Many years ago, Jason and I hired a COO at 37signals, but ended up letting them go after just a year (many reasons, another story). This happened not long before one of our company meet-ups, so we thought it fitting to discuss the matter in-person. What a mistake. The session turned into a group therapy session lasting hours, with a free-flowing out-pour of every anxiety under the sun. 

Some might look at group therapy, with its sharing of emotional stories and vulnerability, as a good thing. And I'm sure it can be, in the right setting. But that setting is not work. Especially not with the entire company present as participants.

But that's where a therapy-infused corporate culture and language often leads. It's a natural extension of "holding the space", of too much navel-gazing "mindfulness", of a posture of nurture and care that borders the patronizing.

It's okay to be disappointed or frustrated or anxious at work. That's part of the experience working with and especially for other people! But where things go astray is when there's an expectation that these emotions always need to be processed during the 9-5 by your manager (rather than after hours with a licensed therapist).

It's also based on a fundamental misconception that everything can be made better for everyone by talking more about it. For some people, men especially, the better way out of a bad situation is to feel useful. There's a whole meme dedicated to "men would rather X than go the therapy", which is posited as a point of derision rather than recognizing taking some/any/all actions as a legitimate coping strategy.

See, there's another one of those therapy words: coping. Belonging to the same lexicon as trauma, rumination, and self-care. I'm sure these are all useful and helpful labels in the right therapeutic context, but again, that just isn't work. 

There's a reason licensed therapists are bound by a whole host of ethical boundaries when working with clients. They can't be intertwined with the client's friends or family or colleagues. They must be competent in the specific areas where they recommend interventions. There are all sorts of healthy constraints on the relationship.

Those constraints can't apply at work when you're treating the 1-1 as an hour on the Freudian couch or turn the all-hands into a group therapy session. It's the same problem with the excessive pathologizing of children that Abigail Shrier covered so well in her book Bad Therapy (one of my favorite reads from 2024!).

It's easy to read all of the above as cold or dismissive, but please don't. It's possible to share the same genuine care for people while disagreeing on the methods and the context that's due to serve them best. And it's also possible to look at the increase in therapy thinking, language, and methods in the workplace as an abject failure of modern corporate culture. An increase that's making people more fragile, more precious, more incapable of coping with the most basic expectations of disappointments or adversity on the job.

That to me is as sound of a theory for trying something else as you could ever have. What we've been doing for the last couple of decades is busted, and it's time to accept that. Get therapy out of the office and let's hand it back to the shrinks.