The shackles of the job taking over who you are? Do you friends introduce you as ‘Joe – the vet’, or ‘Sarah – she’s a vet’? Do you feel defined by your career?
Enmeshment is a term that psychologists use to describe people whose boundaries have become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. This can often be applied to people and their relationships with their jobs. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self according to Janna Koretz a psychologist who specialises in mental health challenges associated with high-pressure careers.
And when you think about it, in almost every social setting, the first thing you ask or get asked when meeting someone new is: what do you do?
From the get-go, your opinions of this person are obscured by the veil of their occupation and vice-versa for theirs of you.
It seems that in society, our career is held as one of our foremost attributes. And maybe that’s ok if you love your job and feel very passionately about your work. Yet what if you start to fall out of love with your job. If your job has always formed part of your identity… Does that mean you start to resent a part of yourself?
Is a High Pressure Career the Common Denominator?
Any vet reading this will certainly know there is no lack of stress in this profession. Pair a cripplingly understaffed industry with having to make life or death decisions on often not a lot of sleep, and you can understand the pressure that veterinary professionals come under day-to-day.
In almost every social setting, the first thing you get asked when meeting someone new is: what do you do?
In addition, vets as a whole are highly-driven and often perfectionists by nature. Without these attributes, they probably wouldn’t be in their job. However, that perfectionism can be a weight of self-pressure and a constant self-criticism.
The high-pressure work environment, lends itself to creating a ‘life of work’. The pressure to stay late, to answer emails or calls from colleagues at home and the ability for clients to contact you at all hours displaces your other relationships and activities at home with which you might otherwise identify (Koretz).
Curating a Vet Life
The other idea that creates this ‘veterinary identity’, is that you’ve probably been working towards achieving this life goal for your whole life or certainly a large proportion of it.
You make friends at vet school, you spend your school and university holidays on work experience at vet practices, your friends and family ask you about their pets on weekends. If you extricated yourself from this, where would you be left socially? And if you turn away from a life goal or career that’s been supported by family from a young age, you risk feeling disconnected from peers, parents or partners.
How to Create a More Balanced Relationship With Your Job
Psychologist Janna Koretz recommends 5 steps to take if you feel worried about how much your job has become your identity.
- Free-up time
Delegate tasks where you can to free up time to avoid staying late at work or working through breaks. And the time that you’ve freed up – can now be filled with non-work related activities. Delegation is often a tricky skill to be learned but makes for much better time management and life management.
2. Start small
Throwing yourself into a new hobby or activity outside of work can be daunting, but starting small with short term plans can help you try out new things and work out what you like.
3. Rebuild your network
Re-connecting with friends and family will rejuvenate your support network as well as create opportunities for making friends outside your colleague-friend circle.
4. Decide what’s important to you
Digging deep and deciding what values really are the most important to you can be a starting point to recalibrate and realise what you want to prioritise in life. Be that family, relationships, community etc. Writing a list can help sort these out in your mind.
5. Look beyond your job title
What transferable skills do you have from your job that could be used in different careers? Instead of tying yourself to your job title, identifying these skills can help you realise how you could be a potentially fantastic candidate for other roles. This can help you feel less vulnerable in times of burn out, being laid off or retirement.
Dr Janna Koretz runs a company that specialises in psychotherapy for people in high-pressure careers and her website actually provides some really interesting free resources. These include articles on stress at work, a free values navigator and a burn-out calculator. Check it out if you’re interested!
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