You're Wrong About - Emotional Labor with Rachel Monroe and Ash Compton of Bad Therapist

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

What is "emotional labor," and why is it probably not what your boyfriend accuses you of making him do when you want him to go to Ikea with you? Psychotherapist Ash Compton and journalist Rachel Monroe are here to tell the tale of how the term sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined—in her 1983 book The Managed Heart—has come to mean, well, almost everything. How is the term still useful? How can we use therapy language as a tool for growth or an excuse for avoiding it? And whose job is it to do these dishes? Happy Valentine's Day from You're Wrong about and Bad Therapist.Bad Therapist https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-therapist/id1780035004Arlie Russell Hochschild https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschildSupport You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-therapist/id1780035004https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschildhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the show

Let a woman take a sick day for God's sake. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we have a Valentine's Day special of sorts with the hosts of Bad Therapist, Rachel Monroe and Ash Compton. I always like to try and do a Valentine's Day episode, although normally it's a bit tough to remember that there are other holidays coming up after Christmas. But I was really thrilled to have Rachel and Ash on this week to talk about emotional labor because I think that really there's nothing more romantic than learning effective communication and that's what this story gets into a little bit today. Rachel is a journalist and has been on quite a few previous episodes of the show.

Ash is a psychotherapist and about their show they write, At a moment when therapy speak has made it into the mainstream and trauma is a national preoccupation, I wonder why. It's high time to examine the shadow side of mental health. And that's part of what we're trying to do together today. I had surprisingly a really good time. If you like bonus episodes, we have some for you over on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions. The one we have out right now I really adore especially it is with Sarah Archer, our home economics correspondent and we're talking about Peg Bracken's 1960 masterpiece, the I Hate to Cook book, which is for people who hate to cook and also for

people who don't hate it or maybe hate it a little bit more than they're willing to admit. It was a lovely episode for me to get to record with her to talk about what it means to try and feed ourselves when everything is scary. I think we came up with some solutions and it's also got recipes in it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening.

Please take care of yourself this week and here is your episode. Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast where we talk about useful ideas that perhaps become so diluted and confusing that they are no longer valuable, especially when people's boyfriends start using them. And I am joined today by longtime friend of the show, Rachel Monroe, and new time friend of the show, Ash Compton. You are both here to tell us about your podcast and also today's topic. Emotional labor. Yay. Our podcast is called Bad Therapist and it's about bad therapists.

There isn't really like one bad therapist, I would say, in this world of emotional labor, but it is definitely a concept that started in the world of like sociology and academia and then like morphed into one of these kind of therapy speak words that we end up talking a lot about on the podcast. So it seemed like a good thing to to talk about with you, Sarah. Yeah, and I requested this because I was like, we should do a Valentine's Day episode. And this is my version of that, kind of. And one of the things that I find really compelling

about emotional labor as a concept in terms of the whole story of who came up with this term and why and what was it originally meant to mean and then how did it sort of, I guess, in the sort of Miranda Priestly effect of it all, like trickle down into the bargain bins of YouTube, you know, charlatan therapy speak and become at a certain point in my estimation a code that some people use to mean anything in a relationship that I don't feel like doing right now. Anything that I have an emotion, a negative emotion about becomes emotional labor.

So classically American, I would like to re-delegate this to someone else. The buck continues to go around and around here. Yeah, what inspired you to dive into the world of bad therapists? I don't think, Rachel, you can correct me, but I don't think a singular therapist was like, aha, but more so it was around like the mental health sphere becoming kind of bloated and more multi-billion dollar loaded. And so we were looking at like, what, who is added to this? Who's acting out around it and toward it. And of course, we had a couple ideas like Reich and what's the history of Freud who we both like,

but has an interesting past. He's a wild and crazy guy, I feel. I feel like when I read Freud, half the ideas, I'm like, that's really quite something. And then he'll say something incredibly bizarre right after that, not in a good way. And you're like, well. Yeah.

