Your Job Might Not Be the Problem

You got a two line email from your manager. No greeting, no punctuation, just “can we talk later.”

And your whole day is over.

You reread it. You check their calendar. You go back through last week looking for the thing you did. You draft a reply, delete it, draft it again. By lunch you have constructed an entire narrative in which you are being managed out, and you have not eaten, and none of it has happened.

Here is the question worth sitting with. Is that email really what did this to you?

Work is where the old story gets retold

Most of us learned how to be a person inside a family. Long before we had language for it, we worked out what we had to do to stay in good standing. Be useful. Be easy. Be impressive. Do not need too much. Read the room before you speak.

Those were not personality traits. They were strategies. They were intelligent, and at the time they worked.

Then you grew up and walked into a building full of people who have power over your income, your schedule and your sense of being good at something. Someone evaluates you. Someone decides what you deserve. Someone can be pleased with you or disappointed in you, and you can feel the difference in your body before you can name it.

Of course the old strategies came with you. Where else would they go.

This is not a flaw in you and it is not a failure of professionalism. It is what the psychologist Alexandra Solomon calls relational self-awareness, the work of noticing that we bring our whole relational history into every room we enter, including the ones with a badge reader on the door.

The tell is the size of the reaction

You do not need to excavate your childhood to work with this. There is a much simpler signal, and you already have access to it. Notice when the reaction is bigger than the event.

A piece of feedback that was mildly critical and left you underwater for three days. A colleague who did not reply and you were certain they were angry. A win you could not enjoy for more than about eleven minutes. A meeting that ended fine and you replayed it at 2am anyway.

The size of the feeling is not proportional to the size of the thing. Which means the feeling is not really about the thing. That gap is the whole signal. When your response to something at work is out of scale with what actually occurred, something older just got touched.

Six signs it might not be about work

Your boss stops being a person and becomes a weather system. You are not managing a relationship with a colleague, you are monitoring a mood. You know their footsteps. You can tell what kind of day it will be from how they say good morning. That is a skill you learned somewhere else.

Feedback lands as a verdict on you, not on the work. Someone says the deck needs restructuring and you hear that you are not good at your job, and underneath that, something quieter about not being good. There is no gap between the critique and your worth.

You cannot ask for things. A day off. A clarification. Credit for something you did. Asking feels enormous and faintly dangerous, so you go without instead, and then you feel resentful about going without.

One person’s approval matters more than everyone else’s. There is usually one. You could get warmth from four colleagues and it would not touch the fact that this one person seemed short with you on Tuesday.

You are the one who absorbs. You take the extra work. You smooth the tension. You notice who is upset and you fix it before anyone asks. And you are quietly exhausted by a job description nobody wrote down.

Sunday is not a day. It is a countdown. The dread arrives before anything bad has happened, which is a fairly good clue that you are bracing for something you have already lived through.

If two or three of those landed, that is worth paying attention to. It does not mean your workplace is fine and you are the problem. Sometimes the job really is the problem. But if you have felt this way in three different jobs with three different managers, the common factor is worth a look.

What to do in the moment

The instinct is to fix the whole thing. Do not. These are smaller than you think, and that is the point.

1. Name the age. When you feel the flood coming, ask yourself quietly, how old do I feel right now. Most people get an answer immediately, and it is rarely the age they are. That question does not solve anything, but it puts a small amount of daylight between you and the reaction, and daylight is what you need to make a different choice.
2. Check the evidence out loud. “What I heard was that this needs to be redone. Did you mean the whole thing or the second section.” You are not being difficult. You are asking reality to confirm or deny the story, before you spend three days living inside it.
3. Do not send from the flood. If your chest is tight, the message can wait an hour. Nothing at your job is as urgent as it feels at the moment your nervous system decides it is.
4. Say the smaller true thing. Not “I feel undervalued and have for months.” Try “I want to make sure I understood that.” Small is not weak. Small is what you can actually do while your heart rate is up.

The part I want you to hear

That kid who learned to read the room, to over deliver, to never be a burden, is not something to get rid of.

They kept you safe. They are also the reason you notice things other people miss, and the reason you are good at your job, and the reason you are still here. The goal was never to evict them. It is to stop letting them run the meeting.

You are allowed to be someone who is very good at their work and also someone who flinches at a certain tone of voice. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

And when you find yourself at 2am replaying a conversation that everyone else forgot by 5pm, you can put a hand on it and say, not unkindly, I know. That was scary once. It is not that now.

If your job has started costing you more than it should, and you are beginning to suspect it is not entirely about the job, that is exactly the thing therapy is good at. Our therapists in Chicago work this way, in person and online, and a first conversation is free.