Understanding toxic leadership, why capable people stay stuck in it, and how to reclaim your agency.
You used to be confident, trusted your instincts, and brought ideas without rehearsing them first. You were good at your work and you knew it. Others knew it too.
So when did that change?
If you’re honest, you can probably trace it back to a particular environment. A particular dynamic, or a particular person in a position of authority whose behavior you’ve been quietly adapting to, probably for longer than you’ve wanted to admit.
Perhaps you’ve told yourself it’s fine, that this is just how high-performance environments work. You might have told yourself to toughen up, manage upward better, stop being so sensitive — and that the problem, somehow, is you.
It’s important to understand that the environment is genuinely affecting you, and it is not your fault that it started. But there might also be a part of you that has been participating in the dynamic in ways you haven’t fully examined yet. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re human, and some very understandable needs are keeping you stuck.
This blog is about both of those things. Because real change requires holding both.
What Toxic Leadership Actually Is
So what is ‘Toxic Leadership’?
It’s not high standards, or accountability or direct feedback. It’s not a strong personality or a demanding work environment. These things can be uncomfortable, but they’re not harmful in themselves.
Toxic leadership is something specific: it is what happens when a person in authority is operating from a chronically dysregulated internal state, driven by fear, threat, or unresolved pressure, and directing that state at the people around them.
In other words, it’s not a leadership style. It’s a regulatory failure with authority behind it. And the reason it’s so damaging is not just the individual behaviors — it’s the relentlessness, the unpredictability, and the way it keeps your nervous system permanently on alert.
What Toxic Leadership Looks Like in Practice
Toxic leadership rarely announces itself. It often wears the costume of rigour, high performance, or passionate commitment to results. You might recognise some of these:
- Chronic urgency as a management tool. Everything is always critical, always needed yesterday.
- Unpredictable moods that mean you’re always having to read the room before you can do your work.
- Shifting goalposts that keep you in a permanent state of uncertainty or insecurity, no matter how well you perform.
- Micromanagement that signals you can’t be trusted, regardless of your track record.
- Public correction or humiliation, framed as ‘honest feedback’ — a means to control you.
- Ambiguity used as a power tool. Clarity is withheld so you stay dependent.
- A culture where speaking up feels genuinely unsafe, even when the topic is work-related.
- Triangulation as a control strategy. Conversations happen about people instead of with them.
- Selective sharing of information that creates division, confusion, or quiet competition among staff.
- Subtle isolation of individuals who challenge the leader, often positioning them as ‘difficult’ or ‘the problem.’
You might also notice something subtler: that the environment rewards anxiety. There’s an unspoken rule that safety is something you earn by performing perfectly, and it can be revoked at any moment — so you’d better stay on your toes and keep performing.
That is not a high-performance culture. That is a threat environment. And your nervous system knows the difference, even when your mind is still trying to rationalise it.
What Toxic Leadership Does to You
Here is what I hear, almost word for word, from clients who are living or have lived in these environments:
“I can tell what kind of day it’s going to be by how they walk through the door.”
“I rehearse what I’m going to say before every interaction. I’m exhausted before the conversation starts.”
“I don’t know who’s safe to talk to. I watch everything.”
“I replay conversations all night. I’m second-guessing things I said weeks ago.”
“I used to back myself. Now I question everything.”
This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: detect threat, adapt to survive, protect you from harm. The problem is that when the threat is constant and comes from someone with power over your livelihood, that adaptation becomes all-consuming.
Over time, living in that state produces real consequences:
- Chronic hypervigilance: always scanning, always bracing yourself.
- Disrupted sleep, physical tension, headaches, a body that can’t fully switch off.
- A slow erosion of confidence, even in areas where you were previously certain.
- Loss of access to creativity, strategic thinking, and genuine presence.
- Emotional withdrawal: numbness, flatness, disconnection from things that used to matter.
Psychological research is clear that prolonged exposure to this kind of environment produces stress responses comparable to major life events — divorce, chronic relational conflict, significant loss. The difference is that most people can’t simply leave without real financial, professional, or identity cost. And so they stay. And adapt. And quietly absorb the damage.
A Note for Women in These Environments
The qualities that often make women exceptional — attunement, relational intelligence, the ability to read a room, hold complexity, repair dynamics that others don’t even notice are broken — become exhausting liabilities in toxic environments. Not because they’re weaknesses, but because they’re strengths that get extracted without limit.
You absorb more, manage more, track more, pre-empt more. And all the while, you privately wonder whether you’re good enough — while being the person holding everything together.
The depletion you feel is the predictable result of a system that has been treating your capacity as infrastructure rather than as something that needs to be protected and replenished.
And there’s one more thing worth naming: for many women, the need to be liked, to smooth things over, and to avoid being seen as ‘difficult’ can make it especially hard to take the stands that are available to you. We’ll come to those shortly.
Here’s the Part That’s Harder to Hear
Everything above is real. The environment is genuinely affecting you, and the person in authority bears genuine responsibility for how they’re behaving.
And, with compassion rather than judgment, there is something else worth looking at.
Most people who stay in toxic environments for extended periods are being held there not only by practical constraints, but by something internal. Something that is worth understanding, because it is the part of this that is actually within your control.
Ask yourself honestly:
Do I need this person’s approval more than I’ve admitted? Is part of why this is so painful that I’m still trying to earn their validation — and it keeps not coming?
For many high performers, the sting of a toxic leader isn’t just about the behavior itself. It’s about the fact that no matter how hard you work, how well you perform, or how carefully you manage the dynamic, the approval you’re looking for doesn’t arrive. And so you try harder, adapt more, give more — because somewhere underneath the exhaustion is a belief that if you can just get it right, the relationship will feel safe.
