WORK : The Enemy or The Antidote?
Yesterday was World Mental Health Day. From the amount of personal sharing flooding through my LinkedIn feed of people’s own experience with mental health struggles, I found it incredibly reassuring how far we’ve come in just a few years. How much better our workplaces will be because people are willing to lean into their vulnerabilities and shine a light on such a taboo subject, that so many of us suffer from.
Aside from sharing my own struggles with my mental health which I feel I’ve documented a lot, I wondered what my contribution to the discourse could be. Well here goes…
The question I often ask myself and my coaching clients:
'Is work, the cause or could it potentially be the antidote to our inner struggles?'. In that I fundamentally believe that in work we have all the ingredients to help identify what our unconscious struggles are. Perhaps a slightly controversial opinion but work can often be depicted as the evil force keeping us from our otherwise healthy and happy lives.
Of course everyone's context is different, both in terms of their own personal history and the environments that they find themselves in the workplace. However, as Alain De Botton so beautifully articulates in his book ‘A Therapeutic Journey' he writes…
“Even without knowing the specifics, we can hazard that work - somewhere along the line - will have heavily contributed to our falling mentally ill. But at the same time, we can suggest that work, if correctly rethought and reconfigured, may play a central role in our recovery.”
Carl Jung himself believed that the work of a therapist (or a coach in my case) with a client is symbolic of the client's struggle with their ego and the Self, and that the therapist can only engage with this struggle to the extent that they have also experienced it themselves. I.e. You can only ever take someone as far as you’ve been yourself.
I feel my parallel experience of both building a business whilst struggling with depression and then having had a full breakdown make me well equipped to navigate these stormy waters. I believe that work can provide the full spectrum of emotions from which we can draw from to explore our own pathology.
I, in no way want to sound lacking in empathy for anyone. If work is too much then of course I would say it’s crucial that you step away and do what you need to protect yourself.
However, my supportive challenge to anyone who this resonates with is to try and stay with it. To find a good coach or therapist who can help hold and contain all of your vulnerabilities. To help compassionately help identify your patterns of behaviour, the situations or the people trigger you and help you realise that you are the constant in every relationship you ever have. That is the one thing you have complete control over making a positive change and most importantly that...You are not alone.
