Must We Hate Our Profession to Belong?

What happens when a profession becomes so practised at identifying what is wrong with the world that it begins to lose the capacity to love what is good in it?

In fairy tales, there are few punishments more frightening than exile. To be sent into the forest, driven from the family home, or stripped of one’s rightful place is to lose more than physical security. It is to lose the relationships through which one has come to know oneself. The world continues, but it no longer seems to have a place for you.

Sometimes exile takes place without anyone leaving. Cinderella remains in the household, but she is no longer recognised as a daughter. She lives among her family, attending to their needs, while being denied a place in their affections. The cruelty lies partly in the proximity. She belongs to the household and does not belong to it.

But there is something important in the Grimm version of Cinderella that we can easily overlook. When her father asks what she would like him to bring from the fair, she asks for the first twig that brushes against his hat. She plants the hazel twig upon her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears. It grows into a tree, and the birds that come to it help her when the demands of the household become impossible. Long before the prince recognises her, Cinderella has somewhere to go and something that sustains her.

The tree does not make the household less cruel. It does not persuade her stepmother to recognise her or remove the work she is expected to perform. But it preserves a relationship with something loving in a world where love has become difficult to find. Cinderella has somewhere to stand outside the judgement of those who have power over her.

I have been thinking about this in relation to our professional lives, particularly the communities in which we train, work and develop our understanding of ourselves. There are forms of exile that happen while someone is still sitting in the room. A person can continue attending meetings, using the expected language and fulfilling their responsibilities, while gradually withdrawing parts of themselves from the shared conversation. They learn which questions are welcome and how to recognise the limits of the group’s tolerance. Nobody necessarily tells them to be silent. The group atmosphere has become sufficiently instructive.

As psychologists, we know something about the importance of belonging. We understand the consequences of shame, conditional approval and the experience of never quite being good enough. Yet I wonder whether we have become less confident about acknowledging these needs within our own professional communities.

One of the things I love about facilitating fairy-tale groups is that they offer people an opportunity to enjoy being psychologists again. We gather around a story, consider its characters, wonder about their relationships and discover what emerges between us. Somebody notices something another person has missed. An interpretation is offered and altered. We may disagree, find something funny, recognise something uncomfortable, or discover that a seemingly insignificant detail changes how we understand the whole story. There is pleasure in thinking together, and in being reminded that we have something worth bringing to it.

I have wondered why this can feel like such a relief.

Psychology has an extraordinary intellectual inheritance. Cinderella’s tree grows from her mother’s grave: what sustains her is a living relationship with something that she continues to tend, and I think a profession’s intellectual inheritance can sustain us in a similar way. The capacity to formulate, to think about suffering in relation to a person’s history, circumstances and relationships, is one of the things that makes our work distinctive. Formulation allows us to consider the meaning of experience and the possibilities that might emerge from understanding something differently.

Yet I have become increasingly aware of a kind of shame that can attach itself to the very act of formulation. There is a concern that to offer an understanding is to impose one, that to interpret is to exercise power, and that our attempts to make psychological meaning may reproduce assumptions we ought to be questioning.

These concerns did not arise from nowhere. Psychological explanations have sometimes been imposed upon people who did not recognise themselves within them. Professional authority has protected interpretations that were partial, mistaken or damaging. Criticism of professional power has helped make room for people whose accounts were previously dismissed, and required psychologists to become more accountable for the knowledge they claim to possess.

That achievement is worth protecting. But something changes when the recognition that we might be wrong begins to erode our confidence that attempting to understand is worthwhile. There is a difference between asking whether a formulation has overlooked something important and experiencing the act of formulating as a moral failure. The first invites us to think more carefully. The second may leave us ashamed of having offered a thought at all.

I recognise a similar difficulty in the wider atmosphere of professional life. Critical thinking should deepen understanding. It allows us to examine assumptions, recognise contradictions and encounter experiences that disturb our existing accounts of the world. But criticism can also become a position from which we relate to other people, our institutions and ourselves. Every achievement reveals another omission, every tradition contains something requiring repudiation, and every expression of confidence becomes vulnerable to the suspicion that we have not yet been sufficiently critical.

In some professional settings, dissatisfaction can come to feel like evidence of moral seriousness. To be a good practitioner is to demonstrate an apparently inexhaustible willingness to question one’s assumptions, institutions, theoretical inheritance and position within them. There is always another adjustment to make, another failing to acknowledge.

The dogma becomes the rejection of dogma.

There is a relational quality to this that I find troubling. When appreciation becomes difficult and every effort at improvement generates another account of insufficiency, the person trying to do better may become preoccupied with avoiding mistakes. Confidence gives way to anticipation. Spontaneity becomes risky. In our clinical work, we would be interested in what such an atmosphere does to someone’s capacity to think, play and disagree.

