Over the years, we’ve found that these issues interact in such complex ways with people’s identity, personality, and emotions that it often requires full-on psychological therapy to address them successfully. People like Dan show up in my office every day - so often, in fact, I had to build a company, Azimuth Psychological, to focus on serving their needs. A particular confluence of high achievement, intense competitiveness, and culture of overwork has caught many in a perfect storm of career enmeshment and burnout. Dan - like many in high-pressure jobs - had become enmeshed not with another person, but with his career.Īs a psychologist, I specialize in mental health challenges associated with high-pressure careers.
Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Hating your job is one thing - but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself? Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Who was he, if not a high-powered lawyer? Had he wasted so many years working for nothing? Would he have had more friends and a happier family if he hadn’t spent all those nights at the office?ĭan’s story is not uncommon.
It began slowly, in a meeting with a particularly pushy client, when a thought bubbled up in his mind: “Why the hell am I even here?” From that moment, he noticed that his impatience, unhappiness, and frustration with his job grew deeper, until all at once, he realized: he didn’t find happiness or fulfillment in his work - and maybe he never had.įor someone who had built his entire idea of himself around his career, this thought sent Dan into an existential crisis. Dan*, a partner at a major Boston law firm, was due at the office, but instead, he was curled on his bathroom floor, unshaven and in his pajamas, crying into a towel.
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