The pioneers, as we call them, had some great ideas that we still call upon. And of course, someone building a map to a world they'd never traveled to had some throwaway-able concepts as well. I feel like we should say that Ash is a therapist herself, which I feel like will come up when we talk about emotional labor, you know, showing up in the world of therapy and interpersonal relationships. Yeah. And I'm a journalist. Yeah. And Rachel, I feel like you've,

you know, you've done some great episodes of the show that I encourage people to listen back to. But I feel like you've been like from your, in your own milieu, like covering a lot of stories that involve trying to sort of see deeply into people in a way that feels sort of like, like you're not a therapist, but you've done a lot of hours in some kind of like therapy adjacent practice. It almost seems. Well, I'm like, it's like the Janet Malcolm book where like the journalist is sort of like the corrupt indefensible therapist.

Well, and yeah, so let's get into the original definition. What is, how is this phrase born and what's the first chapter here? So who first came up with it was a sociologist, Arlie Russell Hothchild, and she wrote a book in 1983 called The Managed Heart, the Commercialization of Human Feeling. And so in that subtitle, you can kind of sense where she was going. But Hothchild attended initial and reoccurring trainings at the Delta Airlines Corporation.

Yes, they were known in terms of like when all the airlines were getting more popular and more kind of like commercialized and standardized. Delta is known for its customer service. And in fact, all airlines actually had sort of like a type that reminded me of sorority rushing only that I know from Bama rush talk, by the way, my only entrance into it. But when I was reading about the airlines and like why Delta was chosen, it reminded me of like this, you know, Delta prefers kind of like a Southern Bell, like a Rosalind Carter type of person. This one prefers like kind of more buttoned up, possibly sophisticated. And this one

they wear turbines and you work in space, but you have Velcro shoes. Where is that flight? I'd like to take it. So few passengers. It's wonderful. Yeah. So she was like using this as a case study. She interviewed extensively flight attendants. She attended the trainings. And she came up with this term when a pilot, when she witnessed a pilot telling one of the recruits to smile like you mean it and like really kind of this is your biggest asset like really make sure

to dial it in you know at its most basic she's talking about and like working through the management of feeling to create this like publicly observable facial and bodily display you know dot dot dot for a corporation to make more money. Right, and like, and to get back into flying and sort of what commercial airlines were sort of about, because I think it like, it's funny for me to hear, and I suspect for a lot of people to hear, that like, there used to really be that much

to differentiate the different airlines, because now you just kind of like choose whoever has the cheapest ticket and who isn't spirit. You know, I did meet a man who was like had the worst emotional labor job ever who worked at the like, like outside the spirit counter and had to just like explain to people this was in Las Vegas. I just had to explain to people like,

no, I'm sorry you bought this ticket. These are the stupid rules for the ticket. Oh, my God. The enforcer. Remember when you bought it and it was cheap? Like, this is why. And just sort of had to like remind people what they did. And he was so, so worn down by this job of people just coming to him being angry about the choice that they had made. You know, we all do this. We like click through.

You scroll through and you're like, oh, it is. It's fifty dollars cheaper, which seems fine until you show up at the airport and they won't let you have a personal item. They charge you $25 to print out your boarding pass. Wait, wait, this was Spirit? Yes. Yes. And this guy was like, look, I'm sorry, you bought the ticket. You knew what you were getting into anyway. And I mean, flight attendants still have to do this. It still seems like an incredibly grueling and thankless job, you know, that you at least have to like pretend to be trying to be nice.

But I imagine that, you know, in this period, it was like there was a the facade was meant to be a lot more seamless than it is now. Absolutely. And there were of note like fewer flights happening, fewer passengers. And then alongside there was sexualization happening in ad culture. So other flight attendants from like different airlines, depending on which one, I think Pan Am was like pretty well known for that. Flight attendants would be upset about like the merging of this assumption that like they were there to be kind of the sexual object. Like, I don't work for that airline. They're the ones like advertising sex, not ours. Ours is more about brand gentleness. Right. Yeah. So this is like, it's like rising alongside, Of course, it's the move from manufacturing to more service oriented jobs in particular

in general in America. But it's also like, you know, kind of happening alongside advertising culture being more integrated into corporate worlds. So yeah, and then what is the initial definition that we end up with because of this? It's funny because in her book, she defines it in a footnote. I don't think she knew when she was doing it that she was like creating something that was going to hit so hard. So it's like almost kind of hard to find. But it is. Yeah. It's in a footnote.

