The Workplace Family Myth

SPEAKER_01 0:00

At some point most of us were told or at at least felt that our workplace was like a family. That loyalty, sacrifice, and belonging were part of the team. And a lot of us gave everything to that idea until something happened that made it very clear the relationship was not quite what we thought it was. Welcome back to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. I'm your host, Yusuf, and this is where we have honest, grounded conversations about what it takes to genuinely look after your mental and emotional well-being. Today, I'm joined by Katie Gadris, an ICF-certified somatic and trauma-informed coach with over 20 years of experience in HR and corporate leadership. The founder of Work Is Not Family, a movement that challenges some of the most deeply held myths about what we owe our workplaces and what they owe us back. Katie's work helps people, he'll not just perform. And today we are going to explore why that distinction matters more than most of us realize. Katie, it's great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Great intro.

A Breaking Point With Leadership

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Perfect. So before we get into the bigger ideas, I'd love to start with you. Like you described a breaking point in a corporate conference room that changed the direction of your life. And without asking you to go somewhere you are not ready to go, what was the thing that became impossible to ignore in that moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah, so I loved how you said in the intro, until something happens and we learn that work is not our family, because that's what happened to me in a conference room sitting with the CEO. So just to give you a little bit of context, up until that time, I had been working at this company for about nine months, so not very long. And my male boss liked me, like liked me in a way that you're a good worker and we're so happy to have you. And where have you been? And this has been your family all along, and you're gonna make so much money here, like telling me all the things that I wanted to hear for my career. And while it felt good at first over time, it started to feel unsafe in my body. And my body really started to send me signals. And then what really happened is when I was sitting in the conference room with the CEO, hoping to have a you know good, productive conversation where we could talk about this and how it was making me feel and how it really wasn't appropriate for the workplace and really just looking for justice and for things to change. What happened instead is that however the CEO responded that day made me feel very dismissed and minimized, and it ended up triggering a sexual assault that I had experienced about 20 years prior. My body made the connection between my abusive male boss, the sexual assault, but then also the institutional betrayal. I was really looking for this workplace to support me and bring me justice. 20 years prior, I was looking for the police to support me and bring me justice. Neither one of those things happened. My body made the connection and it had a very physical reaction to the response. So it was really in that moment when I realized oh, this isn't this isn't what I thought it was. We're not a family.

Why Belonging At Work Feels Safe

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Sounds almost provocative at first because so many of us have genuinely felt deep connection at work, like real care for colleagues, a real pride in what we have built together. So, what do you think people misunderstand when they first hear that phrase?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah, because it does sound really nice at first. And look, and look, I've worked at a lot of places where I have loved my coworkers. I have felt very connected to my work and my boss. And I even work with my some of my family members at multiple jobs. So I've actually worked with family. So it feels good because we are we want to be connected. So many people these days are really just yearning for connection and community, especially as we live more and more in this digital world where we just don't have a lot of that like connection with people. Work is a place that we can get that. We want to belong. We want to feel like if we are loyal, then they will be loyal back to us. And this is a place where I can stay for as long as I want. I mean, why wouldn't we want that? That is going to make us feel safe, not only from a nervous system perspective, but from a financial perspective. Nobody wants to feel like they could lose their job at any time, especially when they love their coworkers. That doesn't feel good to us. So the notion of, hey, we're a family here really makes people think, like, I belong here, and this isn't going anywhere. This is a permanent situation that I'm gonna be able to stay in for as long as I want, and we're gonna take care of each other.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

I see.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

So we had family farms, and you know, before the industrialization, we did work together as a family. That's how we took care of ourselves. But as time evolved and and the industrial industrialization took place, and people sort of got off the family farm and they went into factories or they went into offices, that's really when it started to shift. We did have other sources of community at that time. So we had, you know, faith-based community and neighborhoods that we were really a part of. And so we didn't lean on work so much to sort of meet all of these needs. But again, as more and more time passed and work continued to evolve, it became much more transactional. People lost a lot of those other communities and they really started to put a lot of that weight on their jobs. And at first, our employers, our employment system really leaned into that. You know, back in the day, people did just get a job and they worked there for 40 years and they got a pension and they got the gold watch. And that's really what people did. And there was a sort of mutual loyalty that existed. And I think that's really where the family language came into play. However, as work has continued to evolve and pensions went away, and you know, mutual loyalty went away, employers are sometimes still leaning on that family language without really giving loyalty on their side.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Let's see. And you know, what I am hearing is that the problem is not caring about your work or your colleagues, it is when that caring gets used as a lever against you, when the language of family becomes the reason you are expected to give more than what is healthy or sustainable, and that that is the thing that becomes the problem.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Yeah,

