Disclaimer: This essay has nothing to do with my personal relationships, nor the other people involved in them. Please do not read that sort of criticism into this essay, or I will be forced to pepper the material with popups reminding you not to do so, and nobody wants that.

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The point of family or marriage counseling is to get all of the participants together because they are all involved in the dynamic. While these people can vary widely in their functionality (let's call it), they are all part of the picture, and all of their contributions are crucial.

There should be such a thing as business counseling… something with regular meetings mediated by a truly neutral party.

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Working for my employer is like being the adult child of an emotionally immature parent, in part because their approach to management establishes our relationship as {m/p}atronizing.

Currently, there are typically held to be four core types of emotionally immature parent (Gibson, 2015), namely (in severe paraphrase):

• Emotional: Landmine… you end up walking on eggshells
• Driven: Focused only on their own success
• Rejecting: Rejects their children
• Passive: Provides no support against abuse

The emotional one can show intense, genuine love for their kids, but also equally intense anger or even hatred. The driven one does not prioritize any affection that they might feel. The rejecting one denies any show of affection. The passive one does not love their children enough to run the risk of helping them.

When these dysfunctional management styles are spread across a business in the person of various managers (including layers of leadership), what you get is a corporate parent who is also dealing with a dissociative disorder (i.e., a fragmented personality, give or take). So you end up with the worst of everything:

• Fear (and learned helplessness) because they might explode for any reason at any second.
• They are too self-involved to have any interest in your welfare.
• They hate having anything to do with you.
• Even the ones who have some empathy will do nothing to support you against the abusers.

And here is the worst part:

This partner absolutely refuses to engage in counseling. They blame everything entirely on you. The gaslighting is so intense that the original movie feels proud of the agency's accomplishments in driving their employees insane.

I am burned out from almost 20 years' worth of this abuse. I have tried to encourage healing in various roles, including time as union president. There are occasional members among management who are much healthier than others, but they are ridden over by toxic leadership, and that goes all the way up to the Board. Many members of management are likewise tormented by abusive leadership.

So, why not quit?

Well, packing up some snacks (and toys and underwear) and running away is not viable in our consumerist society. I am economically imprisoned. And if you shift this metaphor to more of a marriage kinda thing, then you could point out that we are staying together for the sake of our 250 children.

There are many (some?) companies who at least have an ombudsperson on staff, someone who is neither management nor rank-and-file, someone who is (supposed to be) skilled in arbitrating this relationship… but not at the one for which I work.

They just keep telling me that they are all healthy and I alone have a problem that requires counseling. Then, when I arrange for counseling through their contractor, and I finally find a counselor who is worthwhile, they change that contractor without checking with anyone whose support they have just depth charged. The replacement contractor is online, and has so many server errors and other problems that getting any counselor at all takes weeks, and then when you finally have an appointment their interface software craps out on their end.

And I can guarantee you that my inability access consistent counseling will somehow end up being portrayed as my fault.

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It's not that businesses have to be emotional in specific in order to be functional. Management and managed do not need to be friends. But at the very least management – and leadership in particular – needs to be emotionally mature and not be abusive.

Now, the use of the word "needs" suggests grounding in certain priorities.

Let's say that the business wants to remain open and viable and reliably offering the services to which they are supposed to be committed, such as providing access to education.

Let's call supporting that set of priorities a “need.”

Now, if they have employees to burn, and good lawyers, then they don't need to avoid abuse. They can just destroy one person after another and hire someone else. Many companies do this.

And if they don't care about the quality of the service that they provide (such as in a consumerist society that deliberately tanks the quality of education, or when a business is acquired as a tax write-off so they do not want profit), then they can just keep killing off employees until they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And if they have been wiping out licensed employees, then they can watch the legislature successively lower the requirements for holding these jobs due to the shortage that the abuse has created.

Why would leadership take such a narcissistic, paranoid, and psychopathic approach to business?

Well, part of the answer might lie in an observation of the high rate of the Big Three among leaders (such as CEOs).

Another part might lie in the lack of leadership in schools that has had any actual business education.

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The main reason that there is no business counseling in a business run by emotionally immature leaders is that they are emotionally immature:

• Emotional: This kind of leader might actually attend… during a happy part of their pattern (but such counseling will likely end ups triggering the irate part).
• Driven: They don't care about you other than as a cog. They just tell you to get fixed.
• Rejecting: They actively reject caring about you, or having to interact at any length with you.
• Passive: They never stand up. They might attend if someone else makes them, but they will not actively participate in helping things to get better.

That’s why not.

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After writing this essay,  I came across an interesting article laying some of this out, albeit written from the perspective of a leader. While it mentions professional development for emotional intelligence (e.g., sending a problematic leader to training and such), it does not express the insight that independent, consistent business counseling is a necessity; that is to say, it still adopts the controlling tone.