It makes me think of Judith Butler being like, I didn't really think that that many people would read gender trouble. And it is like, yeah, I don't know why you would have thought that many people would read it trouble. And it is like, yeah, I don't know why you would have thought that many people would read it either. And yet it happened. Right. But in 2018, she kind of renotes it as the work for what you're paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job.

This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it, some a little of it. From the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural to the bill collector whose job it is to be if necessary, harsher than natural. There are a variety of jobs that call for this. And of note to she has a section, she divides the book into public and private work and lives. And so relationships are kind of lightly talked about off and on in the private life part. But in the public, she also I think I am thinking at the time it was to include men which this is a whole other topic we can get into. But that's where she gets into bill

collectors. And so Hothchild often talks about this like pinch point, which is more or less the contrast between what you actually feel like like perhaps livid at a, what they call an irate person on a flight who like throws a drink at you or grabs your thigh or something. And then what you are kind of forced or trained to like explicitly trained to emote instead. And then so the bill collector would be kind of the inverse of that, like, where the flight attendants kind of wanting to be subordinate to the customer, the bill collector is actually trained to teach you like your piece of shit so they can collect the bill. And they're like above you.

So she includes that I think not just to have like men included as well who just at the time were like a far fewer section of flight attendants, which has changed. But I think she's also showing kind of the inverse emotionality that this can include. Yes, which is interesting because I feel like to the extent that I've even been aware of it in terms of its original definition, I've generally thought of it as like forced cheerfulness and like the way that you know, especially like Disney parks employees or cast members rather have to behave. But like the idea of bringing in sort of like all these different affective roles and also seeing I actually I think it's

actually like quite great to think about the way men behave at work as an emotional sort of like a trained affect or a sort of training into a certain emotional choreography the same way that we see like stewardesses and cocktail waitresses doing that to use really 80s terminology because it's like it's all just as fake it's all fake yeah it's all like a federal judge is performing as much as a Delta flight attendant is. I was just rewatching Twin Peaks and I was thinking thinking about emotional labor because Andy do you guys remember Andy? Oh, yeah, of course. Andy has this thing when he sees like when he sees Laura Palmer's body or when he goes to the crime scene where he just starts

like crying. And that's she she uses it. I mean, cops aren't like a great example because there's a lot more going on there. And she's mostly talking about service economy stuff. But I was thinking about Andy and I was like, oh, that's that's such an appropriate response to like to seeing a body or to being at a place where like somebody was murdered. Yeah. So like weep. But that is not permitted emotional expression for a police officer.

And so like in the show, it comes off as really incongruous, but it also seems completely appropriate and correct and human. It's like his humanity makes him a little bit of a fool as a cop, but like a better human. Yeah. And then, but then that like, according to our training and, you know, the cop media we watched growing up,

that it would be correct emotionally for him to like ransack a room and knock a bunch of stuff over because he's so angry because he can't be sad, but he can be mad. Exactly. I think of that with athletes too, like where you're there's this like permitted expression of like tossing Gatorade on your coacher, but also like tearing something down.

I guess this goes with fans too. Maybe we'll see with the Super Bowl. When you think about it, the fans are working very hard. Yeah. I mean, whatever the Eagles do, it's, you know, they're going to burn that city down. I mean, generally in this era, like it's basically like companies are like, oh, we can commodify emotions. Excellent. You know, that's like the long and short of it in a way.

It's like corporate branding. The the the employee becomes an extension of a corporate brand. I've been thinking a lot about Trader Joe's like stuff coming out now about, you know, their bad labor and sourcing practices and stuff. But like Trader Joe's, like the brand of Trader Joe's is like, we're the nice grocery store. Hawaiian shirts. I know. And the worst is that I do fall for it.

