Worked out: on the chronic and pervasive trauma of corporate life
This article was published in New Therapist, number 70, Winter 2010.
Many therapists have never worked in a corporation, but many of our clients grapple daily with the difficult demands of corporate life. Having spent seventeen years working in industry, I decided to write an article for therapists, explaining some of the issues at stake.
I can’t think of a better metaphor for corporate life than ‘competitive ranking’—the system used to evaluate employees annually, and allocate pay-rises. Sounds anodyne, doesn’t it? Even as though it might reward people fairly, according to relative performance. But consider that if there are ten of you on a team, all working together, helping each other out and putting in the same time and effort, you will nevertheless, at the end of the year, be ranked 1 to 10. Only the top two or three will get pay rises. The bottom few may lose pay, be disciplined, or get sacked. What does that do to your trust in your colleagues, or your willingness to help them? Can you afford to like these people? Can you afford to be real around them? (Greenwald, 2001)
Who on earth would institute a system like this? Good question. A psychology professor once told me he was convinced the executive ranks of big corporations are over-stocked with sociopaths. Today’s DSM calls it Antisocial Personality Disorder. Think about Enron, or Union Carbide (Bhopal), or even the present financial crisis coupled with the banking bonus scandals. Then look at the diagnostic criteria for APD: failure to respect the law, reckless disregard for others, failure to honor obligations, repeated lying, lack of remorse… The criteria seem to be an alarmingly accurate match to what we read every day in the business news.
So we have to ask ourselves: what does it do to an organization to be led by people who meet the criteria for APD? Who will they promote? What qualities will be prized? Who will be selected for in the evolutionary system of the company? It won’t be the emotionally healthy.
Among the traits listed in the DSM for Narcissistic Personality Disorder also, many are adaptive—or even necessary—for success in business. It’s hard to get ahead in such a ruthlessly a competitive environment if you can’t cultivate a sense of self-importance, specialness and entitlement. But along with these traits, come the others: interpersonal exploitation, lack of empathy, and arrogance.
Systemic abuse
Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. Just as I was finishing the first draft of this article, in October 2009, the Deputy CEO of France Telecom was forced to resign, following 24 employee suicides and more than a dozen attempted suicides in the last eighteen months, explicitly caused—according to suicide notes—by stress at work, ‘management by terror’, and forced job changes[1].
In 2007, the BBC reported that “bullying at work has affected one in four workers and the issue is a "major cause" of stress in the workplace”[2]. When French psychiatrist Marie-France Hirigoyen (1998) published a book on ‘moral harassment’ (adult bullying) it became an instant best-seller and was translated into 22 languages. When Barbara Ehrenreich published her daring exposés of minimum wage working life (Ehrenreich, 2001), and disillusionment and injustice in the white collar professions (Ehrenreich, 2006), both books became runaway bestsellers. Clearly there is a huge number of people out there not only suffering from work-related unhappiness, but also desperate to have this witnessed.
The worst end of the scale is workplace bullying. The effects of bullying on adults are similar to those on children—fear, humiliation, loss of self esteem, depression, and so on—in short, it’s devastating. But surely healthy adults can draw firm boundaries against bullying? Well, think again.
It may come as a surprise to anyone who has not worked in a corporation, that there is very little recourse for ill-treated employees: bullying is not illegal, although there is an active legislative campaign proceeding in some states[3]. Most companies have no mechanism at all for employees to give feedback on their managers—the evaluation is overwhelmingly top-down[4]. Added to this, “wave after wave of corporate downsizings over the years [has] slashed the number of HR specialists”[5], so that in many companies the Human Resources department—to which an employee might traditionally have gone for help—now consists of an intranet site and a much reduced staff who field urgent issues, manage training, and perform hiring and firing. It’s not surprising that a recent University of Iowa study showed that abusive bosses are very rarely sanctioned, so long as they meet the bottom line.[6].
But you don’t need active bullying for the corporate work environment to be traumatic. Unfortunately, in the last decade, rolling layoffs have become a common feature of professional life. Layoffs are usually announced several weeks or months before they happen. The immediate—and understandable—effect is fear, nervousness, a feeling of being scrutinized and evaluated. Things get put on hold, projects are axed. Everybody waits to see who’ll be saved. Eventually the goodbyes are said, and then the work of those who are gone is inevitably added to the schedules of those who are left. Resentment smolders. Stress levels rise. Performance suffers and people get scared they’ll be next if they can’t cope. Then the next round of layoffs is announced… This goes on over and over again. As a result, a climate of fear and chronic tension is now the status quo for many people[7].