That belief is worth examining. It is the thing that keeps you working harder to earn something that isn’t genuinely on offer.
Am I staying silent because it’s genuinely the right call, or because I’m afraid of conflict, afraid of being disliked, afraid of what speaking up might cost me?
Fear of conflict is one of the most common reasons capable people remain stuck in dynamics that are harming them. It masquerades as pragmatism (“it’s not worth it”), as professionalism (“I don’t want to make things worse”), and sometimes as selflessness (“I don’t want to cause problems for others”). But underneath, it is often simply the discomfort of being seen, of taking up space, of risking disapproval.
None of this is a character flaw. But it is a place where your agency lives — and agency is what this section is really about.
What You Can Actually Do
The most empowering shift in any toxic dynamic is moving from “How do I survive this?” to “What are my actual options here?” Here are four genuine options worth considering.
1. Decide to stay — but stop handing over your power.
If leaving isn’t currently an option, there is still a meaningful difference between staying as a passive recipient of someone else’s dysregulation and staying as someone who has made a conscious, boundaried choice. That shift — from victim to agent — changes how the experience sits in your body. It means being clear about what you will and won’t accept. It means not performing for approval that isn’t coming. It means doing your work well, for your own standards, not for validation that is never reliably available. This is harder than it sounds, but it is a fundamentally different way of occupying the same environment.
2. Raise it directly with the person.
This is not always possible, and it is not always safe. But it is more often a real option than people allow themselves to believe. It’s important to remember that toxic leaders are operating from a chronically dysregulated internal state, driven by fear, threat, or unresolved pressure — and they are directing that state at the people around them. Meaning, it is not about you. And because of this, some toxic leaders, when called out with care and specificity, do try to make shifts. A calm, direct, private conversation about specific behaviors and their impact can sometimes change a dynamic more than years of quiet adaptation.
Not trying it is also a choice — one worth owning consciously rather than defaulting to out of fear.
Sometimes the most efficient and effective option is having someone come in from the outside to work directly with the leader or leadership team, someone who can name what’s happening without the power dynamic getting in the way.
As a clinical counsellor specialising in leadership and human energy, this is part of the work I do. If you’re wondering whether bringing in external support might be the right step for your organisation, this is something that can be initiated through HR or a trusted senior leader. Feel free to reach out to explore what that could look like.
3. Raise it with HR or a trusted senior leader.
Many people dismiss this option too quickly, assuming nothing will change or that they’ll be seen as the problem. Sometimes that’s a realistic read of the organisation. But sometimes it isn’t — and the failure to escalate the issue means a pattern continues that HR or leadership genuinely didn’t know about.
Raising a concern professionally and specifically, focused on behavior and impact rather than character, is both legitimate and often braver than it feels. It also creates a record — and it gives the organisation the opportunity to respond, which tells you a great deal about whether this is a place worth staying.
If your organisation is open to it, bringing in an external specialist, someone who works at the intersection of clinical psychology, nervous system regulation, and leadership, can be a far more effective intervention than an internal HR process alone. It removes the power dynamic, creates a safer space for honest conversation, and addresses the root of the behavior rather than just managing the symptoms.
If you’re considering this route and would like to understand what that kind of engagement looks like, I’m happy to have that conversation.
4. Leave — as a deliberate choice, not a collapse.
The healthiest people in toxic environments tend to leave first — not because they give up, but because they have enough self-awareness to recognise what’s happening and enough self-respect to act on it. Leaving a genuinely toxic environment is not failure or giving up. It is, in many cases, the most self-honouring and strategically intelligent thing you can do.
If you’ve been telling yourself you can’t leave, it’s worth asking whether that’s actually true — or whether it’s fear making the decision for you.
What Recovery from Toxic Leadership Actually Requires
Whether you stay or leave, there is inner work to do — and it isn’t the work of toughening up or learning to manage your reactions better.
The real work is in your nervous system. In helping it learn that it is safe again — genuinely safe, not just intellectually reassured. In rebuilding access to the parts of you that went quiet under the pressure: your instincts, your creativity, your confidence, your willingness to take up space and trust your own judgment.
It also involves looking honestly at the patterns that kept you stuck — the need for approval, the fear of conflict, the belief that if you just performed well enough everything would be okay. These patterns didn’t start in this job. They have a longer history. And understanding them is not self-blame. It is the beginning of genuine freedom from them.
This takes more than a holiday. It takes more than venting to a trusted friend, or finally leaving and hoping a new environment fixes it. Because the pattern — the hypervigilance, the self-doubt, the scanning — can follow you into a new context if the nervous system doesn’t genuinely reset and the underlying beliefs don’t genuinely shift.
You Have More Agency Than You’ve Been Allowing Yourself
If you’ve recognised yourself in what you’ve read here, I want you to hold two things at once: what is being done to you is real and it matters. And you are not as powerless as you may have come to feel.
The version of you that used to back themselves, trust their instincts, and feel genuinely energised by their work hasn’t gone anywhere. But reclaiming that version of yourself may require more than waiting for the environment to change. It may require looking honestly at what you’ve been participating in — and deciding, with full awareness, what you want to do differently.
I work with high-performing people who are ready to stop managing their experience and start genuinely changing it. As a clinical counsellor, I work beneath the performance layer — at the level of the internal states, the beliefs, and the nervous system patterns that are quietly shaping everything else. This is not about coping better. It’s about recovering fully — and showing up differently.
If this is landing for you, I’d love to hear from you. Not because you’re broken — but because you’re ready to create change.