotional needs are consistently dismissed or minimized, can also contribute to professional jealousy, though it often looks different. People with avoidant patterns may outwardly dismiss recognition and claim not to care about external validation, while internally struggling with intense feelings of inadequacy. When they experience jealousy, they may intellectualize it, deny it, or withdraw rather than addressing the underlying wound, the early experience of learning that vulnerability and need are dangerous and won't be met with care.
The perfectionism connection
Many individuals who experience intense professional jealousy also struggle with perfectionism, and both often trace back to similar traumatic roots. Perfectionism isn't really about high standards or attention to detail, at its core, it's a defense mechanism against shame and a strategy for securing love, belonging, or safety that felt conditional or uncertain.
Children who grew up in environments where mistakes were harshly criticized, where they felt they had to be perfect to be loved, or where they sensed that their achievements were their main source of value often develop perfectionist patterns. The underlying belief is: if I can just be perfect enough, I'll be safe, loved, and worthy.
But perfectionism is an impossible standard, and the perfectionist is always vulnerable to feeling like a failure. When someone else succeeds or is recognized, it can trigger the perfectionistic person's deepest fear, that they're not good enough, that they've failed at being perfect, that their worth is now in question. The jealousy becomes intense because the other person's success represents not just missed opportunity but a failure at the very thing (being the best) that was supposed to keep them safe from the pain of unworthiness.
This creates a particularly vicious cycle. The jealousy itself becomes another source of shame (because feeling jealous conflicts with the perfectionistic person's self-image as generous, evolved, or above such petty emotions), which intensifies the underlying wound, making future triggers even more painful.
Trauma and the inner critic
Most people who struggle with professional jealousy have a particularly harsh inner critic, that voice that constantly judges, compares, and finds them wanting. This inner critic often develops as an internalization of early critical voices: parents, teachers, peers, or cultural messages that communicated "you're not good enough."
From a trauma perspective, the inner critic actually begins as a protective mechanism. If you can criticize yourself first and harshly enough, maybe you can avoid the pain of external criticism. If you constantly monitor your performance against others and identify your shortcomings, maybe you can fix them before others notice. The inner critic is trying to keep you safe from the shame and pain of not measuring up.
But this strategy backfires. The inner critic becomes so strong that it colors everything, making neutral events feel like judgments and other people's successes feel like indictments of your own inadequacy. When a colleague succeeds, your inner critic immediately launches into a comparison: "See, they're better than you. You should have achieved that. What's wrong with you that you didn't?"
This internalized critical voice is essentially a trauma response, a continuation of early wounding that now operates on autopilot. The professional jealousy that emerges isn't really about the external situation; it's about the internal torture of the critic that other people's success activates.
Unmet needs and professional envy
Another trauma-based root of professional jealousy involves unmet developmental needs. Every child needs to feel seen, valued, celebrated, and special in some way. When these needs go chronically unmet, perhaps due to parental preoccupation, emotional unavailability, or a family system where one child's needs were consistently prioritized over others, the adult continues to carry a deep hunger for recognition.
This hunger for recognition can become desperate and consuming. When recognition goes to someone else, it doesn't just feel disappointing, it feels like being passed over and invisible all over again, reactivating that childhood wound of not being seen or valued. The intensity of the jealousy often reflects the intensity of the unmet need.
People with this particular wound may find themselves constantly tracking who gets recognized, who gets praise, who gets the spotlight. They're not being petty or narcissistic, they're hungry for something essential that they never received enough of. Their professional jealousy is a symptom of developmental hunger, not character deficiency.
The imposter syndrome link
Professional jealousy and imposter syndrome, the persistent belief that you're a fraud who doesn't deserve your success, frequently coexist, and both often stem from traumatic experiences that created a fractured sense of self-worth.
When you believe deep down that you're an imposter, other people's success becomes threatening in a particular way. Their achievements seem to prove that they're "real" in ways you're not. They appear to possess some essential quality or legitimacy that you lack. When they're recognized or rewarded, it seems to confirm your worst fear: that eventually, everyone will discover you don't really belong.
This imposter feeling often originates in experiences where a child's authentic self wasn't welcomed or accepted. Perhaps they had to develop a "false self" to gain approval, performing a version of themselves that met family or cultural expectations while their true self remained hidden and unvalidated. The adult then continues this pattern, achieving professionally but never feeling genuine or deserving because they're still operating from that false self, waiting for exposure.
When jealousy arises from this place, it's mixed with fear. The other person's success not only triggers envy but also anxiety that you'll be revealed as less capable, less genuine, less deserving. The jealousy is actually a symptom of the deeper trauma of having learned that your authentic self wasn't acceptable enough.
Healing: From understanding to transformation
Recognizing the traumatic roots of professional jealousy is the first step toward healing, but it's only the beginning. The actual work of transformation requires acknowledging these patterns with compassion rather than judgment, then slowly rebuilding the core sense of self-worth that was damaged.
This healing often involves grieving, acknowledging what you didn't receive in childhood or early life, the security and unconditional acceptance that would have allowed you to develop a stable sense of worth independent of achievement or comparison. It means recognizing that your jealousy, while painful and sometimes destructive, makes sense given what you experienced and learned.
The path forward involves gradually developing what psychologists call "secure attachment" to yourself, learning to be your own source of validation and worth rather than depending entirely on external recognition. It means challenging the cognitive distortions that make you see others' success as your failure, and recognizing that worth and opportunity are not finite resources.
It also requires practicing vulnerability, sharing your struggles with trusted others, including the uncomfortable truth that you sometimes feel jealous. Bringing these feelings into the light reduces their power and their shame. When we hide our jealousy, it grows stronger. When we acknowledge it with self-compassion and in safe relationships, it begins to lose its grip.
For many people, professional work with a therapist trained in trauma-informed approaches can be transformative. Modalities like EMDR, internal family systems, somatic experiencing, or psychodynamic therapy can help process the underlying wounds that fuel the jealousy. The goal isn't to eliminate all feelings of envy, that's a normal human emotion, but to reduce the intensity and reactivity so that these feelings become manageable rather than overwhelming.
Professional jealousy rooted in trauma is ultimately a call to healing. It's an invitation to turn inward and address the old wounds that continue to shape your present experience. When you do this work, something remarkable often happens: not only does the jealousy diminish, but your capacity for genuine celebration of others expands. You become more generous, more secure, and more connected, both to yourself and to the people around you. The energy that was consumed by envy and comparison becomes available for creativity, growth, and meaningful contribution. This is the promise of trauma-informed understanding: that our deepest struggles can become gateways to profound healing and transformation.
Read more from Sam Mishra
Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady), is a multi-award winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach and hypnotherapist. Her medical background as a nurse and a midwife, combined with her own experiences of childhood disability and abuse, have resulted in a diverse and specialised service, but she is mostly known for her trauma work. She is motivated by the adversity she has faced, using it as a driving force in her charity work and in offering the vulnerable a means of support. Her aim is to educate about medical conditions using easily understood language, to avoid inappropriate treatments being carried out, and for health promotion purposes in the general public. She is also becoming known for challenging the stigmas in our society and pushing through the boundaries that have been set by such stigmas within the massage industry.