Skewed attachment and the reptile brain
In this context, the normal attachment bonds that people automatically forge with those they are close to, and which we all need in order to feel safe, unstressed and happy, are rendered precarious, if not broken altogether. Christina Robb writes, “the boss may act relational in order to get some of the zest, will to action, knowledge, self-esteem and solidarity that come from good relationships or to benefit from an underling’s relational skills, but without any real or lasting mutuality. These are vampirish relationships…” (Robb, 2007) Such relationships leave people feeling empty, and wondering what is wrong with them to be feeling so drained.
Some would say the world of work is no place to be seeking attachment anyway. But normally constituted humans cannot help but form limbic bonds. The danger is in the fact that “companies do not have emotional impulses, and human beings do…Corporate malfeasance shocks many, but corporations operate outside attachment as surely as armies do. Misdeeds—even savagery—are inevitable.” (Lewis et al, 2000)
But is that really true? Or rather, does it have to be? Some companies do choose a more empathetic mission, but sadly that mission often ends at the signing on the IPO, when they lose their autonomy to the insatiable demands of the stock market. For appeals to emotion, feelings, honesty and ethics have very little power against the imperative of profit. Many would argue that we cannot afford them, in our globalized capitalist system, dragged along as it is by the exigencies of the stock exchange, with no-one actually accountable for the conditions of ‘the market’.
“This is no place for sissies”, they would say, “you need to be tough to survive.” But what kind of a belief system is that? What kind of world does it create? Those who can thrive in such an environment are those who can live unencumbered by the limbic burdens of empathy, conscience, and remorse. And as long as we let them rule, any appeal for emotional responsibility can easily be made to sound inappropriate, or immature. This is one reason why the sociopaths and the narcissists rise—the system has, at least up till now, selected for them.
This is hard to see, and hard to talk about, because it’s an intrinsic part of abuse that it is rendered unsayable, both explicitly by the perpetrator, and implicitly because the horror of it makes us turn away and decide we’re imagining it, or that it must be the victim’s own fault.[8] Just as individual sociopaths and narcissists are notoriously charming, and can fool you—unless you tune into the counter-transference to feel the cold hardness underneath the polished exterior—you have to learn to look past the glossy front presented by corporations. And that’s not easy to do.
The myth of work and the American dream
While I was writing this article, and researching references, I came across numerous pseudo-psychological articles about “work as play”, or about “work as creativity”, and so on. These are almost inevitably written by people who have never served in the trenches of a corporation. Many large companies have a great reputation for management training and workforce development, and their HR departments and OD consultants may actually believe their own spin.
But courses in good communication, or the Tao of management, or whatever, are just sweet icing on a poisonous cake if the system does not treat its employees well in much more concrete, basic ways. You have to look at the small print. Beware of companies that vaunt their “human capital” while refusing benefits and vacation time, that preach teamwork while pitting people against each other in a zero-sum ranking game, that talk about empowering their employees while paying their management up to 475 times what they pay their workers (Judt, 2005), and so on. To believe the myths of HR without taking a closer look is to take the blue pill, and close your eyes to the matrix of overworked, stressed, exhausted people who know that the truth is not that their company loves them.
“The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York).” (Sirota, Mischkind, and Meltzer, 2006)
The persistence of the American dream that work is one of life’s great satisfactions exacerbates the distress of our client’s felt experience of deep dissatisfaction. It leads them to add a layer of shame and self-blame, thinking it really ought to be different, if they only tried harder, or thought more creatively, or motivated themselves to get another job. The dissonance between the shiny messages of good faith and the felt reality on the ground creates a schizophrenogenic clash in which people know something is profoundly wrong, but cannot name what it is, and so consult us for anxiety and depression, or end up with diseases directly caused by chronic stress. Or simply self-medicate themselves through an intolerable life.
