Work Stress: An Example to Understand
20 April 2009
Read by 1702 persons
Text: Stress and moral harassment at work are two scourges that the modern organization of work encourages so much that the legislator has taken hold of it without however managing to stem the epidemic. The following article opens a series of articles on the subject and aims to describe as faithfully as possible what the therapist can encounter in this matter. It is also an opportunity to present what can be pragmatically implemented to respond to it.
Odile arrives at my office with a note from her general practitioner. She "suffers from a reactive depressive state due to poor working conditions".
Odile is a little over forty years old and lives alone. She complains that work takes up all the space in her life. When she looks back over the last five years, she has the impression of a great void, as if each day had been the same as the previous one and nothing had changed in five years. She feels strong social pressure blaming her for her immobility.
The pressure at work has become too difficult to bear and she started drinking when she gets home in the evening. She worries about seeing the bottles lining up along the trash can and the week. She doesn't know what to do anymore. The fear of being bored at home where nothing awaits her and where she has nothing to do frightens her. Staying at the office among "unproductive incapables" is unbearable and yet she works well beyond her hours.
Ten days ago she was on vacation and she is starting a week of sick leave. It's shameful. That makes three sick leaves in less than a year. It is true, the first was due to a leg injury, but she thinks rather that it was a warning that her body was sending her. The second was to recover from a form of infection that had largely exhausted her. The last and present sick leave is, for its part, very clearly intended to protect her from her professional context.
Odile realizes that she has reached the point of exploding aggressively on a regular basis. She doesn't recognize herself in these behaviors. She says she is shocked by what she does, whether at work when she gets violently angry, or in her personal life where she feels she is brutally creating a void around her. She collapses in tears and declares that she can no longer find herself.
The organization to which she belongs has sectorized its recovery. For her part, she is responsible for a portfolio consisting of many clients with low individual volume. For five years, she has been leading a team of three people on this subject. Other colleagues have few clients but with high individual turnover. With few clients to deal with, they manage to have the means to carry out the collections they are in charge of. Moreover, with high-billing clients, they obtain the support of the organization's leading figures to negotiate cash inflows in case of problems.
None of that for Odile: her clients individually represent only a small stake in the eyes of senior management and she must do everything alone, by force of will with her team. She feels left behind. She often repeats that she has to fight "with her penis and her knife", she who has neither. She feels abandoned. In addition, the new management system is being commissioned and is not satisfactory.
For the implementation of this new system, a project team has been appointed with a project manager at its head. At the moment, someone is acting as project manager. He has not been officially appointed but occupies this space with the complicity of the bodies responsible for managing the implementation of this new management tool. Meetings are held to advance the project. The description of the specifications is far behind. The moment is for "testing": it is up to the users to validate that the modules put into production correspond to what they were intended for.
It's an ungrateful period. Those who use the tool notice the errors, note them and ask for them to be corrected. Those who set up the tool try to understand what is requested by the user while they thought they had strictly followed the specifications. Those who described the functionalities try to understand why what they thought was usable is "broken".
Odile and her team are fully involved and are involved in the testing of this new management system.
In fact, Odile doesn't know how to say no and everything happens as if the organization was unloading the problems of the new management system on her. The resources at her disposal do not allow her to meet the current requirements. She feels guilty about it. She is ashamed of not being able to cope. The requests are often vague, contradictory or even unrealistic. She still tries to find a solution for them. Her solutions are criticized. Often she cannot provide solutions. She feels guilty. She tries anyway. Requests rain down on her shoulders. Her team distances itself from this influx of additional work. She can't take it anymore. She rebels against the incoherent requests made to her in meetings. She always ends up giving in and leaves burdened with extra work despite her anger and complaints. She gets angry and can't take it anymore. She cracks in the face of these "unproductive" people who pass the buck to her. And to top it all off, she learns that she is held responsible for the blockage that prevents the on-time delivery of the new management system. However, she knows that it is false, since she finds herself doing the work of others. She rages. She cracks.
