Is It Your Boss or Your Childhood? How to Tell the Difference

Figuring out how much of a reaction comes from the current job and how much comes from the family she grew up in is harder than it sounds, because both can be true at once. Plenty of women with difficult childhoods also have bosses who are unfair, and the old reaction can distort a real problem in either direction. It can turn a minor slight into a crisis, or it can teach her that being belittled by the person in charge is normal and nothing to complain about.

What the boss did and what she's concluded it means are two separate questions. A supervisor who returns a draft with edits has given her information about the draft, and the conclusion that he's lost confidence in her and is building a case to push her out is something she added.

Those conclusions made sense once. A child whose parent answered a messy bedroom or a forgotten chore with three days of silence learned that small criticism came before something much worse, and with that parent she was right to expect it. At work she reacts to tracked changes on a draft the same way, with a racing pulse and a sick feeling in her stomach. Her body responds to what criticism used to lead to at home before she's had a chance to read the edits.

Many women with this history respond by doing more. If her parents' approval depended on her keeping the peace or getting everything right, she brings the same expectation to work, staying late and checking her boss's mood before she asks him anything. She starts treating being useful as proof that she's valued, and when a volatile boss criticizes her anyway, she takes it as evidence that nothing she does will be enough.

Telling the past from the present starts with what's on paper. A written warning, a lower rating on an annual review, projects reassigned without explanation, or being left out of meetings she used to attend are what a real threat to her job produces, and if none of that has happened, the dread is coming from her history.

The test works in the other direction too, and women raised to excuse a volatile parent skip it. If a supervisor snaps at her in a staff meeting or changes what he expects from her without telling her, those are facts. A woman who grew up being told she was too sensitive or imagining things will blame herself first. She'll tell herself he's under a lot of stress or that he wouldn't have lost his temper if she'd worded her email better. Years can go by in a job like that, because her family taught her that putting up with mistreatment was the condition for being included.

Comparing the boss directly to a parent shows where the two differ. An erratic supervisor can produce the same sick dread as a volatile mother, but his authority has limits hers didn't. A mother decided where her child lived and what the rest of the family heard about her, while a supervisor decides assignments and schedules and answers to HR and to the people above him.

A boss, unlike a parent, is someone she can leave. A child can't leave a parent at all, and an adult daughter who cuts contact with her family faces grief and accusations that she's betrayed them. A job is an agreement to exchange work for pay, and ending it involves none of that.

When a woman agonizes over handing in two weeks' notice, feeling like a traitor or dreading her boss's reaction, she's reacting to a resignation the way she'd react to cutting off a parent. The belief that she has to put up with mistreatment instead of leaving comes from a childhood when she had nowhere else to go. Whether that fear is accurate is easy to test, since an updated résumé and two outside interviews will show whether her income depends on one difficult person's mood. If other companies want to hire her, it doesn't.

Day to day, she can stop doing the unpaid work of keeping her boss in a good mood, since he's paying her for her work and nothing else. She sends a short follow-up email after any spoken instruction so there's a written record, and she answers unreasonable demands with a brief, calm reply and no apology.

You'll still feel it when your boss puts a meeting with no agenda on your calendar for Friday afternoon, and years of reacting this way won't stop because you understand where it came from. The difference now is that you can check what's actually happened before you start apologizing or panicking. If the facts don't show a problem, you go back to work.

From the book

Useful Isn't the Same as Loved

A woman who stays late to keep a difficult boss happy usually learned how somewhere else first, in a family where being useful was how she kept her place in it. Useful Isn't the Same as Loved is written for the daughter who became everyone's support and no one's priority, and it looks at how that role got assigned to her long before she ever had a boss.

Read about the book