Of course, often there are compensations, and they may be considerable. It’s a cage, but it can be a gilded one. It pays for your mortgage, your health insurance, your SUV and the private school your kids are in, so they can grow up and get great, high-paying jobs just like yours.[9] What’s wrong with you that you don’t feel grateful? Leaving seems impossible anyway. Where would you go? So you stay another day, another year, stuffing your feelings. As Christina Robb (2007) puts it: “Corporate success, or getting to the top of the ladder in any hierarchy, can be thought of as a strategy of disconnection.” You have to disconnect, because feeling your feelings is not an option.
Is this normal? Not if you’re a mammal!
I have several clients who came to therapy because they were ‘unhappy at work’. They’re deeply depressed, their self esteem is at an all-time low, they can’t focus, they have no motivation. Even the physical environment in which they spend their days is one of sensory deprivation—featureless grey walls and carpet, no redeeming green view out of a window (in some cases no window at all), fluorescent half-spectrum light and recycled air full of electromagnetic interference. One of them, a young lawyer, said, “I think there’s something wrong with me—I just can’t manage a sixty hour week. Is that normal?”
How have we got to a situation where work takes precedence over normal cycles of human activity, and the need for downtime, rest and sleep? Our human physical limits are a non-negotiable part of life!
The US is unique among industrialized nations in not requiring by law that companies give workers vacation time[10]. Millions of US workers get no vacation—or public holidays—at all. Most white collar workers get two weeks vacation a year, if they’re lucky. With several years of seniority, it may increase to three. The really fortunate might get four. But sick time may come out of that—something unknown in Europe, where workers have a right to paid time off when they are ill.
Blogger Penelope Trunk wrote about having a miscarriage at work. “Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working… This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day.” (Trunk, 2009) Penelope’s point was that we need to be able to talk about these things at work, and yet they are entirely taboo. Because the body is taboo, and feelings are taboo—which makes our humanity taboo.
Studies increasingly confirm what any therapist already instinctively knows: humans need time to rest and play, in order to be healthy. “One study followed 12,338 men for nine years, and found that men who didn't take annual vacations had 32 percent higher risk of death from heart attack”.[11] Thirty two percent is a very significant difference—it’s clear our bodies simply break down under the inhuman scale of the workload imposed by corporate life. What are we doing to ourselves?
Come on, surely you’re exaggerating?
By now, some of you will be objecting to this article, and my apparently negative bias. Perhaps you know someone who has a corporate job and loves it. Perhaps you think it just can’t be as bad as I’m claiming. And its true there are good companies out there, and there are people who love their job. Just as there are good marriages and happy families—but these don’t disprove the fact that domestic violence and child abuse are commoner than we like to think, and need to be taken extremely seriously.
Employee suicides are the tip of an iceberg of malaise: the massive popularity of the Dilbert cartoon strip, which exposes the arbitrary unfairness of corporate life, is a testimony to the dissatisfaction of a wide swathe of the middle class, frustrated by being under-employed, over-stressed, and badly managed. In a recent study reported on the public radio show Marketplace (Marketplace, 2009), over fifty percent of office workers surveyed said, “They had no challenging assignments, they have no opportunities to learn new skills, they have no room to advance, they get no recognition and they have no line of sight to how their jobs fit in with the objectives of the organization.” Can you imagine living like this indefinitely?
It feels risky to me to write this article. Exposing the underbelly of the American dream is a dangerous enterprise, since to accuse the work world of being inhuman is to attack the very engine of American society. Whenever people begin to deconstruct a prevailing socio-political ideology, they run the risk of attack. Feminists are accused of being anti-men, civil rights activists are accused of being racist against whites, anti-colonial resistors are criminalized. To give words to the unspeakable can get the messenger killed—at least professionally. But this has to be said.
It has to be said for the sake of the smart, hard-working, highly-educated people who sit in our offices, weeping about being systematically bullied at work, or about the stultifying tedium of the job they have been randomly re-assigned into following ‘restructuring’, or about the devastating stress of repeated cycles of ‘right-sizing’. If we don’t understand the reality of what they are describing, it could be easy to assume they’re malingering, exaggerating, or have some kind of pre-existing depressive condition.