We should be equally interested when these dynamics emerge within our institutions. There is a difference between being open to criticism and living within a relationship where criticism becomes the principal means of demonstrating commitment.

This brings me to the relationship between morals and morale.

We usually speak about professional morale in terms of motivation, confidence and the capacity to continue working under difficult conditions. We speak about moral distress when practitioners are constrained from acting according to their ethical commitments, and moral injury when serious experiences of transgression or betrayal disturb deeply held moral beliefs. These are distinct experiences, and professional exhaustion cannot be understood without attending to workload, staffing, resources and organisational conditions.

Yet there is another aspect of demoralisation that interests me: what happens when people begin to lose confidence in the moral purpose of work that once gave their lives meaning.

A psychologist may be exhausted because there is too much to do. There is also an exhaustion associated with repeatedly being asked to practise in ways that seem difficult to reconcile with the values through which one entered the profession. What becomes uncertain is whether the work remains recognisable as the work one believed was worth doing.

And institutions do not always respond to declining morale by becoming less moralistic. Sometimes they become more so. There may be increasing emphasis on values, shared identity, commitment and the importance of demonstrating that one belongs. The language of care, inclusion and professional responsibility becomes more elaborate while the experience of those expected to enact these commitments grows further from what the language appears to describe.

Leaders may themselves be struggling with these contradictions, trying to preserve something worthwhile under increasingly difficult conditions. But a group can become highly articulate about its moral commitments while losing the capacity to examine how those commitments are being lived.

When a group’s moral language ceases to describe its experience, it may begin to function as a test of allegiance.

The question becomes not only whether someone is doing good work, but whether they are being recognised as the right kind of professional. Agreement with prevailing language may be treated as evidence of ethical competence. Doubt becomes more difficult to express, particularly where the group has become invested in understanding itself as morally sophisticated.

There is a further problem here about what we take ourselves to know. None of us can read everything. We rely upon colleagues, academic traditions, professional guidance and the scholarship of people we trust. Yet the assumption of intellectual due diligence can sometimes take the place of intellectual encounter.

We recognise a theoretical position and know something about its standing within our professional community. We may know which ideas demonstrate awareness, which thinkers are regarded favourably, and which arguments are considered suspect. Sometimes we know enough about an argument’s reputation to dismiss it without seriously considering what its proponents believe they are saying.

The question shifts from whether something is true, or partly true, to what kind of person would say it.

I notice some hesitation in myself as I write this. There are examples I could name and disagreements I could locate more explicitly, but I am conscious of how easily an argument becomes associated with a position, and a position with a kind of person. I find myself anticipating how something might be received before I have finished working out what I think. There is a familiar wish to make the argument sufficiently careful that nobody could reasonably object to it, although I know this is impossible.

I am left wondering what part of this hesitation belongs to the responsibility of a thoughtful writer, and what part to the wish to remain safely within the group.

Group analysis helps us approach this difficulty without assuming that it belongs solely to particular individuals. Foulkes’s concept of the matrix invites us to consider the network of relationships, communications and assumptions through which experience acquires meaning. Our thoughts take shape within relationships in which approval, disappointment, rivalry, affection and authority are already present.

A group may find it easier to preserve its coherence by locating a disturbing idea in the person who expresses it. The person becomes the problem, and the group is relieved of the need to examine what has been said. What appears to be agreement may conceal the successful management of disagreement. Something is lost to the individual, but also to the group, which has narrowed the range of experience from which it can learn.

This is why I am unconvinced that the answer to professional conformity is simply more criticism. A group with insufficient relationship to sustain disagreement may respond to further demands for reflection with greater anxiety and compliance. Members become increasingly dependent upon approved language, increasingly careful about unfinished thoughts, and less willing to expose themselves to the possibility of being wrong.

We need enough relationship to bear the truth.

Some of the most sustaining parts of my professional life take place in WhatsApp conversations with colleagues. I sometimes think these relationships have been professionally life-saving. The care is often ordinary: someone asking how another person is doing, offering a thought when things have become difficult, remembering an earlier conversation, sharing something useful, or finding a reason to laugh. There is generosity in these exchanges that rarely appears in formal accounts of professional support.

These relationships have histories. People know one another sufficiently well that they do not always need to explain themselves from the beginning. There is room to admit uncertainty, express disappointment and sometimes say things that are not yet ready for a wider audience. I value the relief of being known beyond my most recent disagreement or difficulty.

I think we underestimate the importance of these smaller, more bounded communities. We rightly value openness and inclusion, but friendship and intimacy are not infinitely expandable. A reflective group or circle of trusted colleagues cannot offer the same relationship to everybody. Time, familiarity and mutual commitment help make trust possible.

