How have you been juggling work, life, and everything in between during this 7-layer dip of insanity that the world’s been serving us for the past few years? In this Emotional Push-Up, Dr. Emily is joined by the Community Manager of Morning Brew, Kyle Hagge, to talk about institutional transference, a concept that explains how we sometimes act out feelings about one part of our life in other parts of our life. Tune in to explore where this might be happening in your life!

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Monday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Ready to break an emotional sweat? Welcome to Emotionally Fit with me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. As a therapist, I know that staying mentally healthy takes work and repetition. That's why I'll share emotional push-ups. Short, actionable exercises to help you strengthen your mental fitness. From improving your friendships to managing stress, let's flex those fields and do some reps together.

Hey, there fit fans. I am here today with Kyle Hagge, lead community manager at Morning Brew. Hi Kyle.

Hey Emily. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here.

I'm so glad to have you here. And I'm curious, how has everything happening in this seven layer dip of insanity the last two years has been, how has all of that been affecting your work life overall?

A seven layer dip of insanity. I'm going to have to steal that one. That's quite a good description of what's going on. I would say maybe it should be affecting me more. I've been able to stay relatively focused, probably as a result of privilege and of just maybe a little bit too obsessed with work. So I've been doing okay for sure.

Okay. Maybe even work is the place that you feel okay?

Yeah, that's probably a good way to put it. I think work gives you tasks to complete and things to do that often can give you a distraction for lack of a better word on what is going on around the world.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. To that end, I wanted to share an interesting psychological phenomenon that I've been seeing a lot of right now. It's called institutional transference. So institutional transference happens when we put feelings about something other than work onto our place of work or vice versa. For example, if you're feeling unsupported by leadership at your company, you might start to feel that your spouse is being unsupportive, or if you're feeling overwhelmed by all of the change happening amidst a global crisis, you might feel overwhelmed by even small changes at work. Overall, I would say we tend to wildly underestimate how often we direct feelings about many different things into one convenient place.

So institutional transference happens all the time, but I think I'm seeing that it's especially intense right now because we have so many emotions and not a lot of control about the state of the world. And when you add to that the guilt we might feel for complaining while people are having trouble meeting their own basic needs, our emotions have nowhere to go. So where do they go? They get disguised as other more acceptable issues like frustrations with our spouse or our boss or our company. So we might be fighting or arguing or feeling targeted or hopeless or angry and have no idea that some of these feelings might be about something else entirely. What do you think about this idea so far?

I love it. I feel like I'm back in a really interesting psych class, which for some of my favorite classes. But I didn't take enough of them. It makes a lot of sense. I love the element that there's probably some emotions you aren't comfortable to express and so you find an avenue or a channel that is more acceptable. So it can be hard to diagnose the actual thing that is causing the stress.

So would you say you feel more comfortable having frustrations about work or you feel more comfortable having frustrations about other parts of your life?

I definitely feel more comfortable having frustrations with work because I feel like it's easier for me to find a solution or understand what the solution might be to those issues and work towards it. In life, I think life is a little more complex sometimes and I have fairly rose colored glasses on all the time or a fairly optimistic perception of life and so I don't feel like I have a lot of issues outside of work. But maybe there's some transference going on here.

Okay. This will be an interesting push-up to do because this does require that you get in touch with some kind of frustration that you might have. So let's see how it goes.

Okay. Fair enough, yeah.

So for those listening in, today's push-up is going to help us explore this idea of institutional transference and how it might be showing up in our lives. Step one of this push-up is to take a few minutes and think about a worry or frustration that you have had at work recently. For example, I was speaking with someone who said that a new CEO was appointed to her company and she was feeling really worried about that person's ability to step in and take the wheel. So those listening in, feel free to pause while you do this first step or keep listening to see what Kyle is going to be working with today.

So Kyle, what is one small worry or frustration that you have had at work?

Yeah, so one frustration I've had at work is that we are mainly in the business of delivering educational experiences and cohort based courses. And they're really fun to deliver, I think they're really high quality products, but like anything you have to sell them and we need certain demand. And we're introducing a lot of new courses and I'm always worried about getting enough people to pay us to take the course to make it financially work as a business to keep doing it.

Okay. So the worry is, "Will I be able to do what I need to do to get to the level of success that I want for this particular thing?"

Yeah. Get enough butts in seats is always top of mind.