The reality of trauma
An MFT intern friend who is a refugee from many years in financial consulting joked to me, “When my lovely, empathetic supervisor comes up to me and says, with a kind look in her eye, ‘Hi Sally, how is it going for you here?’ the first thing through my head is, ‘How is she going to f*** me with this question?”
That instant presupposition of danger represents trauma.
Being unhappy in what you do for eight hours a day and fifty weeks a year is not trivial. It’s not just a matter of lifestyle choice. It can and often does end up giving you an identity of unhappiness, failure, impotence and shame. And then there’s the rest of it. What drugs do you use to compensate? Who do you take it out on? What effect does it have on your health? How does it make you treat your kids? What unique talents are you not giving the world? Which dreams are you crushing every day of the life you know you is passing you by?
Look at the statistics on drug and alcohol use, domestic violence, child abuse, road rage, debt, sales of ‘energy boosters’, and prescriptions for anti-depressants and heart disease medications. I believe these figures whisper the hidden truth about the most unacknowledged source of chronic trauma in our society today.
Conclusion
Treating someone who has been traumatized by corporate life is—as you might expect—a matter of listening to the details, accepting the truth, normalizing the feelings, restoring a sense of safety, connection and self-hood. But there is also a political element—this abuse is not a matter of individual persecution; it’s the result of a system, and it’s the system upon which millions of people rely for their livelihood.
I don’t know how to change the system—like many others, in mid-life I opted out, choosing to work as a freelance, and later to study psychotherapy. But I do know is that abuse often hides in plain view, because we cannot imagine the reality of what is before our eyes, and because those to whom it is happening daren’t speak out. The trauma of work in a bad environment needs to be talked about, even shouted about. We need to help that happen. And when it happens, we need to listen with all ears.
In our own professional lives, we too need to be vigilant for power games, hierarchies, politics, inequalities, coercion, dishonesty, cliques, splits and double standards. They’re hard to see, especially when we’re benefiting from them. I don’t have the answers, but I hope I have opened a space in which we can discuss the reality all too often hidden beneath the myth of soul-work.
References
Ehrenreich, Barbara. ‘Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.’ Metropolitan Books, 2001.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. ‘Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.’ Metropolitan Books, 2006.
Greenwald, John. ‘Rank And Fire’, Time Magazine, online June 11, 2001.
Hirigoyen, Marie-France. ‘Le harcèlement moral’. Editions La Découverte et Syros, Paris 1998.
Judt, Tony. ‘Europe vs. America’. New York Times Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 2.· February 10, 2005.
Lewis, Thomas MD, Amini, Fari MD, Lannon, Richard MD. ‘A General Theory of Love’ 2000.
Marketplace, 2009: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/02/pm-limbo-q/
Perkins, John. ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.’ 2004.
Robb, Christina. ‘This Changes Everything: the Relational Revolution in Psychology.’ 2007.
Sirota, David Mischkind, Louis A. and Meltzer, Michael Irwin. ‘Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation’. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge for Business Leaders. 2006. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5289.html
Trunk, Penelope. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/09/24/miscarriage-is-a-workplace-event/
[1] The Guardian newspaper, UK. October 5, 2009.
[2] BBC News online, 7 November 2007.
[3] See the website of the Workplace Bullying Institute, at http://www.workplacebullying.org
[4] Interestingly, when I Googled “employees evaluate manager” to see if I could find counter-proof to this assertion, there was only one entry advising managers to consider asking their teams for feedback. Every other entry defaulted to managers assessing employees.
[5] Human Resource Executive Online. http://www.hrexecutive.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=15708660
[6] According to a study from the University of Iowa, reported in The Epoch Times, online, Feb 28. 2010.
[7] http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/economy.aspx
[8] As Freud did, when he chose not to accept his clients’ accounts of sexual abuse as real—because it was too enormous for him to contemplate.
[9] Though as Barbara Ehrenreich (date) suggests, the higher you go, and the higher your salary, the more at risk you are for the next round of layoffs. So even if you’re doing well in a corporation, you’re not safe, and after you’ve been laid off once, you know it—and then the anxiety never leaves.
[10] By contrast, a statute of the European Union requires that all workers have at least four weeks of paid leave per year, but most countries give more. France gives the most vacation, and has a statutory 35 hour week. And yet French workers are reportedly more productive than those in the US[10].
