Therapy helps us navigate all kinds of relationships. The one with your career is no different.

Emotional ups and downs, falling out of love, and feeling under-appreciated are common experiences at work. Why not try a therapeutic approach to helping you work through them?

I’ve spent the last twenty years or so studying the messy, complicated nature of relationships. I started my career studying couples, focusing on how during the early stages of the relationship, small threats, like watching your partner flirt with the (attractive, single) neighbor leads people to engage in all sorts of protective strategies. Most will bend over backwards to convince their new love that they are hotter, funnier, and overall a better catch than the neighbor. Put them through the same thing 10 years later, and you’ll get a different response (“Enjoy the neighbor, I’ll be catching up on much needed alone time.”).

The early days are full of bending over backwards; of pretending to enjoy hiking even if you hate bugs because your partner won’t stop talking about the health benefits of outdoor time. And over the years, as I expanded my research to workplace relationships, I noticed more similarities than differences in how we go about navigating our behaviors during moments like these. Pretending to like hiking to seal the deal with a hottie isn’t that different than pretending to like client-facing or public presentations to impress a hiring manager. We smile and nod and hope that one day we can transition to a weekend activity, or workplace role, that we actually like.

Impression management mode dominates first dates and job interviews alike. During this stage, most of us care more about looking like an ideal match than a realistic one. Tough questions like “are you in credit card debt?” and “do you have a history of mental health issues?” are waved off to a future time when the relationship is solid enough to handle them. And we shy away from asking interviewers things like, “what are the ways in which I could fail at this job?” and “why have the last 4 people left it?” We are terrified that questions like these will make us look negative, cynical, ungrateful. A bad impression at this stage is costly.

Often we pay the price for these early, communication failures down the road.

I’ve also studied the people who make it through the gauntlet of dating and have found someone they can settle into a comfortable rhythm with. Rarely is it the case that things are smooth sailing. In romantic relationships, emotions often run hot then cold then hot again. It’s not unusual to find yourself loving your partner one day, finding them irritating the next. Those of us who embrace therapy learn what triggers our ups and downs, we put steps in place to better communicate with our partners.

The stages we go through when we fall in and out of love with a person aren’t different from the ones we go through when we fall in and out love with our career.

I teach a course on close relationships at NYU, which is organized around relationship stages. Initial attraction, first dates, the honeymoon period, the “growth years,” drifting apart, and dissolution. By the end of the course we’ve worked through every emotional up and down someone can feel in a relationship. I wrote JOB THERAPY while teaching this class, and it occurred to me that I could teach the exact same class around your relationship with your career. I found myself tangling up the advice I was giving to college seniors about how to make a first date count, with the advice I was giving them about how to ace a job interview. Esther Perel’s TED talk about infidelity, which I assign in my course, is useful when it comes to thinking about having an identity crisis at work. After all this time and commitment to one person, to one career, many people ask themselves: Is this really it?

I also realized that the emotions we have around our careers—frustration, guilt, jealousy, pride, excitement, and ennui, to name a few—are not different in kind than the emotions we feel about our romantic partners. And if we felt ourselves drifting apart or feeling invisible in our love lives, seeking out therapy would be a good idea.

But for most of us, we aren’t trained to think about our careers as a relationship. We are trained to think about them as a thing that we do. And when we are unhappy, we focus on structural issues. Do we want to work in an office, or at home? What compensation package would make this all worth it? It’s a bit like addressing a nagging feeling that you’re falling out of love by buying a house with an extra bedroom. If only I had a little more space, I think I could love this person again.

JOB THERAPY is about treating your relationship with your career like any other relationship. And if you want to improve that relationship, the first step is to dig deep into the psychological source of your unhappiness. The book is organized around different types of psychological starting points, and you can be more than one. From there, I teach you how to move forward in your career journey, from networking to learn more through the interview stage.

Curious to learn more?

You can get started with my “What type of career goer?” Quiz here.