The mistreatment trap

Why do we put up with crappy work relationships?

Photo by Fernando Jorge on Unsplash

I often hear from patients about relationships at home or work that involve their mistreatment or abuse, but that they cannot for some reason exit.

I’m not addressing family here because we can’t divorce or “quit” our families of origin; we can cut off contact, a complicated and difficult decision I’ll revisit later.

I start with a work scenario since it’s a bit easier to discuss, though again nothing is simple because, as always, the unconscious never sleeps.

That said, why do bright, capable people tolerate being repeatedly crapped on at work?

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit, such as “velvet handcuffs”: a good salary with solid healthcare benefits, neither of which is insignificant.

Or perhaps one’s job calls for distinctive or unique skills, with similar positions few and far between. Perhaps the position comes after hard work, diligent toil.

There is also the situation where we believe in the company , its mission or product, and put up with a bad apple who will hopefully be promoted or fired before long (too long, in most cases.)

None of this however points to the problem, where psychotherapy is concerned. What I’m talking about is both a visceral pull towards and away from the boss in question, like flipping magnets that attract and repel simultaneously. The question cuts through rationality with visceral rumination: why can’t I just leave?

Most patients could, with diligence, find another job if they looked long enough, even with a pay cut made up via bonuses or raises, with far lower stress in the erstwhile. (I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to be in this position.)

For the purposes of this column, the challenge here is a symbolic one, the losses inherent in “giving up,” and all that phrase implies.

As with any enmeshed relationship, there are times when two people seem stuck together, for indiscernible reasons. We have all had a boss like this, where we yearn for the validation and recognition we semi-suspect will, like Godot, never arrive.

But, like Beckett’s tramps, we decide to keep waiting: a position we love and hate, and somehow tolerate. An answer will be coming soon, perhaps tomorrow. Soon the therapist too is drawn into the dance.

Consider “Jake,” a patient I saw many years ago. Jake was forty-something, hard-working and bright, raised by immigrants, one European and one South American. He was raised until his teens in Scandinavia, in several locales, and was generally more reserved than American colleagues. He tended to choose his words carefully, thoughtfully, and showed great empathy.

Jake’s boss Brad, originally from New York, was pretty much the opposite: brash, often narcissistic, and much harder on those outside his inner circle of loyalists.

Brad was impatient, nagging Jake to finish projects before deadlines, always moving the goal posts. When Jake, almost always punctual, rushed to accommodate the (needless) early deadline, he made errors which his boss pounced on, sometimes publicly. The two developed a mutually tense, distrusting relationship; Jake silently resisted, reluctant to ask Brad to ease up.

This was at a successful, fast-growing small business. The more it grew, the more Brad, the company co-founder, demanded fealty and control. To challenge Brad was to second guess the emperor, whose ideas were often nakedly self-serving.

Jake felt stifled. Whenever he challenged Brad, even mildly, or suggested a more thoughtful solution to a problem—one that would not necessitate cleanup—Brad bit back, often on Slack or in meetings.

Brad’s insecure prickliness, together with his impulsive Twitter posts, often necessitated walk-backs and clean-up by Jake and others, one reason Brad’s former partner and co-founder had left long before.

This took a toll on Jake, who had talent, quiet charisma, and a solid resumé. He was admired by colleagues and even Brad, on rare occasion. Why didn’t he leave?

Part of the problem is that the problem itself was unclear. He could not state what the problem was, which made him feel foolish, and me in turn, since part of my job is to help patients articulate emotional conflicts; I found myself fumbling for articulation.

Jake for instance wondered if he were too meek in not challenging Brad—or too antagonistic, instead of more consistently “playing ball.” Stop rocking the boat, accept Brad’s crumbs? But Jake resented not having much of a choice, given the tightness of his boss’s leash. Most of all, Jake felt responsible for managing the entire relationship.

This led to a circular dance wherein Jake became anxious around Brad, interpreted by the latter as aloofness , which reinforced Brad’s distrust of Jake, who criticized himself for fostering distrust with Brad, whom he increasingly distrusted, leading to the possible endangerment of a job he really wanted…usually.

Whew.

There was also sociocultural difference regarding Jake’s biracial background, Euro-Caucasian and Hispanic. Brad was not overtly racist (this was pre-George Floyd), nor was he inclusive. Many of his comments would not fly today.

Jake meantime feared he himself was too sensitive, wished he could let it all roll off his back. He had much difficulty articulating his struggle, and I seemed not to be helping.

As with so many men, there was shame in even possibly being seen as weak, with such a macho boss—and father, I learned, who often told his family to suck it up, rather than offer counsel of comfort. (Privately, I related to this.)

Jake’s father was something of a workaholic, impulsive and critical of others, his mother often depressive, stating she had abandoned a potential good life at home for a lonely one in Northern Europe. Jake became a surrogate companion to her, given the frequency of his father’s absences.

I was sure the brass tacks of the matter, psychologically put, related to his father, who sounded insecurely brittle and Brad-like: a dad Jake wanted to both please and defy, every child’s dilemma. Pleasing felt safe, defying felt freeing. A little defiance is good for the soul—but even a mild dose harmed or offended his parents; there was no middle ground to speak of, both environments denied the gray, leaving Jake on his own to navigate the extremes.

These extremes became an unspoken zone of conflicting feelings, so hard to navigate because they remained unseen and never named, and thus enacted or behaviorally repeated. This was devaluing for Jake because it eluded the (invisible) heart of the matter. Jake continued to uphold this cycle in subtly intellectualizing his relationships, including ours.