[11] Home News Tribune, September 12, 2009, featured on www.allbusiness.com.
Many therapists have never worked in a corporation, but many of our clients grapple daily with the difficult demands of corporate life. Having spent seventeen years working in industry, I decided to write an article for therapists, explaining some of the issues at stake.
I can’t think of a better metaphor for corporate life than ‘competitive ranking’—the system used to evaluate employees annually, and allocate pay-rises. Sounds anodyne, doesn’t it? Even as though it might reward people fairly, according to relative performance. But consider that if there are ten of you on a team, all working together, helping each other out and putting in the same time and effort, you will nevertheless, at the end of the year, be ranked 1 to 10. Only the top two or three will get pay rises. The bottom few may lose pay, be disciplined, or get sacked. What does that do to your trust in your colleagues, or your willingness to help them? Can you afford to like these people? Can you afford to be real around them? (Greenwald, 2001)
Who on earth would institute a system like this? Good question. A psychology professor once told me he was convinced the executive ranks of big corporations are over-stocked with sociopaths. Today’s DSM calls it Antisocial Personality Disorder. Think about Enron, or Union Carbide (Bhopal), or even the present financial crisis coupled with the banking bonus scandals. Then look at the diagnostic criteria for APD: failure to respect the law, reckless disregard for others, failure to honor obligations, repeated lying, lack of remorse… The criteria seem to be an alarmingly accurate match to what we read every day in the business news.
So we have to ask ourselves: what does it do to an organization to be led by people who meet the criteria for APD? Who will they promote? What qualities will be prized? Who will be selected for in the evolutionary system of the company? It won’t be the emotionally healthy.
Among the traits listed in the DSM for Narcissistic Personality Disorder also, many are adaptive—or even necessary—for success in business. It’s hard to get ahead in such a ruthlessly a competitive environment if you can’t cultivate a sense of self-importance, specialness and entitlement. But along with these traits, come the others: interpersonal exploitation, lack of empathy, and arrogance.
Systemic abuse
Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. Just as I was finishing the first draft of this article, in October 2009, the Deputy CEO of France Telecom was forced to resign, following 24 employee suicides and more than a dozen attempted suicides in the last eighteen months, explicitly caused—according to suicide notes—by stress at work, ‘management by terror’, and forced job changes[1].
In 2007, the BBC reported that “bullying at work has affected one in four workers and the issue is a "major cause" of stress in the workplace”[2]. When French psychiatrist Marie-France Hirigoyen (1998) published a book on ‘moral harassment’ (adult bullying) it became an instant best-seller and was translated into 22 languages. When Barbara Ehrenreich published her daring exposés of minimum wage working life (Ehrenreich, 2001), and disillusionment and injustice in the white collar professions (Ehrenreich, 2006), both books became runaway bestsellers. Clearly there is a huge number of people out there not only suffering from work-related unhappiness, but also desperate to have this witnessed.
The worst end of the scale is workplace bullying. The effects of bullying on adults are similar to those on children—fear, humiliation, loss of self esteem, depression, and so on—in short, it’s devastating. But surely healthy adults can draw firm boundaries against bullying? Well, think again.
It may come as a surprise to anyone who has not worked in a corporation, that there is very little recourse for ill-treated employees: bullying is not illegal, although there is an active legislative campaign proceeding in some states[3]. Most companies have no mechanism at all for employees to give feedback on their managers—the evaluation is overwhelmingly top-down[4]. Added to this, “wave after wave of corporate downsizings over the years [has] slashed the number of HR specialists”[5], so that in many companies the Human Resources department—to which an employee might traditionally have gone for help—now consists of an intranet site and a much reduced staff who field urgent issues, manage training, and perform hiring and firing. It’s not surprising that a recent University of Iowa study showed that abusive bosses are very rarely sanctioned, so long as they meet the bottom line.[6].
But you don’t need active bullying for the corporate work environment to be traumatic. Unfortunately, in the last decade, rolling layoffs have become a common feature of professional life. Layoffs are usually announced several weeks or months before they happen. The immediate—and understandable—effect is fear, nervousness, a feeling of being scrutinized and evaluated. Things get put on hold, projects are axed. Everybody waits to see who’ll be saved. Eventually the goodbyes are said, and then the work of those who are gone is inevitably added to the schedules of those who are left. Resentment smolders. Stress levels rise. Performance suffers and people get scared they’ll be next if they can’t cope. Then the next round of layoffs is announced… This goes on over and over again. As a result, a climate of fear and chronic tension is now the status quo for many people[7].
