Friends Are Not Therapists: Keep Your Work Grievances To Yourself

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” — Bertrand Russell

Just like you shouldn’t be friends with your therapist, you should not pretend that your friends are also your therapist. A good friend does care about your life and takes an interest in your work but if that is the only thing you are able to talk about every time you see them then the friendship will quickly begin to deteriorate. Though work grievances can be entertaining at first and can bond people, eventually they get very tiresome. “We use complaints as icebreakers,” says Robin Kowalski, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Clemson University. “We start a conversation with a negative observation because we know that will get us a bigger response than saying something positive would.”

But do we complain so much? Michael Cunningham, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Louisville, observes that humans’ taste for complaining probably evolved from our ancestors’ way of crying out a warning when something threatened the tribe. “We mammals are a squealing species. We talk about things that bother us as a way of getting help or seeking a posse to mount a counterattack,” says Cunningham. We no longer have to worry about getting devoured by saber-toothed tigers, but venting our everyday grievances to receptive listeners (a.k.a. expressive complaining) helps us feel validated and supported. But we may also be alienating ourselves. We talked to some people about this subject:

Bob Madison told The Grindstone:

“Whether you are a mailroom clerk or a Fortune 500 CEO, what you do for a living is the least interesting thing about you. Other than a “things are going well,” or, “I’m OK, just some challenges right now,” no one other than your spouse needs to know more about your job. At dinner parties when people talk about work, I tune out. If you’re at a dinner party, the work day is done and we don’t need it rehashed over the entrees, or, worse still, to still mull over office politics while having dessert.

I think we talk about work so much for two reasons – first, fear at disclosing our interior selves and, second, because we have mistakenly thought that our jobs and titles define us. They don’t. It’s what you think and what you do with others and who and what you love and how we live our lives that make us interesting. (There is, sadly, a third category – and that is people who really are nothing other than what they do for a living. And these poor souls are to be avoided at all costs.)”

Karen I. Squarrell Shablin of Strategies for Health Care Excellence told The Grindstone:

“Four years ago I helped a friend get a job with a company I had worked for. Now when she calls all she talks about is the company. I have developed the habit of putting her on mute and having conversations with my husband, children and taking other calls. It is just about her venting about how they are stupid and she is not. Not a conversation. All I have to do is say uh-huh every so often.”

It doesn’t always even have to be complaining. Showing off about how good you are at your job can also be quite annoying too. Shane Fischer, an attorney, told The Grindstone:

“For most attorneys, life revolves around the billable hour. Further, since most attorneys are Type A personalities, they frequently love a challenge and want to “one up” their contemporaries by billing the most hours in a given period. So when I go to a happy hour and have to listen to fellow lawyers talk about how many billable hours went into a project I just want to shoot myself.”

Basically with people that talk too much about work, there is just no off switch. It isn’t considerate as some people leave the office every night or every weekend and really want to get their mind off work. Yes, leaving work behind is a considerable feat in this day and age but some people find that not talking about work and being reminded of it is the first big step.

A stress management professional told The Grindstone:

“My job is in constantly marketing and promoting myself and my services so by the weekend, I don’t want to think about another thing except having fun and restoring myself for the energy that I need for the next week ahead. I’ve been very clear about NO BUSINESS talk  on outings or on the phone at those times and yet they just don’t want to  respect it. This means that I’ve had to lessen my connection with them or  just not return phone calls because I know what’s coming. This is something that I don’t like to do, but there isn’t any way that I can control their  behavior in any other way, even though I have communicated it clearly.

I can’t get why anyone would want to contaminate their weekend or  time off with talk about bills and debt and problems at work. Especially  those that cannot be changed.”