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 that has become untenable, a sense of being undervalued or overlooked, the exhaustion of a job that takes more than it gives. But in most cases, when the work difficulty is examined carefully, 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 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 to doing something similar in a team or organisation.

This does not mean that the external situations aren’t real. Of course difficult managers exist. Unfair workplaces exist. Challenging team dynamics exist and can have an extraordinarily significant psychological impact. But understanding both the external situation and your own internal patterns (and the ways those patterns make the work circumstances so much more difficult to navigate) provides a far more comprehensive picture of what is happening above and underneath 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 or go. And it is a genuinely difficult question, because the answer depends on things that are not always clear from inside the situation: whether the difficulty is with this specific environment or with patterns that will follow us into the next one, whether what feels intolerable is actually intolerable or has become so because of accumulated depletion, and 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 for one set of reasons no longer fits the person that has developed in the meantime. At the start of our careers, we might have so much to prove that we find ourselves compromising on certain 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 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 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, and it is not simply a space to vent about a difficult manager. Therapy can 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 history that shapes our responses, and what genuine resolution, 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 the person — which is often the most useful thing to know.

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. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.