I too became caught up in cul-de-sacs of the either/or, whether Jake should or should not stand up to Brad, and if so how and when and in what tone; there was not enough strategizing in the world to guarantee Jake’s good standing. Much of this in the end was a red herring.

Jake had toiled to advance himself, yearned to feel safe and free enough to expand his skills—at the bottom of all this, however, was a longing for a safely paternal environment—denied repeatedly, presently rooted, via another fraught fatherly relationship that contested Jake’s competence.

Given all that, Jake was resistant to such ideas. He gave lip service to them, but by the next session was back to wondering what, exactly, to do or say around Brad.

I should add that English was neither parents’ native tongue, two intellectuals who rarely if at all discussed feelings or internal life, except as an obstacle to happiness. In upholding this perspective, Jake became protective of his protectors, like many neglected kids, his safety contingent on continued silence.

Thus he remained torn, divided, with no safe place to land.

I fell into the trap of thinking “all we needed were the right words to understand this,” for me to explain it to him, when really it was a void of absence we were circling and unable to name. I eventually grew frustrated, lacking the words to describe to myself what was happening.

Jake resisted seeing Brad as a repetition of paternal trauma. Why? What did I need to say to get through? And why was I increasingly feeling like chopped liver? Perhaps he was upholding the old system, protecting the old ways out of deep familiarity; how could I get this across? (These questions were a clue.)

One day Jake appeared in my office looking pale, almost disheveled. He hadn’t slept, and was clearly agitated. He was likely burnt out, needed a break—yet wary of asking for time off, given how busy things were. Dude c’mon, I thought.

I told Jake that downtime sounded like good self-care; he said “self care” was frowned upon in his testosterone-fueled job.

We went round and round on what to say to Brad about taking time off, any suggestion I made followed by Jake’s commenting, “well the problem with that is…” For instance, Jake could if necessary be available in emergencies. “But I don’t want to be,” he said. To which I said, “Well maybe then you’ll shut off your phone.” “But what if they need me,” was the answer.

“Well maybe,” I finally blurted off-the-cuff, “you could tell Brad to fuck right off.”

“Seriously?” said Jake, laughing. “‘Fuck Brad’?”

“Yeah,” I said, “that.”

Jake smiled ruefully. “Is that allowed?”

“It is in here.”

“Maybe a break is a good idea.” He hesitated. “But if I slack off now…”

I said, “There it is again. It’s like you’re not allowed to need something, to show weakness. But the best way to stand up a bully is to not care. Hell, maybe he’ll miss you.”

Jake sat there wrestling with it.

“What’s he gonna do,” I said, “act like a jerk?”

“Touché,” he said.

I realized in that moment that Jake had never felt a strong male energy that was protective rather than attacking, always something to mollify rather than enlist.

“Also,” I added, “no offense…but you look like hell.”

He sighed with relief, and stared at the ceiling. “Doctor’s orders, I guess” he said.

“I’m happy to give you a note,” I said. He laughed.

Why had I held back?

Sometimes therapists fall into the trap of thinking all patients are capable of deeper self-reflection or “getting in touch” with feelings, and being able to state them, given enough encouragement or facilitating; this is true for some but not all . In a way I was waiting for Jake to “get it” like Jake awaiting recognition from Brad, both of us waiting for Godot.

Some find direct communication akin to a foreign tongue; it has to be modeled. I had feared, because our backgrounds were similar in many ways, that being more direct would rock the boat with Jake, that he’d feel pressured or shamed if I pressed him to focus on himself. In other words Brad became an almost hypnotic paternal presence for both of us.

This led me to overlook the confused relational dance happening before me.

For instance, there was a wistfulness in Jake’s gradually relinquishing responsibility for Brad’s reactions, something resembling sadness. Perhaps because he had always had to marshall forward on his own.

There was a sadness here I had steered clear of—the tragic absence of a loving father, which nothing can fully heal, no matter how caring the therapeutic ambience. We cannot save our patients from the tragedies that have brought them to our offices. The best caring, in fact, illuminates such wounds and facilitates their grieving.

This ties back to the original question. It was hard for Jake to leave, and for us to discuss leaving, because for him to walk away would be another paternal abandonment, devastatingly doubled—an abandonment of hope with Brad which amplified the initial paternal lack felt but never acknowledged, in fact actively denied, devaluing its impact even now.

It was important I see this, lest I contribute to his painful invisibility.

As bright as Jake was, he remained a stranger to… not just feeling, but its articulation, the ability to find it in the shapes and utterances of language. “Let’s just find the right words,” was the fallacy I too had bought into.

There are complicated reasons for this I’ll explore in future columns; one contributor is that our theories are themselves in words, persuading us at times that words are always the answer.

For now, Jake could neither go nor stay, in other words fully be there, in his disappointment and disgust, because his own development derailment created an unknowable muzzling that curtailed his potential.

In such a way, unseen or unspoken emotional abandonment leaves a void which is itself hard to speak to, thus dangerous or forbidden to acknowledge. After a while, one becomes simply used to the numbing absence.

But this yearning for a stable center, borne of being seen, can over time be found in the therapy setting when the “main suspect” goes missing: the patient’s neglect or devaluing, the systemic fear of acknowledging fear or suffering. Often his manifests as the therapist themselves feeling somewhat irrelevant, or like means to some concretized end.

Such intensity can provoke therapists’ anxieties, contributing to our own missteps if we are wary of rocking the systemic boat(s), kowtowing to subjective ghosts of our own.

To acknowledge such struggle, alongside our persistence to be helpful and work it through, an embodied hope and commitment, disconfirms patients’ expectations of disappointing repetition, the enforcement of that sneaky, silent monologue which insists that in the end everything truly is their fault.