The most successful executives are at special risk for depression. How achieving all of your goals might actually be a downer.
By
Hara Estroff Marano, published on March 01, 2003 - last reviewed on July 31, 2006
Highly driven success typically comes at the cost of intimate
relationships. "You have to make huge sacrifices on the way to the top,"
says Burguieres. "You're not aware of it as you're doing it." But it
leaves CEOs unable to share themselves, magnifying the job's isolation.
True, executives reaching a certain level get some perks and can arrange
a more sane life. "But by that time," says Real, "a lot of damage has
been done."
It's not that CEOs don't have terrific people skills. "On the job,
these guys are very gifted with people, but they're gifted at how to work
other people's vulnerabilities," says Real. "The demands of human
relationships outside the job require you to have and deal with your own
vulnerabilities, your very humanity. You have to be sad. You have to show
fear or disappointment. And you have to let somebody comfort you.
Hard-driven men are not generally conversant with or even friendly
towards their own human vulnerabilities."
"The reason why the masculine agenda is so hollow," he notes, "is
that there is something that actually makes you happy deep down in your
core. It's intimacy. What makes human beings happy is other human
beings."
The coping strategies of successful CEOs work against them.
Feelings of depression are warnings that you're not being rewarded at a
self-esteem level, and you need to find a better way of sustaining
self-esteem. "But successful males usually don't respond to early signals
of pain adaptively," says Berglas. "They push the business paradigm to
the point of exhaustion in an attempt to mollify the pain. The underlying
vulnerability is only exacerbated. Ultimately, they burn out." It's
"striking" how worn out executives get, says Jon Allen, Ph.D., a
psychologist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. "By the time they
get into care they're in bad shape."
People at the top have the power, the resources—and the
temptations—to mask their problems. Depressed CEOs so often get into
disastrous affairs that such behavior can be looked on as a symptom of
distress. Observes Atlanta's Frank Pittman: "It's an adrenaline fix. You
know that you are down. You don't know that it's depression. You think
it's the routine, the lack of excitement in your life. So you do
something that jump-starts you. It would be so much safer to go
bungee-jumping or shark-wrestling."
Not just anyone can help them. It takes a special breed of
professional, one who is not intimidated, envious or overly impressed by
their power, prestige or purse. An envious therapist will be hostile, an
impressed one fawning. "Either way they will fail to connect with the
horrible loneliness inside the guy," says Pittman. "And the guy will come
into therapy and do what he usually does, which is to be charming and
superficial. He won't be challenged to get real."
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