Okay. So now step two is to check in with yourself about where else in your life, this feeling might also be showing up. So for example, that friend I have who is worried about her new CEO, it turns out that her son who has unique learning needs just got a new teacher who is not as caring or competent as his last teacher and she's feeling a little worried about that too. So if you give it some thought, is there anywhere else in your life that you can imagine this might be showing up?

Yeah, it's interesting. The first thing that comes to mind is this idea of enough. Will we have enough people to fill a seat? I think the idea of, "Will I have enough?" Definitely shows up in other places in life. "Will I have enough money to do the things that I want to do? Will I have enough friends that support me to have a really dynamic friend group that I feel comfortable with? Will I have enough love from significant other that I think is necessary to fill that part of my life up?" So I definitely see how this idea of, "Will I have enough?" transfers over into many different elements of my life.

I love that. That's a really great example. Because on the surface this is really about butts in seats. "That is what I'm worried about is filling these seats of this class." But when you dug a layer deeper, it was actually about just a feeling of enoughness in general and how complicated that is. And by the way, you are far from alone with that. I think every single person on the planet worries a little bit about having enough of one thing or another.

So then step three of this push-up is to reflect on why it might be easier to be more upset or worried about this in one part of our life than the other. So my friend told me in her case, it's less scary to think that the CEO of her company will be bad because worst case scenario, she can switch companies. Whereas, this school is the only viable option for her son right now so it feels really high stakes. So Kyle, when you think about it, do you imagine there might be reasons why it's a little easier to channel your worry about enough into this particular work situation versus facing it in all of the other places it might show up in your life?

Yeah. Wow. This is deep. I love this. So I think for work, it's easier because there's a sense of team. We have eight or so other people in our particular department that are all working towards the same goal and so you feel like you have support on accomplishing that in a work setting. I think of some things, like let's just use money for an example, that's just me. You got to figure that out and no one's really going to help with that particular issue. And then I think also it's probably identity. At work, I'm pretty confident that I can do a great job and if it doesn't work out, we don't get enough butts in seats, we don't get enough period I'll find another job. I'll find another opportunity and I'll probably be okay.

The life stuff is a little deeper and there isn't necessarily as easy to visualize a plan B of, "Oh, if I don't get enough love, I'll just go down to the love store and get more." It's a little harder to articulate where that other stuff that you need would come from. So yeah, both a team element and then visualizing a plan B make work a little easier to focus on.

That's really thoughtful way to reflect on it because really that's it, that's the whole push-up. The goal here isn't to make our feelings go away. It's just that contextualizing them can really shift our ability to take them on. The idea is if new or worse than usual problems are popping up at work or at home right now, it's really helpful to take a step back and think what else could be at play. So if you found yourself up until 3:00 in the morning trying to figure out, "How am I going to fill these seats?" You might say, "Is it just this that I'm worried about? Or is it also that I felt a little dropped by my partner today? Or is it also that I'm not totally sure if I'm going to be able to afford that vacation that I've been really excited about? What else might this be about?" And just by making room for that, we change it a little bit. So how did this all land with you working your way through this?

I loved it. Honestly, and I didn't know we were even going to go down this path all that much, it was quite interesting. I don't actually think I've had these thoughts anywhere else. And the other connection I'm making is it is about that enough or that demand generation. "Have I found enough people to have that depth with?" The same way where in work, "Have I found enough people to have this really great experience with?" So I actually think there's a lot of parallel ties that I had not previously thought about.

Yeah, if there's one thing I've come to know deep down from all the work I've done with so many people it's that we are poetically, exquisitely good at recreating dynamics that are familiar to us in our work life. I can't tell you how many patients will tell me about a problem they're having with a colleague that turns out is just like the problem they're having with their sibling, or the colleague that's having a power struggle with their boss that's very similar to the power struggle that they have with all authority in their life, that kind of thing. So there's so much we can learn about ourselves by digging into what is happening at work and vice versa. So thank you so much for breaking an emotional sweat with me, flexing those feels. I really appreciate it. And thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you so much. This was wonderful. Very therapeutic to go through that.

Amazing. Have a good day, Kyle.

You too.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. Did you do today's push-up alongside me and my guest? Tweet your experience with the hashtag #EmotionallyFit and follow me @DrEmilyAnhalt. Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's join-c-o-a.com to learn more and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @JoinCoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.