Work Difficulties: When the Problem Is Not Just the Job

Workplace difficulties frequently bring people come to therapy. They arise in many forms: conflict with a manager or colleague, a role or workload that has become unsustainable, a sense of being undervalued or overlooked, or the overall exhaustion of a job that takes more from you than you gain. When most work difficulties are examined, what emerges is that the problem is not only the job. The job has become a place where something more fundamental is being played out.

 

What work difficulties often involve

The workplace is a relational environment, and our relational patterns do not stay at home when we go to work! If you find it difficult to assert yourself in personal relationships, you will tend to find the same difficulty in professional ones. If your sense of worth is heavily invested in being competent and useful, you will feel that particular sting of professional failure or criticism more acutely than the circumstances alone may warrant. If you grew up managing the emotional dynamics of a complicated family system, you will often find yourself drawn into doing something similar in your team or organisation.

This does not mean that the external situations are not real and the cause of significant distress. Of course difficult managers and team members exist. Unfair workplaces exist. Challenging team dynamics exist and can have an extraordinary psychological impact on us all. But understanding both the external situations and our own internal patterns (and the ways those patterns make the work circumstances so much more difficult to navigate) can provide a comprehensive picture of what is happening above and below the surface.

 

When to stay and when to leave

One of the most common questions that arrives alongside work place difficulties is whether to stay in a role or organisation, or to exit. It is a genuinely difficult question because the answer depends on things that are not always clear from inside the situation. Is the difficulty specific to this environment or will the patterns follow us into the next role? Is what feels intolerable actually intolerable, or has it become so because of accumulated depletion? We may need to ask ourselves what leaving would actually change.

 

When the work difficulty is about more than work

Sometimes what presents as a work difficulty may be better understood as: burnout, our own high expectations of self or others in action, a midlife identity question, or the signal that a career that was chosen at one stage for one set of reasons, no longer fits the ways that we have developed since.

At the start of our careers, we might have so much to prove that we find ourselves compromising on certain non-negotiables and values. At any stage of our career, we may find ourselves saying yes to things that may help us progress and climb the corporate ladder, when we really want to say no ( e.g. to working long hours, extensive overseas travel, working on weekends, attending work social gatherings that we do not enjoy, cancelling personal plans, or eroding our prided personal relationships in favour of work ‘commitments’).

These are not small matters, and they are not necessarily resolved by a change of employer. They require a more fundamental examination of what we believe work is for, what work means to us, and what we wish to prioritise, build or protect, in our personal, social and relational worlds away from work.

 

What therapy can offer

Therapy for work difficulties is not the same as career coaching. Whilst it may help to vent about a difficult manager or colleague, therapy can also provide an opportunity for us to understand what is happening at work in the context of our whole self and history: the patterns that we bring, the relational and family histories that shape our responses. Therapy allows us to ask ourselves what genuine resolution to our workplace stresses, rather than temporary relief, might actually require.

Therapy can offer a space to think about these questions with more clarity than tends to be available in the middle of a difficult situation. Not to provide an answer, but to help distinguish between what belongs to the job and what belongs to us. This distinction helps us to make decisions while focusing on those things that are within our personal control.

Therapy can also help us to remember our true priorities and values around work, and to ask ourselves whether the roles that we choose (or find ourselves in), really allow us to experience the quality of life that we truly desire.

If work has become a significant source of distress and you have not yet found a space to examine what is actually going on, therapy may offer the reflective space that you are looking for.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.