Betrayed by Work

Philipson frequently compares her patients to the typical housewife of the 1950s whose existence centered on her husband -- and who then was devastated when her husband left her for another woman. "If 100% of your identity is rooted in work, and work turns on you, what are you left with?" she asks. "My patients often say, 'I don't know who I am anymore.' " One woman told her simply, "Work was my life. So when I left my job, I felt that my life was over."

Philipson's patients are all ordinary women with ordinary jobs: They're police officers, bankers, journalists, office managers, and secretaries. Her caseload largely reflects the HMO and managed-care plans that her office accepts as third-party payers and the fact that women are more likely to seek therapy than men are. But her patients aren't IPO millionaires or Fortune 500 CEOs, she says, which shows just how pervasive this phenomenon is. "You might expect CEOs to make their work their lives; they have status, power, and money. But a lot of my patients are in pink-collar jobs. You might think that for them, a job would be just a job. And yet the loss they've experienced feels just as great to them."

Philipson's patients are not the only people who feel that way. According to a recent study by professors Donald Gibson and Sigal Barsade of the Yale School of Management, becoming emotionally dependent on work is a remarkably common, if hidden, phenomenon. In a telephone survey of 1,000 working men and women, 24% -- nearly one out of four -- were "chronically" angry at work, report Gibson and Barsade. The most common reason for their anger, they found, was that they sensed that their employers "violated basic promises" and didn't fulfill "the expected psychological contract with their workers." But the problem remains mostly "underground," the authors say, because people tend not to express their anger openly. Instead, they simply lose interest in their work and become lethargic and uncooperative.

Benjamin Hunnicutt, an historian and professor at the University of Iowa at Iowa City who specializes in the history of work, worries that work is fast replacing religion in providing meaning in people's lives. "Work has become how we define ourselves," he says. "It is now answering the traditional religious questions: Who am I? How do I find meaning and purpose? Work is no longer just about economics; it's about identity."

Of course, that's exactly what makes the new world of work so inspiring. It's also what makes it so treacherous. How do you give your all to work, without making it become the center of your existence? How much is too much to expect from your job? In an age when work is undeniably personal, how do you know when you are taking your work too personally?

To provide some insight into that dilemma, Philipson invited some of her current and former patients to share their stories with Fast Company. Sitting in a circle in Philipson's sparsely decorated office on a cool evening in May, the women quickly lose their self-consciousness, and the gathering begins to sound like any other group session, except this time it runs for more than three hours.

Though they have told their stories many times before, each woman recounts her betrayals in obsessive detail -- quoting dates and conversations verbatim -- stopping only when Philipson gently moves the discussion to the next woman. Usually, Philipson tightly controls the structure of her sessions, trying to limit each group member to just two minutes to tell her story to a newcomer. "There is often a propensity among many of them to go on and on," she explains later. Having had their pain belittled by friends, family, colleagues, and even some doctors, these women crave assurance that this wasn't their fault, that what they're feeling is real.

Consider these stories from Philipson's patients, then, as a series of cautionary tales. Having stepped over the line between what they do and who they are, these women are learning to pull themselves back -- and where to draw the line in the future.

We Are (Not) Family

A small tear is forming in Yolanda Perry-Pastor's eye as the 34-year-old tells how the company she loved drove her to physical and mental collapse. A high-school graduate and mother of three who worked her way up to customer-service manager at one of California's largest corporate plant and shrubbery suppliers, Perry-Pastor loved her work for six years, until the layoffs began and her work life began to unravel.

It all started when the staff in Perry-Pastor's office was cut from 13 to 4, forcing her to take on personnel, payroll, and accounting responsibilities. Soon she felt overwhelmed. Emails weren't being answered; mistakes were being made. "I kept asking for help," she says. "But my boss just said, 'Hang in there. We're all working hard.'"