She has considered resigning several times lately. She has taken steps to obtain a sabbatical leave.
It is in this context that she comes to see me. Where to start?
Her doctor is raising the alarm; it's urgent. She is suffering at work and has the impression that people want to harm her. She even says she is harassed by the acting project manager.
For my part, I am not on the spot to see what she is experiencing, and even if I did see it, I would be quite unable to know how she experiences it from the inside. I therefore invite her, on the one hand, to announce that she is not well and that if it starts again as before her sick leave, she will have to stop again, and on the other hand, to report her suffering to the occupational physician; two things she has never dared to do until now. Of course, since there is suspicion of harassment, I ask her to contact a lawyer.
This first intervention aims to give her space: the more she is directly immersed in her professional context, the more she takes on additional work and ends up getting carried away in meetings. Logically, if she manages to loosen the constraint, she should be less tempted to say yes and less likely to lose her temper. If I achieve this, then she will experience fewer situations she suffers and her sense of guilt will be less fueled. The request for the lawyer has a double objective: if it is indeed harassment, it is necessary to open a legal file, otherwise and in any case, she understands that this option exists and feels stronger at this idea, therefore more able to cope. Potentially the company supports her, she therefore has allies, she is no longer alone. As a result, she comes out of her isolation.
Then, I understand that this woman is always trying to find a solution even when it is not her responsibility. She has been imbued with "be positive" to the point of no longer seeing the dangers when they arise and falling into traps as if she no longer learned from the situations she goes through. I therefore invite her, just as an exercise, to ask herself the surprising question for her "how could you do to be even worse later?". I remind her of the old principle that to untwist something well, you must first know how to twist it and twist it in every way to feel its dynamics well, and finally, after having understood this dynamic, untwist it. The question "how to aggravate?" corresponds to this first step dedicated to twisting before untwisting. It will be time later to see how to untwist.
The effect of these interventions is the expected one: the pressure at work is released. By looking at what she could do to worsen the situation, she comes to enter the opposite dynamic, that is to say, to finally do what it takes to feel better, which she had not managed to obtain until now.
However, the situation is not the simplest. If manifestly the intervention with the occupational physician and the clear announcement that the project management context has a negative impact on her health have allowed a relaxation of requests, the project team is offended because it loses its "good-for-everything". People ready to invest with competence in the delivery of the project are nowhere to be found. It is then reported to senior management that Odile must re-enter the loop as before. The project comes before everything. Odile is summoned to be told that she must invest like never before for the good of the organization. Fortunately, Odile has understood one of the traps set for her: this time she comes to the meeting with concrete examples showing that the dysfunctions are not her fault and that the request made to her exceeds her management perimeter. She takes the opportunity to have her priorities validated. She leaves with the impression of having experienced a dialogue of the deaf but satisfied: the preparation of the meeting showed her strengths in the situation, and she understood that at the highest level, the notion of priority seemed confused.
The rest of the support will follow this line of conduct: put Odile in a position to look at what is happening concretely, factually and logically.
However, she is still hurt by her aggressiveness. She reveals herself to be very angry with herself, who finds herself in this situation, and with some colleagues and managers who seem to her to be "unproductive smooth talkers" and "hypocrites". She boils.
Anger is there, internal and permanent. Anger carries a message of destruction. That is its role: "get out of the way, do what I want, otherwise I'll hurt you". For those around her, there is no ambiguity: deep down, the emotion is understood in its primary sense. This is, moreover, the original role of emotion: to communicate between living beings. Around Odile, the reaction, however polite it may be, is quite naturally to protect oneself. So they do everything to invalidate, block, disqualify Odile's actions. Rationality no longer plays a role: the original naturalness is at work. Odile feels like a failure. Her anger increases. Around her, people feel threatened. They protect themselves. Impossible to get out of it. Positive and constructive rational discourse no longer works. Odile doesn't understand. People resent her.
