Betrayed by Work

Week after week, psychologist Ilene Philipson listened to her patient, convinced that the woman was hiding something. This young person had come to Philipson because she was deeply depressed, suffering from anxiety attacks and uncontrollable crying bouts. Philipson kept waiting for her patient to reveal some horrible trauma that had plunged her into crisis, but all she talked about -- between sobs -- was her work.

The story she told was unremarkable, a rather typical tale of bad management: As an administrative manager at a small investment company, she had been lavished with praise and perks -- until, that is, she asked for a raise. Then her bosses turned against her. She wept as she told Philipson how she had been stripped of her privileges, how she no longer received invitations to client dinners, how she was no longer trusted to do million-dollar trades for clients. "She was reacting as if she were facing some catastrophe," Philipson says.

This doesn't make sense, she thought to herself. Her patient had no previous psychiatric history. She had successfully coped with many other stresses in her life, including being a child of an alcoholic parent. Why would an otherwise well-adjusted person fall apart because she was no longer favored at work?

Then Philipson began to notice a curious pattern. Four other new patients came to her who were also profoundly depressed about work. Like the first woman, these hard-working, loyal employees had weathered many other crises in their lives. Yet being demoted or passed over for a promotion, or just having an unsympathetic supervisor had devastated them. Utterly at a loss to understand her clients' despair, she decided to start a therapy group for them. "They clearly weren't getting better," says Philipson, 49, a psychologist at Pathmakers Inc., a group practice with roughly 35 clinicians in 12 northern California offices. "I figured that if I brought them together, maybe they could help one another."

In February 1993, Philipson posted a sign in her office and sent flyers to other Pathmakers facilities and nearby offices, announcing a therapy group for those "unable to work because of problems with supervisors or coworkers." She was quickly besieged with new patients -- and found herself in the middle of a phenomenon that she believes is a disturbing by-product of the new economy: people betrayed by their work.

It's one of the defining axioms of the new world of business: Work is personal. These days, more people have higher expectations for work than ever before. People want to bring their whole selves to the job -- all of their skills, all of their interests, all of their values. But even in an era of heightened expectations, warns Philipson, it's possible to expect too much. For the women in her therapy groups -- so far, there have been about 150, all told -- work has turned into their sole passion. Whether they are single or married with children (about 40% of them have spouses or live-in partners), work has become their primary source of self-esteem, recognition, respect -- their only path to interconnectedness.

"What they have done," Philipson explains, "is to transfer all of their unmet emotional needs to the workplace." But "work is not a meritocracy. Your boss is not your friend. Your colleagues are not your family. Workplaces are intensely political environments. If you bring your heart and soul there, you're likely setting yourself up for feeling betrayed."

Dismissing Philipson's patients as weak and insecure may be easy; hearing them cry indignantly about the vice president who took away their parking spot and their title might make you want to scream, "Get over it, already!" But Philipson argues that her patients are merely at the extreme end of the same continuum that most of us are on, a continuum that marks our culture's increasing infatuation with work: "These people are in the same boat with all of the rest of us who work longer hours, take fewer vacations, and wake up and go to sleep thinking about work."

As family, community, and religious ties have broken down, Philipson observes, life outside work has become increasingly empty. Meanwhile, workplaces have become more appealing, with teams replacing rigid hierarchies, casual dress supplanting corporate power suits, and employers offering rank-and-file workers previously unimaginable opportunities to make an impact. As a result, continues Philipson, more of us are looking to our jobs to satisfy basic emotional needs that, in another era, would have been met by family, religion, and community life.

Don't misunderstand the argument. Philipson is not suggesting that it is unhealthy for a job to make you feel valued and part of a community. The problem occurs when "work is the only place where those needs are met. Your identity shouldn't depend on one relationship. You need many anchors for affirmation."