Work Is Built For Labor

SPEAKER_00 8:28

and I have a background in HR, and so I do view these conversations through the employer's lens and the HR lens as well. And I don't put all of that blame on the employer. Like the employer's job is to run a business, and so they're gonna try to get as much work out of you as they can for the money that they pay you. And why is that wrong? You know, this is a system that is built for labor. It's not built for love, it's built for labor. And so your employer's job is to get that labor out of you. So, as employees, we have to take some ownership of how we show up at work. So the work that I do is not about like employers are bad and hate your job. Like, I don't, I don't really believe that. It's more about taking a look at how we show up, what we were taught about work, how we carry responsibilities in our bodies, the the way that we are looking for work to meet our emotional needs. It's not their job. It's their job to get work out of you. So, what's our job? It's our job is to show up and do that work, but we also have to learn how to protect our own well-being.

unknown 9:42

Yeah.

When Trauma Shows Up At Work

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Katie, you work as a somatic trauma-informed coach, which tells me you understand that the impact of difficult workplace experiences does not just stay in our heads, it lives in the body as well. So, what is underneath the surface for someone who has been in a high pressure, emotionally demanding work environment for a very long time?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Yeah, great question. I mean, that's the that's some of the work that I do with people and also what I experienced myself. So, you know, having a sexual assault be triggered in the workplace was not something that I ever expected. That was something that was really buried deep inside of me. It wasn't even something that I thought about ever, uh or a lot, I should say, but something at work happened that brought it up. And that's the trauma piece of you know, what happens to people in these situations. The way I like to think about it is we really are absorbing, you know, it's not necessarily stress, it's not necessarily burnout. For some people, it is, but the people that I work with are really just absorbing the emotions, the urgency, the dysfunction of everything around them. And that's because they learned to do that when they were kids in order to feel safe. So we have these lived experiences where our brain and our nervous system are like, okay, this wasn't safe. This wasn't a good thing. So to make sure this doesn't happen again, let's do this. Let's figure out a way that we can protect ourselves. And so for some people, that's people pleasing. For other people, that's being super independent, being highly responsible, being very capable. Those behaviors keep us safe and they can benefit us in a lot of ways. And at work, that can definitely benefit us. Being responsible, capable, competent, being the go-to person, the problem solver. Those behaviors are a lot of reasons why high performers are high performers in the first place. What we don't always realize, and we don't what we're not always aware of, is the reasons why we created those behaviors in the first place, why our system created those behaviors in the first place can now come out at work. Or work can take advantage of those. And before we know it, we're just in this like default habit loop. These behaviors are coming out on a sort of a subconscious level, and we're not even aware that we're doing them. Sometimes they help us, sometimes they hurt us.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

I think a lot of people will quietly recognize this gap between how they look on the inside, capable, professional, getting on with it, and what is actually happening beneath. And the fact that there often is not a name for it makes it even harder to address.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Yeah,

Neurosception And Body Alarm Signals

SPEAKER_00 12:53

and we're just not taught about it. Like we're not really taught about the nervous system in school. When I was struggling at work, I didn't know what was going on inside my body. I just knew that I felt really bad. And there was a lot of shame that came up for that. And so that's part of the work and that I do now, and why I'm so happy to be on podcasts like this is to just let people know this does happen in the workplace. And there is scientific reasons for what's going on in our bodies. So our brain does this process called neurosception where we're like constantly scanning our environment. We don't even really know we're doing it, but we're constantly scanning our environment, trying to figure out if we're safe or if we're in danger, if there's threats around. And if your brain picks up on something that's similar to something in your past that wasn't safe, it's gonna go, there's a little, there's something here that's reminding me of this thing that happened before when we weren't safe. And so I need to alert you of that. And it doesn't tell us by a thought, it tells us through the body and it sends a signal through our nervous system. And that's what most people think of as fight or flight or anxiety or a nervous stomach, or that's why you can't sleep at night. That's why you're waking up in the middle of the night checking your work emails because this your system is perceiving threats and it's really trying to keep you safe. And that's because it loves you. That's its job. It's it's your your brain's job is to keep you safe and away from pain. And so it's gonna work really, really hard to do that for you. And unfortunately, we are taught to ignore those signals and just push through and push ahead.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