I then ask Odile to purge her anger. As often in brief therapy, the request involves the establishment of a ritual with a precise framework. It is a question of reorienting the perception that mobilizes the emotion in a disabling form, towards a more adapted form. As for anger, it is necessary to find a liberating and non-destructive way of expression. In this case, I ask her to write angry letters that she will of course not send to her recipient, but that she will destroy with the greatest possible emphasis or rage.
The accomplishment of these tasks - announcing her situation instead of hiding it, expressing her anger instead of trying to contain it, observing what can aggravate instead of always trying to find a solution - within the precise framework that is adapted to Odile's context is effective. From the fourth session, that is to say a month and a half after the beginning of the support, Odile has regained the initiative over her life but it remains fragile.
Odile must indeed deal with two traps that life sets for her: the love of work well done, and social ascension. In the first case, she risks wanting to do everything perfectly again even if it is not within her area of responsibility, because it is necessary to find a solution, especially since no one seems to worry about it. In the other case, succeeding in her position means potentially accessing new responsibilities and exceeding the level that seems acceptable to her parents.
Indeed, the investigation shows that behind the social pressure weighing on her, there are a number of parental injunctions with which she can no longer cope. The "succeed my daughter!" that she heard from her parents was accompanied by particular attention for her brother and a form of nonchalance towards herself and her sister. In short, "get married and have children, that's all we expect from you", seemed to be the true expectation of her parents towards her. Odile realizes today that she has succeeded professionally and finds herself at odds with the parental message; she feels guilty, she did not obey... and it gnaws at her.
Concretely, everything happens like this. On the one hand, Odile seeks to always do her work well, whatever the moment and the nature of this work, and wants it to be irreproachable. On the other hand, she tries to reason herself to justify that she was right to make the life choice she has made and tries to overcome the deeply ingrained parental messages by trying not to think about her childhood.
By observing in detail what happens when she is doing badly, two underlying movements emerge: seeking to do good work and seeking to obscure the parental request. It is impossible to try to stop or alter them head-on; it is necessary to compose with them. However, leaving them as they are means preparing for a relapse.
Two movements will therefore be requested of her. The first consists of giving a framework to her perfectionism. I therefore asked Odile not to change anything she does but to devote one hour of clock time per day, and one hour only, to a frenzy of perfect work, as intense as possible, with the highest possible level of quality, and the best possible results. The second is to think every day, at a time that seems good to her, about memories she has with her parents to erect them into framed pictures and thus fill a mental gallery that she has the ability to open, visit and close.
The first movement alters the perfectionist dynamic in three aspects while respecting it: it limits it in time, it makes it voluntary and it amplifies it. The expected result is there: Odile proved unable to keep this hour regularly and declares to have quickly distanced herself from this vital necessity to do everything perfectly to the point of taking charge of the work of others. She incidentally brings up an anecdote of healthy delegation on her part. I will have to emphasize it so that she becomes aware of it. It is also at this moment that she proudly declares having resumed swimming and having organized herself to finish a painted canvas that she had abandoned a long time ago.
The second movement alters the effect of the parental injunctions with which she finds herself at odds. By creating her gallery of memories, the good ones on one side, the bad ones on the other, instead of fleeing the relationship with her parents, she is led to immerse herself in it. In the same way as before, the way of immersing herself in the relationship with her parents is limited in time, voluntary, and has a particular intensity. The result is also there: Odile calms down, relativizes what she has experienced with children's eyes and puts it back in its place in the past. Pernicious injunctions cease to gnaw at her to regain a place and meaning in her life.
It is then that, to her great surprise, appeased and having regained control over her life despite an unchanged context, Odile is offered a transfer to a sector that has attracted her for a long time. This is a position as an expert, without team responsibility, in which she projects herself both with satisfaction and with realism: it will be an opportunity for her to rebuild herself and establish a new relational network. It will also be an opportunity to take care of her personal life.