Skewed attachment and the reptile brain
In this context, the normal attachment bonds that people automatically forge with those they are close to, and which we all need in order to feel safe, unstressed and happy, are rendered precarious, if not broken altogether. Christina Robb writes, “the boss may act relational in order to get some of the zest, will to action, knowledge, self-esteem and solidarity that come from good relationships or to benefit from an underling’s relational skills, but without any real or lasting mutuality. These are vampirish relationships…” (Robb, 2007) Such relationships leave people feeling empty, and wondering what is wrong with them to be feeling so drained.
Some would say the world of work is no place to be seeking attachment anyway. But normally constituted humans cannot help but form limbic bonds. The danger is in the fact that “companies do not have emotional impulses, and human beings do…Corporate malfeasance shocks many, but corporations operate outside attachment as surely as armies do. Misdeeds—even savagery—are inevitable.” (Lewis et al, 2000)
But is that really true? Or rather, does it have to be? Some companies do choose a more empathetic mission, but sadly that mission often ends at the signing on the IPO, when they lose their autonomy to the insatiable demands of the stock market. For appeals to emotion, feelings, honesty and ethics have very little power against the imperative of profit. Many would argue that we cannot afford them, in our globalized capitalist system, dragged along as it is by the exigencies of the stock exchange, with no-one actually accountable for the conditions of ‘the market’.
“This is no place for sissies”, they would say, “you need to be tough to survive.” But what kind of a belief system is that? What kind of world does it create? Those who can thrive in such an environment are those who can live unencumbered by the limbic burdens of empathy, conscience, and remorse. And as long as we let them rule, any appeal for emotional responsibility can easily be made to sound inappropriate, or immature. This is one reason why the sociopaths and the narcissists rise—the system has, at least up till now, selected for them.
This is hard to see, and hard to talk about, because it’s an intrinsic part of abuse that it is rendered unsayable, both explicitly by the perpetrator, and implicitly because the horror of it makes us turn away and decide we’re imagining it, or that it must be the victim’s own fault.[8] Just as individual sociopaths and narcissists are notoriously charming, and can fool you—unless you tune into the counter-transference to feel the cold hardness underneath the polished exterior—you have to learn to look past the glossy front presented by corporations. And that’s not easy to do.
The myth of work and the American dream
While I was writing this article, and researching references, I came across numerous pseudo-psychological articles about “work as play”, or about “work as creativity”, and so on. These are almost inevitably written by people who have never served in the trenches of a corporation. Many large companies have a great reputation for management training and workforce development, and their HR departments and OD consultants may actually believe their own spin.
But courses in good communication, or the Tao of management, or whatever, are just sweet icing on a poisonous cake if the system does not treat its employees well in much more concrete, basic ways. You have to look at the small print. Beware of companies that vaunt their “human capital” while refusing benefits and vacation time, that preach teamwork while pitting people against each other in a zero-sum ranking game, that talk about empowering their employees while paying their management up to 475 times what they pay their workers (Judt, 2005), and so on. To believe the myths of HR without taking a closer look is to take the blue pill, and close your eyes to the matrix of overworked, stressed, exhausted people who know that the truth is not that their company loves them.
“The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York).” (Sirota, Mischkind, and Meltzer, 2006)
The persistence of the American dream that work is one of life’s great satisfactions exacerbates the distress of our client’s felt experience of deep dissatisfaction. It leads them to add a layer of shame and self-blame, thinking it really ought to be different, if they only tried harder, or thought more creatively, or motivated themselves to get another job. The dissonance between the shiny messages of good faith and the felt reality on the ground creates a schizophrenogenic clash in which people know something is profoundly wrong, but cannot name what it is, and so consult us for anxiety and depression, or end up with diseases directly caused by chronic stress. Or simply self-medicate themselves through an intolerable life.
