You Look Fine to Me

What would happen if we took the same approach to problems at work as we do to problems at school?

Imagine you’re in a job you really don’t like. I don’t know about you but I’ve had a few. There was the cake factory where we put tangerines on tarts all day, the coffee shop where the coffee machine didn’t quite froth up the milk enough to make elegant looking cappuccinos (and so the customers constantly complained) and the mental health team where no one would talk to me because they didn’t want a clinical psychology trainee. As I remember these, I can feel some of the sensations associated with them in my body. I start to feel prickly and queasy. I want to get away with every part of me.

Anyway, back to the imaginary scenario. You don’t like your job. You’re bored, there aren’t many choices and you don’t really feel you fit in. It’s pressured too, there’s an Employee of the Week prize every Friday and the competition is cut throat. Every night you go home with hours of extra work to complete and sometimes you have to work into the small hours to get it done.

You start to feel unwell at the idea of going to work. People tell you to just switch off after work but you can’t. It dominates every moment of your time, as you dread each morning. You think, this has to change. You go to see your boss but she says that everyone has to work, you’ll get used to it after a while and you look fine at work. She thinks you’re doing well and you’ve got the potential to be successful. She encourages you to keep at it.

You go home and discuss it with your family. They are sympathetic but they can’t think of many ideas to help. They suggest that maybe if you join a sports club at lunch time you might feel better, and you could talk more to your colleagues and make friends. They also remind you that everyone has to work and that’s just part of life.

You’re still feeling terrible so you go to see a psychologist. They tell you that you’re suffering from work-based anxiety and they think that treatment should involve a combination of anxiety management and exposure therapy. They tell you that as part of this you must continue to go to work, as otherwise the anxiety will get worse.

They even call your family and tell them that they mustn’t let you take sick days as that will make it harder for you to keep going. They suggest that if you do take a day off, they should turn off the Wifi and not do anything interesting with you, as otherwise you might want to stay at home more. The psychologist says that changing your work probably won’t help, as we know that these problems are likely to happen again and so it’s better just to persist where you are. They say if you leave it will look bad on your CV and will mean you can’t get interesting work in the future. They remind you that things could be worse, you’re lucky to have a job and an income in the current climate.

You try, but no matter how much you use their techniques (breathing exercises, challenging your negative thoughts, mindfulness) you don’t enjoy your work anymore than you did before. You are just getting through the days. You start to feel more hopeless now, as there doesn’t seem to be any possibility that things are going to get better.

You start to think that maybe there is something deeply wrong with you, because no one else seems to mind work as much as you do. You start to feel that perhaps if this is all that life has to offer, maybe there is no point to it all. You feel trapped.

Back to reality and out of your imagination. Would this work for you? Would you start to enjoy your work? What impact might this have on you in the long term? How do you think you’d start to feel about yourself and the world?

This is what some parents tell me happens when children have difficulties attending school. They tell me that for them, the recommended approaches make things worse but there seems to be no alternative. That’s why I’m going to talk about this in my next webinar. I’ll ask what happens when children aren’t fine in school - and what the gaps are in our approach. How could we do things differently, and what might make things better not worse?

That’s what I cover in my new mini-course. It’s the same content as the live webinar, but with bonus content and handouts. I’ll cover the standard approaches to children who aren’t fine at school, and how we can do better. Click here to get it now.

My Child is Not Fine at School