The rest consisted in accompanying her in the realization of her ambitions, the time she gets used to living with her new landmarks.
Paul-Henri Pion
Posted on April 20, 2009
mieux-etre.org
Odile arrives at my office with a note from her general practitioner. She "suffers from a reactive depressive state due to poor working conditions".
Odile is a little over forty years old and lives alone. She complains that work takes up all the space in her life. When she looks back over the last five years, she has the impression of a great void, as if each day had been the same as the previous one and nothing had changed in five years. She feels strong social pressure blaming her for her immobility.
The pressure at work has become too difficult to bear and she started drinking when she gets home in the evening. She worries about seeing the bottles lining up along the trash can and the week. She doesn't know what to do anymore. The fear of being bored at home where nothing awaits her and where she has nothing to do frightens her. Staying at the office among "unproductive incapables" is unbearable and yet she works well beyond her hours.
Ten days ago she was on vacation and she is starting a week of sick leave. It's shameful. That makes three sick leaves in less than a year. It is true, the first was due to a leg injury, but she thinks rather that it was a warning that her body was sending her. The second was to recover from a form of infection that had largely exhausted her. The last and present sick leave is, for its part, very clearly intended to protect her from her professional context.
Odile realizes that she has reached the point of exploding aggressively on a regular basis. She doesn't recognize herself in these behaviors. She says she is shocked by what she does, whether at work when she gets violently angry, or in her personal life where she feels she is brutally creating a void around her. She collapses in tears and declares that she can no longer find herself.
The organization to which she belongs has sectorized its recovery. For her part, she is responsible for a portfolio consisting of many clients with low individual volume. For five years, she has been leading a team of three people on this subject. Other colleagues have few clients but with high individual turnover. With few clients to deal with, they manage to have the means to carry out the collections they are in charge of. Moreover, with high-billing clients, they obtain the support of the organization's leading figures to negotiate cash inflows in case of problems.
None of that for Odile: her clients individually represent only a small stake in the eyes of senior management and she must do everything alone, by force of will with her team. She feels left behind. She often repeats that she has to fight "with her penis and her knife", she who has neither. She feels abandoned. In addition, the new management system is being commissioned and is not satisfactory.
For the implementation of this new system, a project team has been appointed with a project manager at its head. At the moment, someone is acting as project manager. He has not been officially appointed but occupies this space with the complicity of the bodies responsible for managing the implementation of this new management tool. Meetings are held to advance the project. The description of the specifications is far behind. The moment is for "testing": it is up to the users to validate that the modules put into production correspond to what they were intended for.
It's an ungrateful period. Those who use the tool notice the errors, note them and ask for them to be corrected. Those who set up the tool try to understand what is requested by the user while they thought they had strictly followed the specifications. Those who described the functionalities try to understand why what they thought was usable is "broken".
Odile and her team are fully involved and are involved in the testing of this new management system.
In fact, Odile doesn't know how to say no and everything happens as if the organization was unloading the problems of the new management system on her. The resources at her disposal do not allow her to meet the current requirements. She feels guilty about it. She is ashamed of not being able to cope. The requests are often vague, contradictory or even unrealistic. She still tries to find a solution for them. Her solutions are criticized. Often she cannot provide solutions. She feels guilty. She tries anyway. Requests rain down on her shoulders. Her team distances itself from this influx of additional work. She can't take it anymore. She rebels against the incoherent requests made to her in meetings. She always ends up giving in and leaves burdened with extra work despite her anger and complaints. She gets angry and can't take it anymore. She cracks in the face of these "unproductive" people who pass the buck to her. And to top it all off, she learns that she is held responsible for the blockage that prevents the on-time delivery of the new management system. However, she knows that it is false, since she finds herself doing the work of others. She rages. She cracks.
She has considered resigning several times lately. She has taken steps to obtain a sabbatical leave.
It is in this context that she comes to see me. Where to start?
