I have PTSD. I’m also a software engineer, which means I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where somebody jokes that a bad deploy or a flaky test suite “gave them PTSD.” Everybody laughs, the meeting keeps going, and nobody thinks about it again.
Except me. I think about it a lot.
I’m not writing this to call anybody out. I don’t think most people who say it mean anything by it. They want the biggest word they can find for “that was really annoying,” and PTSD is a big word. But it’s big because the real thing is bad, and the joke only works by borrowing from people who actually live with it.
This isn’t me being offended
People tend to treat this as a taste thing. Some people find it offensive, some don’t, agree to disagree. That’s not what’s happening.
When I hear it, my body reacts before I get any say in it. Everything tenses up. My heart rate jumps. I lose the thread of whatever’s being presented, and most of my effort goes into keeping my face neutral so nobody notices. Sometimes that’s ten minutes. Sometimes it’s the rest of the day. I don’t decide any of that. It’s closer to flinching than to having an opinion.
The people it hits hardest can’t really push back
This is the part I most want people to get. The people most affected by a PTSD joke are usually the least able to stand up for themselves when it happens. The reaction that makes it hit so hard is the same thing that makes it nearly impossible to calmly say “hey, not cool” in the moment. You’re busy just holding it together.
By the time you can think straight, the meeting has moved on. Bringing it up later feels like dragging everyone back to something they’ve already forgotten. And they have forgotten. That’s the gap. For the room it was a throwaway line, gone by the next slide. For me, that stupid joke lives rent free in my head. It replays. I keep turning it over looking for some way to resolve it, and nothing does.
It’s also never just once. I’ve heard some version of this joke at each of my last three jobs. After that many times, my body has learned the pattern: the next one isn’t an if, it’s a when. So it’s not only the joke that costs me something. It’s the background bracing for the next one.
If the only way these comments get dealt with is the affected person finding the strength to speak up in the middle of a stress response, most of them never will be.
Work makes it worse
Anywhere else, I could just leave. At work, I can’t. I’m in that meeting because it’s my job, usually in front of people whose opinion of me matters for my career. Reacting visibly costs something. Speaking up costs something. So most people with PTSD just eat it and say nothing, which is exactly why the people making the jokes almost never find out.
And when it happens in front of a big group and nothing gets said, the group learns it’s fine. The next person is a little more comfortable saying it. That’s how it ends up at three jobs in a row.
The fix is pretty small
I’m not asking anybody to stop being funny. Laughing about a terrible outage together is one of the better parts of this job. Just pick a different word. “That bug haunted us” or “that release was brutal” still gets the laugh, without the diagnosis.
If you catch yourself saying it, a quick “bad choice of words” is plenty. It doesn’t need to be a big moment.
If you lead people and it happens in a public setting, say something afterward. It doesn’t have to name anyone. A short note about what’s expected takes the weight off the person least able to carry it, and it does more than you’d think.
And if someone tells you a comment like this got to them, believe them. They’re not saying you’re a bad person. They’re telling you something you didn’t know, and it probably took a lot more out of them to say it than you realize.
Why I’m saying this now
I’ve heard this joke at job after job, and staying quiet never made it hurt less. It just meant nobody knew. If a few people read this and swap out a word next time, that’s a better day for someone they’ll probably never realize they helped.
And if you’re one of the people who’s sat through that meeting, white-knuckling it until you could close the laptop: you’re not being oversensitive. It’s real. You’re allowed to say so.