Of course, often there are compensations, and they may be considerable. It’s a cage, but it can be a gilded one. It pays for your mortgage, your health insurance, your SUV and the private school your kids are in, so they can grow up and get great, high-paying jobs just like yours.[9] What’s wrong with you that you don’t feel grateful? Leaving seems impossible anyway. Where would you go? So you stay another day, another year, stuffing your feelings. As Christina Robb (2007) puts it: “Corporate success, or getting to the top of the ladder in any hierarchy, can be thought of as a strategy of disconnection.” You have to disconnect, because feeling your feelings is not an option.
Is this normal? Not if you’re a mammal!
I have several clients who came to therapy because they were ‘unhappy at work’. They’re deeply depressed, their self esteem is at an all-time low, they can’t focus, they have no motivation. Even the physical environment in which they spend their days is one of sensory deprivation—featureless grey walls and carpet, no redeeming green view out of a window (in some cases no window at all), fluorescent half-spectrum light and recycled air full of electromagnetic interference. One of them, a young lawyer, said, “I think there’s something wrong with me—I just can’t manage a sixty hour week. Is that normal?”
How have we got to a situation where work takes precedence over normal cycles of human activity, and the need for downtime, rest and sleep? Our human physical limits are a non-negotiable part of life!
The US is unique among industrialized nations in not requiring by law that companies give workers vacation time[10]. Millions of US workers get no vacation—or public holidays—at all. Most white collar workers get two weeks vacation a year, if they’re lucky. With several years of seniority, it may increase to three. The really fortunate might get four. But sick time may come out of that—something unknown in Europe, where workers have a right to paid time off when they are ill.
Blogger Penelope Trunk wrote about having a miscarriage at work. “Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working… This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day.” (Trunk, 2009) Penelope’s point was that we need to be able to talk about these things at work, and yet they are entirely taboo. Because the body is taboo, and feelings are taboo—which makes our humanity taboo.
Studies increasingly confirm what any therapist already instinctively knows: humans need time to rest and play, in order to be healthy. “One study followed 12,338 men for nine years, and found that men who didn't take annual vacations had 32 percent higher risk of death from heart attack”.[11] Thirty two percent is a very significant difference—it’s clear our bodies simply break down under the inhuman scale of the workload imposed by corporate life. What are we doing to ourselves?
Come on, surely you’re exaggerating?
By now, some of you will be objecting to this article, and my apparently negative bias. Perhaps you know someone who has a corporate job and loves it. Perhaps you think it just can’t be as bad as I’m claiming. And its true there are good companies out there, and there are people who love their job. Just as there are good marriages and happy families—but these don’t disprove the fact that domestic violence and child abuse are commoner than we like to think, and need to be taken extremely seriously.
Employee suicides are the tip of an iceberg of malaise: the massive popularity of the Dilbert cartoon strip, which exposes the arbitrary unfairness of corporate life, is a testimony to the dissatisfaction of a wide swathe of the middle class, frustrated by being under-employed, over-stressed, and badly managed. In a recent study reported on the public radio show Marketplace (Marketplace, 2009), over fifty percent of office workers surveyed said, “They had no challenging assignments, they have no opportunities to learn new skills, they have no room to advance, they get no recognition and they have no line of sight to how their jobs fit in with the objectives of the organization.” Can you imagine living like this indefinitely?
It feels risky to me to write this article. Exposing the underbelly of the American dream is a dangerous enterprise, since to accuse the work world of being inhuman is to attack the very engine of American society. Whenever people begin to deconstruct a prevailing socio-political ideology, they run the risk of attack. Feminists are accused of being anti-men, civil rights activists are accused of being racist against whites, anti-colonial resistors are criminalized. To give words to the unspeakable can get the messenger killed—at least professionally. But this has to be said.
It has to be said for the sake of the smart, hard-working, highly-educated people who sit in our offices, weeping about being systematically bullied at work, or about the stultifying tedium of the job they have been randomly re-assigned into following ‘restructuring’, or about the devastating stress of repeated cycles of ‘right-sizing’. If we don’t understand the reality of what they are describing, it could be easy to assume they’re malingering, exaggerating, or have some kind of pre-existing depressive condition.
The reality of trauma
An MFT intern friend who is a refugee from many years in financial consulting joked to me, “When my lovely, empathetic supervisor comes up to me and says, with a kind look in her eye, ‘Hi Sally, how is it going for you here?’ the first thing through my head is, ‘How is she going to f*** me with this question?”