Her doctor is raising the alarm; it's urgent. She is suffering at work and has the impression that people want to harm her. She even says she is harassed by the acting project manager.
For my part, I am not on the spot to see what she is experiencing, and even if I did see it, I would be quite unable to know how she experiences it from the inside. I therefore invite her, on the one hand, to announce that she is not well and that if it starts again as before her sick leave, she will have to stop again, and on the other hand, to report her suffering to the occupational physician; two things she has never dared to do until now. Of course, since there is suspicion of harassment, I ask her to contact a lawyer.
This first intervention aims to give her space: the more she is directly immersed in her professional context, the more she takes on additional work and ends up getting carried away in meetings. Logically, if she manages to loosen the constraint, she should be less tempted to say yes and less likely to lose her temper. If I achieve this, then she will experience fewer situations she suffers and her sense of guilt will be less fueled. The request for the lawyer has a double objective: if it is indeed harassment, it is necessary to open a legal file, otherwise and in any case, she understands that this option exists and feels stronger at this idea, therefore more able to cope. Potentially the company supports her, she therefore has allies, she is no longer alone. As a result, she comes out of her isolation.
Then, I understand that this woman is always trying to find a solution even when it is not her responsibility. She has been imbued with "be positive" to the point of no longer seeing the dangers when they arise and falling into traps as if she no longer learned from the situations she goes through. I therefore invite her, just as an exercise, to ask herself the surprising question for her "how could you do to be even worse later?". I remind her of the old principle that to untwist something well, you must first know how to twist it and twist it in every way to feel its dynamics well, and finally, after having understood this dynamic, untwist it. The question "how to aggravate?" corresponds to this first step dedicated to twisting before untwisting. It will be time later to see how to untwist.
The effect of these interventions is the expected one: the pressure at work is released. By looking at what she could do to worsen the situation, she comes to enter the opposite dynamic, that is to say, to finally do what it takes to feel better, which she had not managed to obtain until now.
However, the situation is not the simplest. If manifestly the intervention with the occupational physician and the clear announcement that the project management context has a negative impact on her health have allowed a relaxation of requests, the project team is offended because it loses its "good-for-everything". People ready to invest with competence in the delivery of the project are nowhere to be found. It is then reported to senior management that Odile must re-enter the loop as before. The project comes before everything. Odile is summoned to be told that she must invest like never before for the good of the organization. Fortunately, Odile has understood one of the traps set for her: this time she comes to the meeting with concrete examples showing that the dysfunctions are not her fault and that the request made to her exceeds her management perimeter. She takes the opportunity to have her priorities validated. She leaves with the impression of having experienced a dialogue of the deaf but satisfied: the preparation of the meeting showed her strengths in the situation, and she understood that at the highest level, the notion of priority seemed confused.
The rest of the support will follow this line of conduct: put Odile in a position to look at what is happening concretely, factually and logically.
However, she is still hurt by her aggressiveness. She reveals herself to be very angry with herself, who finds herself in this situation, and with some colleagues and managers who seem to her to be "unproductive smooth talkers" and "hypocrites". She boils.
Anger is there, internal and permanent. Anger carries a message of destruction. That is its role: "get out of the way, do what I want, otherwise I'll hurt you". For those around her, there is no ambiguity: deep down, the emotion is understood in its primary sense. This is, moreover, the original role of emotion: to communicate between living beings. Around Odile, the reaction, however polite it may be, is quite naturally to protect oneself. So they do everything to invalidate, block, disqualify Odile's actions. Rationality no longer plays a role: the original naturalness is at work. Odile feels like a failure. Her anger increases. Around her, people feel threatened. They protect themselves. Impossible to get out of it. Positive and constructive rational discourse no longer works. Odile doesn't understand. People resent her.
