New Year: 4 Tips for Dealing with Stress in the Workplace, Pt 2

In my last post, we examined some central insights related to dealing with stress in the workplace; in this post we look at some key insights concerning our particular individual identity and workplace stress.

In Part 1 of this post we saw how our complexes and our shadow can impact our relationship to work.  Now we look at work much more closely in the light of who we really are.

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I am Not My Work…

One of the biggest difficulties for many people in our age and culture is to become conscious of the fact that the work role is truly not one’s personal identity.

We all need a social mask and a pattern of response to our work environment to maintain appropriate boundaries and the integrity and solidity of the self in the work place.  It keeps us from losing our identity at work, and is what Jungians would call a work persona.

Yet the individual may become so actively identified with the work role as to have no real awareness of individual identity beyond work  He or she runs the risk of becoming lost to the things that really make her or him who they are.  Such identification opens up the floodgates to potential stress, because any sense of self-worth or self-esteem comes to hang completely on success or failure at work.  We haven’t even mentioned job loss or retirement: to such a work-identified individual, it can feel literally like complete loss of identity and social death.

A variant of this theme, common in our time, occurs when an individual has so much demand and so many out of control expectations thrust upon them by the work place, that they literally have no time to think about or do anything personally meaningful, other than work.  The individual doesn’t choose to be identified with work: rather, he or she is thrust so deeply into the demand of work that there is no psychological space or energy for any other identity than the work role.

In either situation, however hard it is, the individual needs to get out from under the work role, and discover his or her fundamental identity.  The stress burden is overwhelming, and the self is at stake.

…And My Ultimate Vocation is to be Myself

 We often use “vocation” to refer to a person’s work.  Yet the word really a much broader meaning, namely that which the individual is called by life to be.

A healthy sense of vocation, in this fuller or broader sense, can certainly reduce the amount of buffeting by workplace stress.  In Jungian or /a-midlife-transition terms, gaining a sense of true vocation is always closely related to gaining the clear sense of identity, of who I am.

Work environments can be shaming, and can lead to a gradual diminishment of self-esteem.  They can easily lead to the sense that our self-esteem, our worth, and even our dignity depend on our ability to do certain specific kinds of performances.  A sense of our vocation, which is rooted in the true fullness of everything that we are, the uniqueness of who we are, and the inner impetus to live out that unique being, can be the best way to protect the core part of ourselves from the most corrosive effects of stress in the workplace.

One of the most important aspects of /a-midlife-transition is the process of coming to understand my own fundamentally unique identity.  This is a matter of both conscious awareness and connection with, and open-ness to, the unconscious depths of the individual.  Identity in this sense goes far beyond the superficial understanding often embodied in the workplace social self or persona.

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst

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PHOTO:     © Steve Jurvetson ; Daviddje ; Wonderlane   

© 2014 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)