Just step out to the bathroom is all I ask. I have to do it myself on occasion.
Emotion in the workplace has to be kept to those feelings that can be dismissed within a few minutes of time. Nothing wrong with a gripe or a moan to start the day or fill a break as long as you drop it and get back to work. Every once in a while someone will be unable to keep from letting personal turmoil, tragedy, or even joy from interrupting work, but the problem is drama/attention queens/whores who make a practice of this.
But only if you’re Judy. Otherwise it’s not your turn, silly.
Actors need to leave their home life at home as well.
I have to disagree. Emotions are part of the human condition and they’re part of what make people worth having around as workers. What’s bad is when people are overly sensitive or overly expressive of their emotions. Anger, when it results in yelling and insults, is bad, but when it results in greater inspiration to do better work, it’s good. Happy, when it results in coworkers enjoying their time and being productive is good, but when it results in people being overly chatty and non-productive, it’s bad. And being emotionless, it’s good when making objective choices about spending money and all that, but it’s bad when it causes a manager to lack compassion for his employees or an employee is listless about his work.
So, yeah, if someone breaks down into tears when reasonably criticized, they need to grow up, but if someone expresses frustration when a bad decision is made and they do something about it, provided they can keep their tone and language in check, it’s a net positive. People just need to learn to not let their emotions dictate their actions.
I will say, however, that personal business needs to stay at home. When I am in a particularly rough time at home, other than when it must necessarily impact my work, because I need time off, I don’t bring it in and I don’t talk about it. And at the same time, when work gets busy and stressful, I leave it at work.
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting it’s advisable that no one have any feelings at all the moment they walk into the office doors.
You could ask a mental health professional for some treatment options. Or you could try to find a work environment that doesn’t cause you as much distress (or try to identify ways to change your own work environment so that the problem occurs less frequently).
Alone on the floor of the shower, curled into a fetal position as your try to wash away the stench of failure that surrounds you.
I am going to second this. I would love to be much more in control of my emotions, and for the most part, I am.
I am not in control of my tear ducts. At all.
Sometimes you just cannot get out of the situation and into someplace (like the bathroom) fast enough.
Preferably while bleeding from the anus, like Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas.
Okay. So, about two months ago, I had a miscarriage. I took 3 days off, but was crying randomly for the next 2 weeks. Should I have:
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Taken those 2 weeks off, resulting in others having to shoulder my share of the work?
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Gone to work, but excused myself to the bathroom for 15 minutes at a time 3-5 times per day, causing people to worry about me when they saw me running to the bathroom or came upon me sobbing in there?
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Continued to work, tears flowing, to the best of my ability, minimizing disruption of the workflow?
Which would be most practical? Which would offend your no-emotions sensibilities the least? “Just suck it up and don’t cry” was not an option.
A miscarriage is a perfectly reasonable life event to ask others to deal with your crap for a couple weeks.
Ack, goddamn you. This scene made me cringe perhaps more than any movie scene ever.
On my list of excellent, well crafted movies I wish I had never seen.
If I had a co-worker who literally broke down weeping 3-5 times a day, it wouldn’t offend my sensibilities— but I’d definitely think that person wasn’t ready to be at work yet, regardless of whether she was sobbing at her desk or in the bathroom. I’m also pretty sure my boss would insist that she take some additional time off, and neither I nor my co-workers would question it.
I remember the scene, of course, but not the blood specifically. Is that on the DVD extras?
Okay, time for me to be an asshole!
Mag, assuming you’re working with adults, every single person in your office has had to juggle enduring some horrible personal loss with the rest of their lives. I’ve done it, my friends have done it, everyone who is a grown up has at least once had to suffer through some horrible shit, so we get it, we know how it feels, we know it’s incredibly hard. For most of us “sucking it up” for long enough to perform our jobs is an option, but all right, you’re not like us. You just cannot control the flow of tears at all. You can’t get away for 15 min a few times a day? Your coworkers follow you into the bathroom? Why? And if they follow you, then that’s their problem, and I’ll give you a pass (not that a pass from me is worth anything) on this one. If you follow me to the shitter and end up having to deal with something unpleasant, I’m not going to call that my fault. You really should be able to get away without people tailgating you, but if someone needs to be nosy, then fuck 'em.
If you still can’t work with that, then yeah, take some time off. Seriously. You’re not helping anything by sobbing all over the office. Just… go home. Please.
Just part of the movie. What would they call such a DVD extra anyway? “Director’s Cut: Special Anal Bleeding Footage!”
Sounds like you don’t have a problem with “emotion” so much as with involuntary physiological reactions to emotion.
That is, you are not using your emotional reactions to try to manipulate your co-workers or bosses, or to coax them into giving you help and support for your personal problems. Your weeping reaction seems to be just an involuntary symptom of emotions that you’re not trying to inflict on other people.
So I think you should get a pass for that, as long as you do two things:
- Deal with your reaction matter-of-factly with your co-workers and try to be as little disruptive in the workplace as possible. I mean really non-disruptive, not being ostentatiously furtive, so to speak, about your tears and not looking sorrowfully brave if someone expresses concern about it.
If you’re going through an especially weepy phase, then at some point when you feel more or less normal you should inform the people you work with as lightly and pleasantly as possible that you’re temporarily on some kind of treatment that stimulates the tear ducts, or something like that.
You’ve made it clear that you’re not doing this on purpose to bother your co-workers with your emotions, and good for you. Now all you have to do, as far as possible, is avoid bothering your co-workers with your physiological symptoms. Treat it as though you had a recurring allergy attack that gave you watery eyes and runny nose: annoying for you and not pleasant for others, but nothing that anybody should worry about.
- Recognize that involuntary crying in public is somewhat outside the normal range of physiological reactions to normal levels of stress from ordinary negative feelings like anger and frustration, and seek some help. IANAD and I don’t know anything about your health, but it’s generally accepted that frequent crying is a common symptom of depression or a related emotional health problem. Especially if you’ve had a traumatic experience like a miscarriage, you could be clinically depressed.
Or maybe it’s just a pattern of stress reaction that could be helped by some cognitive behavior therapy. Much more unusually, there can be physical conditions that cause excessive crying. It’s not wimpy or drama-queen-y to get it checked out.
But once again, something like a miscarriage or 911 is a pretty unique circumstance. The rest of us aren’t robots expecting you to be stoic through all of that. That said, most people don’t have 911s or miscarriages every day, so the people who are constantly emotional at work are ridiculous-- that’s what I reckon most of us are talking about here.
That said, as M.O.L. mentioned, if you feel your eyes welling up, excuse yourself and go sit in the bathroom for a few minutes until you can pull yourself together. Go sit in your car for 15 minutes until it passes. I sincerely doubt anyone in your office would judge you for that. And heck, if you can’t get through the week without a constant stream of perfectly warranted tears down your face each day, maybe you should take some time off. It’s not a knock, everybody needs a break sometimes and few things are more important than your mental health-- a good boss should recognize that too.
Yes, more to the point, before this turns into getting permission slips for every unique circumstance, our main beef is people who can’t seem to control themselves at the office. They’re in a bad mood, or their project ran late, or their coworker is an idiot, or they didn’t get the kind of performance review they wanted, their maid quit, or whatever, and they think an appropriate reaction is to to wail, piss, moan or shout. It’s not. Get it together, please.
I haven’t seen either film but right up until I read this I always thought *Leaving Las Vegas * was the comedy with Nic Cage & the Flying Elvises. Turns out that’s Honeymoon in Vegas. :smack:
Which explains a lot about the reactions I get when people mention Leaving Las Vegas and I reply with something like “That’s the Nic Cage comedy right?” :eek: