People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.  

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam showed that people in the USA used to be connected to large numbers of neighbors and peers, by all sorts of clubs and civic groups and religious institutions that were larger than the household, but smaller than the state—the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, B'nai B’rith, and so on—and that since the 1970’s, most of these have shrunk or even vanished. For my MFT internship (2012-2016), I trained in Gestalt therapy at a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Relational Center whose motto was and is: Isolation hurts. We help. See also Johann Hari’s excellent book on this issue, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  

Our drive to be part of something larger than ourselves is a core need that’s sometimes fulfilled in wholesome ways, even today. If we’re fortunate, it can arise where we earn our daily bread. Teamwork on the job, if it goes well, feels good and works effectively. It’s not necessary to spoil it with cynicism by deciding that it’s all a swindle, just because management planned it for the purpose of maximizing the owners’ profits and the shareholders’ return on their investment. Yes, management did set up a personnel structure, with its cooperative and competitive dynamics; and yes, they did so mainly with those financial motives. But it’s a wasteful mistake to use this fact to empty-out the value of a collaborative experience. Enjoying your job doesn’t make you the dupe of exploiters—unless your employer happens to be exploitative. So it’s pretty important to have some criteria for that category.  

If the company’s internal communications are laced with the rhetoric of family life, does it feel icky and bogus?  

Prioritize your physical and mental health, and take a close look at the effects of your current employment on those two factors.

Is it a permissive environment, where bad interpersonal behavior has no consequences? Or an over-policed one, where H.R. feels overzealous and unpredictable?  

Do rewards for extra hard (or extra good) work go to everybody, not just the suits in the suites?  

Are you stuck in your current role, or can the leadership be convinced that they could make better use of you in another one where you feel you’d add more value? If you contribute advice for improving processes, products, or practices, does that get rewarded or punished?  

Do you feel misled about important aspects of your role, or are they frank with you where it counts?  

Bonuses and raises are not the only genuine sort of rewards—there’s paid time off, broader choice of tasks and teammates, more control over your schedule and remote work, and so on. Be wary if you put in a heroic chunk of overwork, and they either ignore it, or pay you in symbolism, praise, and thanks, but nothing more.

Consider that the ideal job, the real peach on a high branch, gives you three things:

·      enough meaning

·      enough money

·      adequate work-life balance  (WLB) 

Awful jobs are missing all three, and are way too close to what sociologists have called “social death,” in which one’s humanity is under dire assault by some combination of abuse and neglect. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a poignant bestseller called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about such jobs, and the vexing struggle for upward mobility. More recently, in Democracy Awakening, professor Heather Cox Richardson has taken account of the way access to opportunity waxes and wanes cyclically through the history of the United States.  

A good job can provide you with any two of these, but not all three—and if the one you need most is the one that’s missing, the job’s not so good. Sociologist David Graeber made a splash with his Jeremiad on corporate culture, Bullshit Jobs, which he defined thus: “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Bullshit jobs pay plenty, and they don’t take over your whole week—but their lack of meaning takes on a creeping toxicity the longer you work there, because the company culture requires you to fake it. Even if the work is (relatively speaking) socially and environmentally harmless, you still come to feel you are selling your integrity because you have to bullshit other people, and yourself, that the work is not, in fact, the bullshit it really is. This is sometimes called “golden handcuffs.” 

If there’s work-life balance and meaning, but not much money, it may be possible to add a lucrative side-hustle without becoming exhausted. If there’s good money and real meaning, but you’re frazzled and sleepless, that strategy’s not available; you may need to negotiate more time away, or build an exit ramp.  

Aristotle wrote a book of ethics for his son, where he states: Happiness is not amusement, it is good activity. Ideally, work is a form of serious play that gives us a role in the community and compensation for our labor in that role. On your way to a vocation that really suits you, remember that the gatekeepers will be behind you one day; that the stepping-stones are temporary phases of your life with something to teach you, however unpleasant; and that you must steer your life in the direction where you want it to go.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

At the job interview, the people asking the questions are usually searching for a particular experience they want to have with an applicant in the interview itself. The one who can give them that experience usually gets the job. What they want is an interaction, but it’s also a display. They want to have a conversation in which their specific, actual questions really reach the new person (that’s the interaction part). The questions evoke answers presented with a calm exuberance that’s a pleasure to watch (that’s the display). In music, the Italian phrase con brio means “with spirit, with vigor.” This kind of animated, engaged demeanor arises when the applicant has both confidence and expertise—a combination that usually comes from work experience, so it tends to count as evidence of work experience. Resumes, too, are evidence of work experience, but not everyone who has done a job has also learned from it, internalized its procedures and its ethos, and achieved good feelings about their ability to do it well in the future. Those are what the people doing the hiring are looking for in the interview, and the best evidence for it are answers that match the interviewers’ questions; that are focused on the concrete content of the job’s actual entailments (rather than abstractions about what kind of job it is), but aren’t entirely limited to that; and that show some degree of enjoyment from the applicant that springs from the pleasure of being both interested in something and good at it.

Applicants for teaching jobs are often advised, wisely, to treat the interview like a lesson, and to teach the interviewers about the way the job works and how to do it well. But this advice can apply to many other kinds of work, too—not just jobs in education. The teaching frame of mind, the Teacher role, can take you out of your ego-driven worry about how you’re being perceived, because it helps you to focus on the material at hand and the communication process. Value judgments and the fear of embarrassment, imaginary comparisons of yourself to others, worry about rejection or failure—these should be crowded-out by the enjoyable business of sharing what you know. One of the best indicators of your likely success is that the interview was fun. If it wasn’t, you might not like the job itself, either, in which case you’ve “dodged a bullet” by not getting it. The capacity to enjoy the interview not only bespeaks a confidence that comes from competence, it also suggests you’ll enjoy the work itself, which is associated with better performance. A hiring is a contract between employer and employee, and the enjoyment of an interview is a good sign that both parties may well benefit. If you feel qualified, stay in touch with your desire for the job, with your knowledge of the field, and with the pleasure you take in excelling at this particular type of work. It will probably show.

People cheat when they feel cheated. They lie when they feel lied to, and they steal when they feel robbed. Some of that springs from a need for cosmic balance, where I pay-forward whatever I suffered that should not have been my fate. But some of it is a communication, where my behavior is meant to inscribe on the walls of the universe: this thing I do to others, is what was done to me.

Compulsive shoplifting, for example, can be a kind of broadcast to the world, silently announcing that I have been deprived of my due. Typically, the stolen good was not a material object but a form of experience, some crucial, human relational need that I now despair of ever meeting. Why the despair? Because of too many failed attempts to get hold of that primal good, and because the critical period has passed, in which the needful thing could have found its mark, by meaning just what I needed it to mean: that I am a good-enough person, in a good-enough world. If I can believe this belief, then a good-enough life-of-my-own can feel both permissible (fate will allow it) and feasible (I can manage it). If I doubt my own goodness and/or the goodness of people in general, it will be much harder for me to build an ongoing good experience of being myself. So, whence comes this necessary faith in the human good?

According to Heinz Kohut, what children need are parents who can supply two crucial developmental resources: first, a mother (figure) who mirrors our childhood grandiosity and affirms it for us, and second, a father (figure) whom we can idealize and look up to, identifying with him in an aspirational way. Kohut saw these two needs as ordered, both chronologically and in their relative importance. He also saw childhood and youth as eras that often afford us second chances to get what we need, or, if things go poorly, a new round of trauma (from deprivation or other emotional injury). A step-parent, say, can step in and make things much better, or much worse.

In the 1970’s, psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner made an observation which has often been quoted, and deserves even more notice today: “In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid.” This Somebody need not be the original parent (biological or adoptive) or a step-parent; it can be, say, a relative, a guidance counselor, or a teacher — often an art teacher, perhaps because art is nearer to the emotions than most other subject areas taught in schools. But the changes in institutional culture of the past two decades have made it more risky and difficult for teachers to show special interest in troubled students who may need it. Among the religious, clergy can be well placed to show this kind of individualized interest, but they, too, have become understandably risk-averse as the stakes of being misunderstood have sharply risen. Librarians sometimes took on this kind of role in children’s lives, with often wonderful results, but smartphones and the internet have so fully replaced books that librarians are fading from view.

If a community is in sufficiently rough shape, an idealistic nonprofit might come along and offer a program that pairs at-risk youth with ethically ambitious adults who help them along in caring ways. But those programs don’t always appear, and not all childhood neglect or abuse happens in poorer cities and towns that are in obvious trouble. Much of American literature is about the family traumas of the middle class, and even the wealthy are often very desperate people — in part because they already have the money that everyone else assumes is the solution to every problem, yet their pain continues. “Spoiled,” remember, does not just mean “pampered.” It means a kid has been given everything except what’s most important: wholesome loving care. It is, after all, a metaphor about rancid milk — because material abundance paired with emotional scarcity can spoil a person’s capacity to believe that real love (which psychoanalytic language symbolizes as the breast milk of a loving Mother) exists anywhere.

Some kids who are deprived of one or more of Kohut’s two essential relational supplies (a mirroring mother figure and an idealizable father figure) become hyper-competent, fiercely independent adolescents. Later in life, they can have trouble coupling-up, because romance involves giving what they never received, and because the offer of love feels strange and dangerous to them. By contrast, some other deprived kids remain dependent for decades, relentlessly hoping the caregivers they need will come along, or indeed, that their own feelings and behaviors will eventually transform the attachment figures they do have into the wise and generous ones they still crave. Then there are those who combine elements of each, presenting as adults with impressive professional success while remaining lonely and emotionally entangled with their withholding parents. These people are ahead of their peers in the outside world, but behind them on the inside.

Much trouble can be avoided if several afflicted kids find each other in time to form a group, where they can do their best to raise one another. But this is hard, because independent kids are reluctant to depend on anyone, including peers; dependent kids may welcome fellowship, but their resentments can get displaced and wreck the very friendships they have loaded with meaning and value. An adolescent friend group, with its intense attachments, passions, and impulses, can work wonders or exacerbate personal trouble, depending which personality elements get validated within it, and how the larger world responds. Plenty of movies are about the various storylines that such a group can be found living through, though it’s rare that a clique of teenagers manages to learn, from a film, how to avoid the pitfalls in its path. Art might seem to promise lessons of useful prudence, but it mainly offers us a deeper understanding of those losses and mistakes we’ve already endured.

The benefits of therapy derive from insight on the one hand, and the therapeutic relationship on the other. Between the two, it’s usually the relationship that does the most good — but it’s a relationship built on a series of conversations whose main ingredients are the patient’s stories of the past and the recent past, expressions of feelings in the present, and interpretations that come from the therapist or from the patient (in other words, insight). Some of what gets illuminated and reframed is the experience of not-getting what we needed. It might seem like a waste of painful effort, to recount what you already know about old yearnings and losses. But it often turns out that the telling is itself a healing process, when someone is listening with consistently reliable respect and empathy. The teller and the listener can then reshape what the story means, shifting control of that meaning from the outside world of the past into the inner world of the present.