REAL Emotional Labor is Unfair

Emotional Labor is a term that the term-maker, Arlie Hochschild, used to describe "the work of trying to feel the right feeling for the job."

When you're a doctor, a school teacher, a restaurant server, or a flight attendant, your job might require you to feel a feeling - or portray a feeling - that you, the real human person, don't actually feel at that moment.  In these job examples there are times you might actually feel angry, frustrated or scared, but in the context of your job you have to relate to your patients, clients, students or customers with optimism, support, happiness, ease, and so on.

When your bona fide job duty requires you to portray a feeling that is different than the one you actually feel, you are then being paid for emotional work as part of your job. 

That's why she called it a kind of "labor." In the workplace, internal emotional management becomes paid labor.

According to Hochschild, the term holds very important nuance, which applies to situations outside the workplace too. 

And this is where its application to healing from complex trauma comes in.

In an interesting interview in The Atlantic, Hochschild notes that not all internal emotional management qualifies as Emotional Labor. 

There's a quality of bracing against a consequence, which delineates true Emotional Labor from say, any run of the mill annoying dynamic: "[I]t's only emotional work if it’s disturbing for you...[if] it is experienced as anxiety-provoking or fear-evoking to you."

Anytime your real, internal emotions differ from what's needed in your environment and it causes you discomfort or a feeling of bracing against a negative consequence, then you're doing terribly unfair extra work.  

This extra work is tender.  It's emotional.  And it's unfair.  

Hochschild notes: "[I]f your mother-in-law is extremely disapproving of you...and you’re having to defend your self-esteem against the perceived insult, that’s emotional labor."

In this scenario, it's unlikely that the mother-in-law is expending any extra effort of internally managing her own emotional experience.  On the contrary, the absence of her own restraint creates the extra work for you of having to defend your own worth and self esteem. 

It's unfair.

This is a hallmark of complex and relational trauma.  Someone else's abuse or neglect has created a whole lot of extra work for you.  Perhaps it only occurs in the company of a particular person.  But likely this kind of treatment has affected your general sense of self, and this kind of after effect plays out in other relationships, or at work. 

Hochschild says, "If in the course of asserting yourself [at work,] you find that you are having to brace yourself against imagined criticisms, or people are looking disapproving and you realize your job may be in jeopardy, all of that bracing and anticipation and experience of anxiety I would count as...emotional labor."

It's completely unfair, and it takes a lot of hard work to unwind this kind of constant Emotional Labor that can extend from the original experiences of bracing against a terrible consequence.  

However, it IS possible to do.

You can learn how to trust yourself to recognize which relationships and workplaces support emotional coherence - when your real feelings and your portrayal of your emotions can be one and the same - and reduce the experience of bracing, anxiety and fear.

Be Well, Kind Soul!