Is It Work Or Is It Me?

Many of my clients come to me because of work-related stress. The stress is real and the troubles they face are certainly coming at them from the outside world.?

But so often, I find that the cause of work-induced stress is something my clients didn’t expect: old emotional wounds, unresolved trauma and childhood beliefs.

I’ll combine several clients into one fictional woman, who we’ll call Cathy, to show you how this plays out.?

Cathy came to me because she fell apart at work, and by all appearances, it was work stress that led to her breakdown. However, we soon discovered that the real cause went much, much deeper.

Is Your Work Struggle Really About Your Job — Or Something Deeper?

As is the case with most of my clients, Cathy holds a respected position at a high-powered company where she must meet tough professional demands. She is highly intelligent and she worked very hard to put herself in a position where she would experience stress like this. She enjoyed the financial rewards and the accolades she got from executives.?

So then, why did she find herself sobbing uncontrollably one day, unable to deal with even the simplest of her responsibilities?

What we discovered is that her goals, her achievements, were all done for her parents – in particular, she wanted to fulfill her mother’s unfulfilled dreams. Many of us do this, both consciously and unconsciously. We want to fulfill our parent’s dreams, and their dream becomes our own dream. If our dream is to please the parent, then the career choices are secondary, as they serve the primary goal.?

Many times when a person’s goal is to achieve for the sake of others, they end up in a place they don’t want to be. They achieve for someone else. Their outside world is based on what they saw growing up

Cathy already understood how childhood beliefs affect us all in adulthood. She strongly believed that her career was the result of her desire to please her mother. She was ready to figure out how that dynamic had contributed to her breakdown.

However, what emerged in therapy was a completely different dynamic.?

She had lost her father a few years before when he passed away suddenly. She thought she had resolved her grief. But grief can sneak up on us in ways we don’t expect. Cathy hadn’t come to therapy to talk about her father’s death. She had pushed it down, trying to move on as society often expects us to.?

What Cathy truly missed was her father’s voice—his support, his wisdom. It wasn’t until she sat down and spoke about her struggles with work that she connected the dots back to the deep loss she had not truly processed. The voice she longed to hear wasn’t guiding her, and that absence came to a crisis point during some routine decision-making process at work, when she completely lost her composure..

The Magic of Discovering Personal Truth

Making connections like this can be a pivotal moment in therapy. Nothing about our lives came about randomly. Our circumstances arise from our deepest desires. Most of the time, we remain unaware of our true desires until they erupt in some debilitating way that forces us to identify them.?

Cathy’s breakdown wasn’t just from work stress. It resulted from using all her energy to keep her unresolved grief buried under a story about living her mother's dream. She chose to elevate a typical cliche about her mother to the level of a life-forming explanation so she could avoid confronting just how deeply the loss of her father had altered her world.?

Upon realizing that the mother story was only partially relevant, and that her grief truly precipitated her breakdown, her path forward opened brightly.

The beautiful thing about coming to a realization like that is the positive impact it has on our ability to perform at work while caring for ourselves at the same time.?

Of course, if something is driving us insane on the job, it might be because of what is happening on the job. There are highly stressful, unjust, random, and hurtful situations in any work environment. But if the intensity of our reaction seems out of proportion – to us personally, or to those around us – there might be something deeper within that fuels this reaction.?

Cathy, our fictional amalgam, had a complete breakdown over something that those around her did not find nearly as distressing as she did. Her disconnect was enormous and demanded attention.?

For some of us, the disconnect can be a lot more mild. But the wisdom gained from pursuing this line of thought can be just as profound, just as rewarding, and just as freeing.?

Of course, Cathy is still working through her grief, and she will always feel it to some degree. But it no longer affects her work. Now that she has clarity on all of this, she can identify work problems as work problems, handling them appropriately, and she can identify grief as grief, so she can find or make the space she needs to experience it in a full, healthy manner.

In my experience, many people find that their troubles at work aren’t about the job. The job arose around them because they needed to replay dynamics they experienced as children. They find themselves in work situations that somehow trigger or mimic childhood situations that have a profound impact on their whole lives.?

It's fascinating how we will attract these sorts of situations to ourselves, repeatedly, until we figure out whatever lesson we need to learn from them.?

Finding the Balance Between Past and Present

If you feel frustrated at your job, ask yourself: Is this really about work, or is it about something else??

Be willing to go deeper than pop psychology. The thing that keeps triggering you may very well lead you to a liberating personal insight, if you think it through properly and persistently.

That insight, in turn, may free you in ways you didn’t expect. It may empower you in ways you didn’t expect. The freedom and power may help you a great deal, both personally and professionally.?

So, rather than seethe with anger or lash out in frustration, first ask yourself if the intensity of your reaction is really equal to the situation. If there’s a disconnect, there may be something of real use to be discovered by breaking it down and figuring out how this situation recalls something from your life that has impacted you deeply. For Cathy, it was the loss of her father’s voice.

An honest insight like that is what your true self is looking for. The manifestations in your work and in your life indicate what it is that you need to learn. Actually learning it is a whole different endeavor, but that is the “work” that will truly advance you.