Mary Eldridge, LISW, LCSW - Mind to Thrive

08/07/2026

Comment HEALING and I will help you find your voice again in rooms that once took credit for it.

If your work has ever left your hands and come back with someone else’s name on it, you already know the particular sting of watching leadership call it collaboration. It was not collaboration. It was your idea, your hours, and someone else’s credit.

Capable people expose gaps that someone else did not want seen. It is easier for leadership to let the more visible person keep the win than to correct the record in front of a room. Your accuracy was never the problem. It was inconvenient to whoever benefited from staying quiet about it.

So you started sharing less. Waiting to see who agreed before you spoke. Keeping your best ideas closer instead of putting them on the table first. That is not a personality shift. That is self protection that used to be optional.

Comment HEALING below and let’s work on putting your name back on your own work.

08/07/2026

08/07/2026

Comment HEALING below if taking your own earned leave has ever felt like it came with a penalty.
 
When taking leave is punished, and staying late is praised as loyalty, hard work, persistence, something specific is happening underneath. They’re conditioning you to accept unhealthy and toxic work conditions, one reward and one punishment at a time, until the version of normal you started with quietly gets replaced.
 
They’re gaslighting you into thinking that it is normal to do those things, that it is actually the expectation, implicit or explicit, even when nobody ever said it out loud. The absence of a written rule doesn’t mean the expectation isn’t real. It just means it’s harder to point to and easier for them to deny.
 
If you’re done accepting toxicity at work, comment HEALING below and let’s talk about what healthy actually looks like.
 

08/07/2026

Comment HEALING below if a coworker’s insecurity has ever masqueraded as competition with you.
 
Remember this the next time a toxic coworker feels threatened by you: that feeling is proof you were capable enough to be in that room in the first place. Threat doesn’t get triggered by mediocrity. Nobody feels destabilized by someone who isn’t a real reference point for their own performance.
 
If a coworker is spending energy undermining you or trying to make you smaller, it’s because some part of them has already clocked that you’re a legitimate measure of what’s possible in that role, and that comparison doesn’t flatter them.
 
You earned your seat. Their reaction to you doesn’t change that.
 
Comment HEALING below and let’s talk about it.
 

08/06/2026

Comment HEALING and I will help you tell the difference between a room that is safe and one that has just trained you to stay quiet.

If a leader watched a coworker interrupt you, talk over you, or take your point and said nothing, that silence was not neutral. It was a decision about whose comfort mattered more than the harm happening in front of them.

Naming what someone did means confronting them. Confronting them costs the leader something. Watching you absorb it costs them nothing. So they let it keep happening, and you learned to brace before every meeting instead of walk into it steady.

That vigilance you carry now is not you being dramatic. It is what happens when support was never guaranteed and you had to build your own early warning system instead.

Comment HEALING below and let’s rebuild your read of a room, this time with real backup.

08/06/2026

Comment HEALING if you have made any of these same mistakes trying to survive your toxic workplace.
 
The first was volunteering for everything thinking that eventually one of them would finally make you feel like you belonged there. It never worked. Because belonging in a toxic workplace was never actually on offer.
 
The second was opening up about feeling invisible and excluded only to have it dismissed every time. Or handed back to you as proof that the problem was you.
 
The third was isolating yourself. Closing the door. Pulling away from the people who might have helped because the shame had gotten loud enough to make you believe the narrative they were building around you.
 
None of those things were ever the problem. You are a high achiever with impossibly high standards who has been proving yourself every single day in a place that was never going to acknowledge it.
 
You do not have to keep earning a place you already deserve.
 
Comment HEALING below and let’s work on replacing their narrative with the truth about who you actually are.

08/06/2026

Comment HEALING below if cutting off a narcissistic coworker made you the villain of the whole office.
 
There’s a specific feeling that comes with finally cutting off a narcissistic coworker and accepting you’re going to be painted as the villain across the entire workplace, not just to that one person. Narcissistic coworkers rarely lose quietly. Once you pull back access, stop engaging, stop giving them the reaction they’re used to getting, they go on offense, recruiting allies, rewriting the history before yours ever gets the chance to reach anyone.
 
The story they tell about you says more about their need for control than it does about anything you actually did.
 
Comment HEALING below and let’s talk about it.
 

08/06/2026

Comment HEALING if you are somewhere in the healing process and realizing it is more complicated than you expected it to be.
 
Because I want to share two things I believe deeply about what recovering from a toxic workplace actually requires.
 
The first is community. And I do not mean this casually. I mean it as a clinical reality about what isolation does to people who have been through what you have been through.
 
Toxic workplaces are extraordinarily effective at making you feel alone in your experience. At building a narrative that you are the problem. That what happened to you happened because of something fundamentally wrong with you. That other people are not struggling the way you are struggling. And that narrative is incredibly hard to disrupt from inside your own head.
 
But the moment someone else says I felt that too everything shifts. The shame loses its grip. The story that was being used to keep you small starts to crack. You remember that what you experienced was not a personal failing. It was a systemic one. And you are not alone in it.
 
Connect with people you trust. Talk about what happened. Find the spaces where your experience is recognized and validated. Community is not a supplement to healing. For many people it is the foundation of it.
 
The second thing is this. Leaving your toxic job is not the finish line. I know it can feel like it should be. Like the exit is the answer and everything will reorganize itself once you are out. But leaving removes the source. It does not undo what the source created inside you.
 
Real healing requires effort and intentionality and time. It requires processing what actually happened to you. Regulating a nervous system that has been in survival mode. Rebuilding self trust that was systematically dismantled. And doing all of that with support rather than in isolation.
 
You do not have to figure this out alone. You were never supposed to.
 
Comment HEALING below and let’s do this work together.