I didn’t know I was a workaholic. That surprises me because I easily spotted plenty of other victims. I even scolded a few of them for carrying their identities in a briefcase.
Then I found myself taking the cure. Cold turkey! And only when I felt the withdrawal symptoms did I recognize the disease and realize what was happening.
I had resigned from my job as a television producer and moved from Calgary to Winfield in the Okanagan Valley. My wife Bev had accepted a call to be the minister here. I had always wanted to write, and this seemed like an ideal opportunity.
Suddenly I didn’t have an official title or a position or an office to go to, and I didn’t have a pay check at the end of every month. I felt odd at first, then painful. As I hammered and dug to get the house and garden in shape, the age-old question behind all questions kept coming back to me: Who am I? What am I?
Pounding away at a two-by-four one day, I remembered some feelings from years before, an event of some sort in New York where I was working. We were asked to say who we were without reference to our jobs. I couldn’t do it.
A few weeks earlier, a friend down the hall from my office had been given his walking papers. I wondered who he was now-just an unemployed executive? And who would I be if that happened to me?
I hurried back to my office. That always helped. Whenever I started getting upset, I’d open my heavy brown briefcase, take out two antacid tablets, and get to work.
That should have been a clue. It’s a classic symptom of workaholism-using your job to escape the reality of life. Another classic symptom is to have your identity so tied up with your job that you have no meaning unless you’re working.
“Workaholism” isn’t even a word in the sense that it appears in any dictionaries or medical books. But there is some serious writing on the subject. For instance, pastoral counselor Howard Clinebell says,
“Dependence on overwork and dependence on overeating are psychologically very similar to drug dependence.”
Then I found a definition of alcoholism that startled me. It’s from the World Health Organization. “An alcoholic is an excessive drinker whose dependence on alcohol has attained such a degree that it shows in noticeable mental disturbance or interference with bodily and mental health, interpersonal relationships, and smooth economic and social functioning.”
Change “alcohol” to ‘ work” and that’s it. Exactly! Except for the economic part. People with other kinds of addictions usually suffer financially. Workaholics are given raises and promoted.
I was working in New York as an executive with the National Council of Churches in the U.S., with a big office and a very reasonable salary. Early every morning I’d grab my heavy brown briefcase and squeeze into the carpool with all the other executives and their briefcases. We’d talk shop all the way to work.
In the briefcase, along with the headache pills, the antacid, and all the papers I’d fussed with late the night before, was a brown bag with my lunch. I didn’t have time to go out.
The only time I’d take a rest from work was when I developed one of my massive headaches. Then I’d go home early, sleep it off, and be back at work the next morning.
Meanwhile, at home, Bev and the kids were becoming a one-parent family. I was physically at work half the time and emotionally at work the rest of it. That was one important reason our marriage was showing some pretty wide cracks. It was Bev, I thought, who couldn’t cope. I just went back to work.
It’s strange I couldn’t see it in myself because I saw it so clearly in my boss. He was a basket case, I thought. Six o’clock in the morning would see him at his desk, and he wouldn’t leave until nine at night. Then he’d take a briefcase full of work to do at home.
The building where I worked was full of people like him. With a few exceptions like me, most were clergy. My guess is that about a third were workaholics.
Wayne Oates, a minister and psychologist from Kentucky who has studied the subject, says ministers are particularly vulnerable because much of their work is of an unseen, intangible, invisible kind, and they cannot point to specific results.
Workaholics have a great need to be needed, which is natural. But we try to fill that need by making ourselves indispensable in our jobs rather than through developing relationships with other people.
Workaholism isn’t just a male disease. Wayne Oates also says many homemakers are workaholics, finding their identity and purpose in the perpetual round of feeding, taxiing, scheduling, and worrying over youngsters. Some of them get that way because they’re married to workaholics. In that sense, the disease is communicable.
Mine came from my father. I have many images in my mind about Dad, who died when I was in my early twenties. None of these images has him relaxing or just spending time with me for the fun of it. He was always working at something-if not at his teaching, then around the house or garden. He had good reason to work hard. Life was a constant, sometimes desperate struggle to make ends meet.
I follow the same pattern, but I don’t have the same justification. Probably I’ll never be able to “erase the tape” that makes me what I am. I have a friend in A.A. who says, “You never stop being an alcoholic, but you can stop drinking.” I can choose to live by a different set of values.
With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see I actually started working on my liberation from workaholism while we were still in New York. That was probably the real reason I resigned from my big office and took a job in Calgary.
For a little while things were better. But we really hadn’t dealt with the fundamental questions, so we soon fell into the same old traps.
Workaholism is an escape from reality, from a real encounter with ourselves, with others, and with God. As long as we can prop up our sense of self-worth by working like Trojans, we feel fine. When the job is finished, so is the sense of purpose and meaning. That’s why so many people die the year they retire.
That’s what happened to my dad. When he retired from teaching school, he worked hard at his garden. When the doctor told him he had a slightly enlarged heart and to stay out of the garden, he had nothing. It killed him.
The early Hebrews knew something we should relearn. They considered Sabbath rest to be something holy; important enough to make it one of the Ten Commandments. If we took the Sabbath concept seriously, we’d do much to control workaholism as well as a variety of other related diseases.
There’s another even more relevant commandment-the first one, about not having other gods. When my work, even my work for the church, became the most important thing in my life, I was guilty of idolatry.
That’s not the conscious reason I quit my job. I know now I also had an unconscious need to get “the monkey off my back.”
Sure, it might have been possible to shake my work addiction and keep my job, just as it’s possible to beat the bottle without leaving home and work. I know people who have done both, though usually with help.
One of my friends used an idea he called the “full date book.” He marked off a couple of evenings each week, a couple of Saturdays each month, every Sunday, and a few other days here and there. When anyone asked him to do anything during those times, he simply said, “Sorry, I’m booked.” It worked, but it took him months before he could say that without hedging or feeling guilty.
I needed something more drastic, something that wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t been married to Bev. She has taken over the role of chief breadwinner in our household. I write, produce audio-visuals, make speeches, and lead workshops.
I’ve joined the choir at the church, something I’ve never “had time for,” and I’ve started work on the huge garden I wanted to grow in the Okanagan sunshine. Most of all, I want to leave myself open to see the subtle colors of life being lived around me. That’s hard to do if your arm is aching from the weight of a heavy brown briefcase.
-Ralph Milton
Winfield, B.C.
Copyright © 1981 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