So

What Healthy Work Boundaries Are

SPEAKER_01 14:46

what does healthy actually look like if work is not family? What is it? And what does a person who has a genuinely healthy relationship with their work life actually experience? Not just what they avoid, but what they have instead.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

So isn't it crazy that we even have to ask like what healthy looks like when it comes to work? Because a lot of us like we don't even really know. And so I think of this in two ways. There's healthy workplaces. So from the leadership perspective. So I do teach trauma-informed leadership as well. So being a healthy leader, healthy leaders set clear expectations, they hold people accountable, they're very clear on roles and responsibilities and what is your responsibility and what is not in your job? They create spaces, not necessarily for you to be your authentic self, but for you to be able to perform the job that you signed up for, and then they pay you for that. And it's not really about all of the other junk that can come along with the workplace. It's really about do you have the ability to perform your role that you agreed to do in an environment where you'd like to stay here? Sometimes it can really be like that simple from the workplace. And then from the employee's perspective, what I see a lot in what I used to do is we can really look to our employer and our job to meet our emotional needs. Like, I want to be my authentic self. I want to feel seen, I want to feel heard, I want my boss to know my heart. That's not your boss's job. That's not your workplace's job. And honestly, we as employees, we have to stop asking our workplace to meet our emotional needs. It's setting them up to fail. They can't do it, it's not their job. So we have to take responsibility for that.

Why Quitting Does Not Fix Patterns

SPEAKER_01 16:58

You know, that feels like a really grounded place to start because I think most people sometimes assume that change requires leaving, quitting, burning it all down. And what you are describing is something more interior, more immediate, a shift in how you understand the relationship itself.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, and that's the thing. Like when you are struggling at work, everyone's gonna tell you to quit your job. Everyone's gonna say, it's not worth it, just get a new job. The problem with that is that if these behaviors are really coming up from your prior lived experiences, your nervous system, your neurosception picking up on threats, that may have nothing to do with your job. That's coming from within. So if you just quit your job and go to the next place, number one, the next place might be toxic as well. And number two, you're bringing the same behaviors with you. So the work that I do is really about doing that internal work, the nervous system work to figure out what sort of is coming up for you and what are these behaviors that are driving you at work. And like you said, be more grounded, learn how to regulate your nervous system, learn to detach who you are from what you do. And once you figure out how to do that, you may be able to just stay in your job. It may be fine because it's not part of your identity, and you can learn to sort of stop absorbing and just do your job. Other times, you do want to leave. You know, sometimes some workplaces are very abusive, and you're never going to learn to regulate your nervous system while you're currently in an abusive environment. But that's not always the case.

Free Webinar And Ways To Connect

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Katie, for people who want to connect with you or just want to learn more about your work, where can I do that?

SPEAKER_00 19:05

My website is workisnotfamily.com. So I think we'll put a link in the show notes that will lead you to my resources page. So I do a free webinar every week about what is really going on, why the common advice, like we talked about, just quit your job, doesn't work, um, and what you actually need to do to stop absorbing everything that's around you. So that's an that's a resource that I offer. It's free. It's every Wednesday at noon Eastern time. So you could get that through the link.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Perfect. And yeah, that link is in the show notes. So just go and check that out. Katie, is there any last places that you want to leave us with?

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Last thing I'd like to say is that if you are really struggling at work right now, you will know if this is more than just stress or more than just burnout. If you are feeling really emotionally activated, if you are consumed by work, if it is affecting your ability to take care of your body, if it is affecting your relationship with your children or your marriage, I didn't know there was help out there. I had a hard time finding help out there. So that's why I created this work. So if you are in this position and you just feel alone and you want to talk to somebody about what's going on, please reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn and you can send me a message there as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Perfect. Kathy, thank you so much for your directions, your care and for bringing such important and timely thinking to this show today. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Thank you for having me. It was great to be here.

You Are Not Your Job

SPEAKER_01 20:54

And to everyone listening, thank you for being here on Healthy Mind Healthy Day. If this episode gave you language or something you have been caring quietly at work, please share it with someone who needs to hear. Until then remember, you are not your job, and that is not a limitation. That is actually your freedom.