The clock on the wall of Conference Room B clicks over to 10:04 AM, and David-whose primary expertise lies in supply chain logistics-leans forward with a practiced, soft-eyed gaze. He asks us to ‘take a breath and name what we are bringing into the container today.’ I am bringing a cold cup of coffee and an urgent need to finish the inventory for the upcoming exhibit, but I say nothing. Beside me, Anna Z., an archaeological illustrator who spends her days reconstructing the fractured pottery of the 1004th century BCE, shifts uncomfortably in her ergonomic chair. She is a woman who understands that some things, once broken, require a specific kind of resin and a very steady hand to repair. David, however, is wielding a verbal sledgehammer wrapped in velvet. He spent 24 minutes on a Sunday evening listening to a pop-psychology podcast and has decided that our department’s failure to meet the Q3 targets is actually a ‘symptom of unregulated nervous systems.’
It is a strange, precarious moment in the modern workplace. We have traded the cold, hard edges of ‘performance reviews’ for the soft, blurry boundaries of ’emotional processing.’ On the surface, it looks like progress. We are finally acknowledging that employees are humans with pulses and histories. But as I watch David try to ‘hold space’ for a room of 14 exhausted adults while glancing at his smartwatch because he has a hard stop in exactly 4 minutes, the irony feels heavy enough to sink the building. We are borrowing the language of the clinic to avoid the accountability of the office.
I remember recently when I tried to look busy when the boss walked by, frantically clicking through spreadsheets of 444 rows of data just to avoid a ‘check-in’ about my ‘inner child’s relationship to deadlines.’ The irony wasn’t lost on me; I was performing productivity to avoid performing vulnerability. This is the new corporate tax: the expectation that you must not only do your job but also allow your supervisor to play amateur psychologist with your psyche. Anna Z. tells me later, over a lukewarm tea, that she finds it invasive. Her work requires a precision that doesn’t allow for ‘vibes.’ When she illustrates a shard of Roman glass, she isn’t looking for its ’emotional truth’; she is looking for the angle of the light and the chemical composition of the silica. She wonders when our professional lives became so saturated with the pseudo-clinical that we lost the ability to just be colleagues.
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The Vocabulary Tax
The vocabulary of healing has become the new dialect of management.
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The Danger of Unqualified Care
This shift isn’t accidental. As the world becomes more volatile, managers are desperate for tools to maintain control. The old tools-fear, hierarchy, the promise of a gold watch after 44 years-have lost their teeth. So, they reach for the new ones. They use ‘safety’ to describe a lack of conflict. They use ‘triggers’ to describe basic disagreements. But there is a fundamental danger in using therapeutic language without therapeutic training. A therapist is bound by a code of ethics, a clear boundary of confidentiality, and years of supervised practice. A manager is bound by the bottom line and the quarterly report.
When David asks me to ‘unpack my resistance’ to the new software rollout, he isn’t trying to help me heal; he’s trying to get me to stop complaining about the UI bugs. It is a form of linguistic gaslighting that makes it impossible to have a rational conversation about workplace friction because every objection is reframed as a personal emotional failing.
I’ve seen this go wrong in 14 different ways in the last month alone. There was the meeting where a junior designer was told her ‘boundary setting’ was actually ‘avoidant attachment’ because she didn’t want to work on a Saturday. There was the supervisor who tried to ‘process’ a bereavement with an employee in a glass-walled office in the middle of a Tuesday, leaving the poor woman more exposed than supported. The problem is not the language itself; the language is beautiful and necessary in the right hands. The problem is the lack of rigor. We are handing the keys to the pharmacy to people who haven’t finished the first chapter of the chemistry textbook.
The 4 Levels of Excavation
Anna Z. often talks about the 4 levels of excavation. You don’t just dig a hole; you peel back time, layer by agonizing layer. You document the context. You respect the soil. In the workplace, we are skipping the excavation and jumping straight to the interpretation. We want the ‘aha’ moment of a breakthrough without the 244 hours of difficult, boring, and often painful self-reflection that precedes it.