That instant presupposition of danger represents trauma.
Being unhappy in what you do for eight hours a day and fifty weeks a year is not trivial. It’s not just a matter of lifestyle choice. It can and often does end up giving you an identity of unhappiness, failure, impotence and shame. And then there’s the rest of it. What drugs do you use to compensate? Who do you take it out on? What effect does it have on your health? How does it make you treat your kids? What unique talents are you not giving the world? Which dreams are you crushing every day of the life you know you is passing you by?
Look at the statistics on drug and alcohol use, domestic violence, child abuse, road rage, debt, sales of ‘energy boosters’, and prescriptions for anti-depressants and heart disease medications. I believe these figures whisper the hidden truth about the most unacknowledged source of chronic trauma in our society today.
Conclusion
Treating someone who has been traumatized by corporate life is—as you might expect—a matter of listening to the details, accepting the truth, normalizing the feelings, restoring a sense of safety, connection and self-hood. But there is also a political element—this abuse is not a matter of individual persecution; it’s the result of a system, and it’s the system upon which millions of people rely for their livelihood.
I don’t know how to change the system—like many others, in mid-life I opted out, choosing to work as a freelance, and later to study psychotherapy. But I do know is that abuse often hides in plain view, because we cannot imagine the reality of what is before our eyes, and because those to whom it is happening daren’t speak out. The trauma of work in a bad environment needs to be talked about, even shouted about. We need to help that happen. And when it happens, we need to listen with all ears.
In our own professional lives, we too need to be vigilant for power games, hierarchies, politics, inequalities, coercion, dishonesty, cliques, splits and double standards. They’re hard to see, especially when we’re benefiting from them. I don’t have the answers, but I hope I have opened a space in which we can discuss the reality all too often hidden beneath the myth of soul-work.
References
Ehrenreich, Barbara. ‘Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.’ Metropolitan Books, 2001.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. ‘Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.’ Metropolitan Books, 2006.
Greenwald, John. ‘Rank And Fire’, Time Magazine, online June 11, 2001.
Hirigoyen, Marie-France. ‘Le harcèlement moral’. Editions La Découverte et Syros, Paris 1998.
Judt, Tony. ‘Europe vs. America’. New York Times Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 2.· February 10, 2005.
Lewis, Thomas MD, Amini, Fari MD, Lannon, Richard MD. ‘A General Theory of Love’ 2000.
Marketplace, 2009: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/02/pm-limbo-q/
Perkins, John. ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.’ 2004.
Robb, Christina. ‘This Changes Everything: the Relational Revolution in Psychology.’ 2007.
Sirota, David Mischkind, Louis A. and Meltzer, Michael Irwin. ‘Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation’. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge for Business Leaders. 2006. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5289.html
Trunk, Penelope. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/09/24/miscarriage-is-a-workplace-event/
[1] The Guardian newspaper, UK. October 5, 2009.
[2] BBC News online, 7 November 2007.
[3] See the website of the Workplace Bullying Institute, at http://www.workplacebullying.org
[4] Interestingly, when I Googled “employees evaluate manager” to see if I could find counter-proof to this assertion, there was only one entry advising managers to consider asking their teams for feedback. Every other entry defaulted to managers assessing employees.
[5] Human Resource Executive Online. http://www.hrexecutive.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=15708660
[6] According to a study from the University of Iowa, reported in The Epoch Times, online, Feb 28. 2010.
[7] http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/economy.aspx
[8] As Freud did, when he chose not to accept his clients’ accounts of sexual abuse as real—because it was too enormous for him to contemplate.
[9] Though as Barbara Ehrenreich (date) suggests, the higher you go, and the higher your salary, the more at risk you are for the next round of layoffs. So even if you’re doing well in a corporation, you’re not safe, and after you’ve been laid off once, you know it—and then the anxiety never leaves.
[10] By contrast, a statute of the European Union requires that all workers have at least four weeks of paid leave per year, but most countries give more. France gives the most vacation, and has a statutory 35 hour week. And yet French workers are reportedly more productive than those in the US[10].
[11] Home News Tribune, September 12, 2009, featured on www.allbusiness.com.