When Trouble With Your Boss Keeps You Awake at Night
It's very useful to notice how you talk to yourself.
I don't mean out loud.
I mean that inner dialogue that you have going on in the background much of the time.
In between the to-do lists and planning for the next meeting, we often have little debates going on in our minds.
We rehash old wounds, we imagine what we'd like to say to the person we have to see every day whom we don't get along with. We imagine what we wish we'd said to the person whom we think slighted us the other day.
Work is a potent source of these inner dialogues.
Most particularly with people whom we find challenging.
Colleagues who rub us the wrong way. Or people who don't seem to like us for some reason and make our lives miserable.
The boss. The boss in particular.
Whether you like the boss or not, the boss can have a big impact on your work life, and you have a lot invested in this relationship going well. You want your boss to like respect, and praise you for a good job.
The boss, often, is the grown-up self’s surrogate parent.
At least that is the dynamic that is replicated in the modern-day world.
The boss has authority and power over us, just as our parent did when we were children. If we get along with our boss, that is great.
If we are able to have a mature professional relationship with our boss, yeah!
The work system, however, makes it easy to default to a parent-child relationship, especially when either party is immature or carrying wounds and conflicts that unconsciously get played out in current relationships.
In a sense, we are never able to grow up in these situations.
Especially if you work in the corporate world or an institution of any kind. It is easy to be constantly embroiled in parent-child relationships, caught in a context that fosters this type of relationship. This is because of the power other people can have over your work, your livelihood, your well-being, your life.
It can feel like a trap.
And of course, you can lose sleep over these things.
When it's time to go to bed, in the silence and the emptiness of the night, these frustrations and agonies tend to pop to the surface.
You rehash the conversation you had today with your boss. You analyze the possible slights of that bully colleague. You agonize over something you feel forced to do and hate because it's part of your job.
And then you get really frustrated. Not only is this situation dominating the daytime and poisoning your downtime – it’s also following you right to bed and messing with your sleep!
The indignity, the frustration, the unfairness of it all!
Oops! Isn't that the inner child speaking?
You might bring these conflicts to bed with you and tussle with them instead of falling asleep.
Put your inner child to bed and get better sleep
The first step to resolving the situation is to notice what you are doing.
What is happening in your mind, what is dominating your thinking, preventing you from sleeping? It is helpful to step back and notice the dynamic.
See the pattern.
What role do you keep playing over and over?
I am not talking about figuring out how to resolve the situation. Or playing psychologist in your head, trying to find the source of why you are caught in this situation.
That is what your mind is doing already. That is what is making your life so miserable.
Your mind is desperately trying to make things right. You keep playing the script again, hoping to resolve it in your mind. but that never happens.
You may be reminding yourself of how unfair it all is, how the other person is abusing you, how you did everything possible to make things right.
When you think that way, you are coming from a place of powerlessness, the inner child comforting itself.
Or you might be berating yourself, telling yourself how you should have handled the situation, how you always do this stupid thing, how you must manage things better next time. This is your internalized "authoritarian parent" getting mad at you.
These dialogues are driven by the inner parent. This is the internalized voice in the mind that comes from relationships with authority figures early in life. The internalized child responds to the internalized parent.
It's not important to get deeply into analyzing the complexities of the dynamic.
In fact, that can get us even more embroiled.
The most useful thing to do is to notice that you are caught in an inner dynamic.
Simply notice that it is happening and step out of playing one of these roles in your mind.
Because the actual dynamic itself is endless.
These are particular patterns that we carry. They never resolve and they never stop. The internalized child will never get out of its powerless situation. The internalized parent will never let go of its power.
Both have to grow up. To become the adult.
From the adult role, you can gain perspective. You can look at things with reason. You can be compassionate.
To get to sleep, the adult in you can say to yourself, "I notice that you are caught in that dialogue again. You won't resolve it in your mind right now. Tomorrow you can look at it with new perspective".
Put your inner child to bed and get some sleep.