The worst job I ever had lasted less than 6 months. I was fired because the owner didn't know how to run things and would just blame the employees.
Prior to this I had excelled at every job I had ever worked at. Even the shitty businesses were pretty well-run, and there were safe-guards in place to ensure issues didn't come up that cost the business money.
So when I began working here and getting yelled at several times a day for making mistakes I began to internalize it. I was told several times a week that I was costing the business money. I also had my employment threatened a few times – “If you wanna keep working here, you'll need to…” I thought I was fucking up the business, I was causing it to fail, etc. After all, I must be a failure if I'm causing to owner to go ballistic as much as he is – No one else ever yelled at me like that!
All this anxiety lead to me sleeping at most 1-2 hours a night, usually being woken up by an anxiety dream about work. Some nights I wouldn't sleep at all, and I'd go into work fueled by coffee and adrenaline. I couldn't relax, and I wasn't present for my wife, my family, or my friends. I had never felt like this in my life, I felt like an utter failure.
On the morning I was fired I went home, laid in bed, and slept like a rock for 4 hours until mid-afternoon.
Ever since then I've had this anxiety in the back of my mind about work. Any bit of criticism I received lead me to believe I've be fired. I avoided my bosses and managers, even if they were good people, because I associated interactions with a boss to be something negative. If a co-worker or boss told me I was doing great work I assumed they were lying. After all, I'm the loser who almost tanked my last job!
My therapist, who I just began seeing in regards to my ADHD, told me that it seems all my job issues were an isolated incident with this one shitty company, which I then carried with me to other jobs. At the time I hesitated to call this workplace “hostile”, or to say my boss was “toxic” – I just wasn't pulling myself up by my bootstraps hard enough! I also only associated PTSD with serious trauma like surviving the horrors of war, etc.
But she said that I've been showing all the symptoms of PTSD, even though that business is long in my past. My homework this week is to think about how working there affected me, and to see all the positives I bring to my current job. I'm currently working at a huge company, handling some projects and accounts that are well-regarded and known around the world. Surely I'm not a fuck-up if they trust me with these projects and have nothing negative to say about my work on them!
tl;dr: Therapist says a past job I had was so bad I developed PTSD from it. No matter how much I tried to downplay what happened, she says 6 months in that shithole company caused me trauma that's still with me and affecting my success. Man, one bad business can really fuck you up!