Yet there is something uncomfortable about defending these spaces. The WhatsApp group that sustains one person may be the group from which another feels painfully excluded. Informal professional networks can carry influence, information and reputations beyond their immediate membership. The warmth experienced within a group may have a very different meaning for someone who remains outside it.

I cannot declare these relationships harmless simply because I experience them as generous. Their value is real, but so are the questions about whom they include, what they protect and what they may prevent us from seeing.

There is also something I need to acknowledge about my own desire for a less critical professional culture. What feels to one practitioner like another exhausting demand to repudiate the profession may feel to another like the first opportunity to describe something that has never been properly recognised. The pleasure of belonging may sometimes have depended upon someone else’s experience being overlooked. A criticism that disturbs our enjoyment may be doing precisely the work that criticism needs to do.

But it does not follow that greater isolation will make us more capable of receiving it. People need relationships in which they are known beyond their errors and disagreements. Someone whose contribution has been valued may be better able to hear that they have overlooked something important. Someone whose place feels perpetually uncertain may become preoccupied with defending it.

This is not an argument that supportive groups are necessarily open-minded. The familiarity that makes a group a source of care can also become the means through which its members avoid uncomfortable knowledge. What matters is whether the group helps its members return to difficult realities with greater curiosity, or protects them from having to encounter those realities at all.

I have also been returning to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, particularly the ending of The Return of the King. What interests me is what happens to the people who have struggled to preserve the world they love.

The Shire is saved, but Frodo cannot fully return to the life he has helped preserve. Something has happened to him that cannot be undone by the recovery of his community. Sam can return to the ordinary pleasures and obligations of home, while Frodo remains marked by experiences that have altered his relationship with the world.

The survival of a community is not the same as the recovery of everyone who has suffered for it.

I think about this in relation to professional institutions. We speak about restoring morale, rebuilding trust and recovering a shared sense of purpose. But the restoration of a group does not necessarily repair the people who have been injured within it. A community may regain its confidence while some members remain unable to return, and its renewed unity may depend upon an unwillingness to examine what happened to them.

There is something else in Tolkien’s story that seems equally important. Frodo’s journey is not sustained by individual determination alone. His survival depends repeatedly upon friendship, loyalty, mercy and the willingness of others to remain alongside him. Sam’s companionship does not remove the burden or prevent every injury, but it makes parts of the journey possible that would otherwise be unbearable.

I think of colleagues who have helped one another continue working through difficult periods, the conversations in which professional confidence is restored, and the groups in which people find themselves able to think again. These relationships may not transform an institution, but they can change what it is possible to bear within it. And yet Frodo leaves. Love does not make everything reparable, and being cared for does not oblige someone to remain within a world they can no longer inhabit.

Cinderella’s story offers another possibility. Her survival within the household depends partly upon a relationship beyond its judgement. The hazel tree, rooted in the memory of her mother, provides something the household cannot give her. By the time she is recognised through the slipper, the story has already shown us that she has not been entirely dependent upon those who refused to see her.

Both stories remind us that belonging and recognition are not always found in the same place. The relationships that sustain us may exist outside the institutions to which we have devoted ourselves, and the restoration of a community may not mean that everyone can return.

I find myself in a similarly complicated relationship with psychology. I love its intellectual inheritance, its interest in the complexity of human beings, and its capacity to make suffering more understandable without necessarily making it less serious. I love the pleasure of formulation, when an apparently disconnected experience begins to acquire meaning. I love the experience of a group discovering something together that none of its members could have arrived at alone. I value the generosity of colleagues, the friendships that sustain difficult work, and the extraordinary privilege of being invited into another person’s account of their life.

I also recognise how readily professional communities can become organised around the protection of their own image, and how easily a language intended to deepen understanding can become a means of dismissing those who disagree. My affection for psychology gives me reasons to defend it, but also something to lose when criticism reveals a failure I would rather not recognise.

This is why I think the recovery of professional morale requires more than another account of what practitioners must change. We need to recognise what remains worth doing, what deserves our loyalty, and what we would grieve to lose. Without these attachments, criticism can become an endless exercise in repudiation, leaving us less certain of the good towards which our efforts are directed.

But a profession worthy of love must be one in which love does not require silence, where loyalty can include disagreement, and where preserving what is valuable does not become a refusal to recognise whom it has harmed.

I think again of Cinderella tending the tree at her mother’s grave. It does not remove the hostile household or make its demands reasonable. It gives her somewhere beyond those demands from which she can continue to live. Maybe we need something similar in our professional lives: relationships that sustain us without determining everything we are allowed to think, and enough confidence in what we value to encounter criticism without experiencing it as the destruction of everything good.

So then can we love our profession well enough to tell the truth about it, and remain sufficiently connected to one another to hear what that truth might be?