I then ask Odile to purge her anger. As often in brief therapy, the request involves the establishment of a ritual with a precise framework. It is a question of reorienting the perception that mobilizes the emotion in a disabling form, towards a more adapted form. As for anger, it is necessary to find a liberating and non-destructive way of expression. In this case, I ask her to write angry letters that she will of course not send to her recipient, but that she will destroy with the greatest possible emphasis or rage.
The accomplishment of these tasks - announcing her situation instead of hiding it, expressing her anger instead of trying to contain it, observing what can aggravate instead of always trying to find a solution - within the precise framework that is adapted to Odile's context is effective. From the fourth session, that is to say a month and a half after the beginning of the support, Odile has regained the initiative over her life but it remains fragile.
Odile must indeed deal with two traps that life sets for her: the love of work well done, and social ascension. In the first case, she risks wanting to do everything perfectly again even if it is not within her area of responsibility, because it is necessary to find a solution, especially since no one seems to worry about it. In the other case, succeeding in her position means potentially accessing new responsibilities and exceeding the level that seems acceptable to her parents.
Indeed, the investigation shows that behind the social pressure weighing on her, there are a number of parental injunctions with which she can no longer cope. The "succeed my daughter!" that she heard from her parents was accompanied by particular attention for her brother and a form of nonchalance towards herself and her sister. In short, "get married and have children, that's all we expect from you", seemed to be the true expectation of her parents towards her. Odile realizes today that she has succeeded professionally and finds herself at odds with the parental message; she feels guilty, she did not obey... and it gnaws at her.
Concretely, everything happens like this. On the one hand, Odile seeks to always do her work well, whatever the moment and the nature of this work, and wants it to be irreproachable. On the other hand, she tries to reason herself to justify that she was right to make the life choice she has made and tries to overcome the deeply ingrained parental messages by trying not to think about her childhood.
By observing in detail what happens when she is doing badly, two underlying movements emerge: seeking to do good work and seeking to obscure the parental request. It is impossible to try to stop or alter them head-on; it is necessary to compose with them. However, leaving them as they are means preparing for a relapse.
Two movements will therefore be requested of her. The first consists of giving a framework to her perfectionism. I therefore asked Odile not to change anything she does but to devote one hour of clock time per day, and one hour only, to a frenzy of perfect work, as intense as possible, with the highest possible level of quality, and the best possible results. The second is to think every day, at a time that seems good to her, about memories she has with her parents to erect them into framed pictures and thus fill a mental gallery that she has the ability to open, visit and close.
The first movement alters the perfectionist dynamic in three aspects while respecting it: it limits it in time, it makes it voluntary and it amplifies it. The expected result is there: Odile proved unable to keep this hour regularly and declares to have quickly distanced herself from this vital necessity to do everything perfectly to the point of taking charge of the work of others. She incidentally brings up an anecdote of healthy delegation on her part. I will have to emphasize it so that she becomes aware of it. It is also at this moment that she proudly declares having resumed swimming and having organized herself to finish a painted canvas that she had abandoned a long time ago.
The second movement alters the effect of the parental injunctions with which she finds herself at odds. By creating her gallery of memories, the good ones on one side, the bad ones on the other, instead of fleeing the relationship with her parents, she is led to immerse herself in it. In the same way as before, the way of immersing herself in the relationship with her parents is limited in time, voluntary, and has a particular intensity. The result is also there: Odile calms down, relativizes what she has experienced with children's eyes and puts it back in its place in the past. Pernicious injunctions cease to gnaw at her to regain a place and meaning in her life.
It is then that, to her great surprise, appeased and having regained control over her life despite an unchanged context, Odile is offered a transfer to a sector that has attracted her for a long time. This is a position as an expert, without team responsibility, in which she projects herself both with satisfaction and with realism: it will be an opportunity for her to rebuild herself and establish a new relational network. It will also be an opportunity to take care of her personal life.
The rest consisted in accompanying her in the realization of her ambitions, the time she gets used to living with her new landmarks.
Paul-Henri Pion
Posted on April 20, 2009
mieux-etre.org