I'm like, man, that cashier really likes me. Wait a minute. Yeah. And actually, it's, you know, maybe this has shifted. Maybe it's way, way shifted. But at the time when this book was written, I think it was about like a flight attendant might spend like one, one and a half hours with you longer if the flight is longer. But actually every person on a flight has 100 hours of labor behind it, like the bag person

or you know, someone who's like, you know, on the customer service lens, someone who's on the customer service lens, someone who's in the office, arranging things, all the pilot situations. Obviously I know nothing about flight work. Just like I'm like. And I wonder to what extent this sort of like helped fertilize the robust American Karen type, because I feel like if you're of a certain age,

then you grew up when a lot of service workers were like doing a better job of pretending to like you. Totally, yes. Right, that expectation dies hard. The person who you interact with at a desk is like the victim of so much cost cutting and so many like razor-thin margins that that they're under so much stress and are in so little control of anything because so much has also been automated around them. And just the way that business has moved in so many directions that they don't really have the power

to make you happy. And they're too tired to pretend that they care. Totally. Yeah, that fantasy has died hard, like you said. So Arlie Heschel wrote this book and this definition that was just mentioned in the footnote really caught on and there were a ton of subsequent studies and stuff.

And one of the interesting things that came out of these thousands of studies of this in the sociological realm was that sometimes, sometimes emotional labor works. I think the one study that I was looking at called it like amplified enthusiasm or amplified positive affect can like in the right conditions have this resonance.

And so like, if you do, if the like Trader Joe's employee like really does seem like they like your banana or whatever, like you can can have a nice interaction there. Or if you're a tour guide, you don't want to be like, and here is the city I live in that I see every day. Probably annoyingly to everybody who knows me, I'm a chit-chatter with the retail worker. I think Ash and I are opposite probably on this spectrum.

Yes, you are a chit-chatter. I'm like, let's go, we gotta go. I'm just born to be somebody's annoying mom. What what tends to be difficult in an emotional labor context is this idea of dissonance. So when you're like the further that like the emotion you're feeling is from the emotion you're expected to perform. And I think like as these jobs get, like you're saying, Sarah, more and more difficult, and these constraints are imposed from outside

that make your job worse and make your ability to actually perform care harder than the dissonance increases. Like she talks about nurses and in hospitals, that's always gonna be a hard job and you're always gonna be performing care that is for money for somebody that you don't know. There's some level of faking the emotion

that's always gonna be there and that's not necessarily bad, but when hospitals are taken over by private equity and you have a timeline that you're supposed to meet and you're disincentivized to form any sort of relationship or spend any time with somebody, then the care becomes more and more performative and more and more distant from any sort of reality. It feels like what you're talking about

is almost kind of like an uncanniness that can take over. Where if someone is just way too careful given the obvious circumstances or something, then you start to feel like you're being taken care of by an automaton, but what we really want is just like 15% fakery, like the whole hog. Yeah, it's like that gulf is the gulf is the problem. And some of it, so much of it maps onto like civil society,

like how to, you know, whatever, if you're in a really bad mood, how to like be nice to someone who comes to your door with a package free, you know, it's like this happens all the time when we bump up against other humans, but hostile will talk about like deep acting versus like surface acting.

And so in the mid 20th century, while there's this like rise of the managed heart, as she called it, like with this- That's beautiful. Yeah, right. What is that, a Larry Kramer play? I know, right? Yeah, so like with this like commercialization of healing,

the like one of the key components was like, you know, where employees were trying to, Yeah, so with this commercialization of healing, one of the key components was where employees were trying to, as Rachel was noting, genuinely feel the emotions that they were meaning to display. Not just for the branding purposes, which are of note, but the healthcare industry is a really big part of this too. Like as you're saying with nurses or any hospitalists, like, you know, you know, people are in pain at times or they've just lost a level and or they are about to and like, so even if you are exhausted on your feet for a 16 hour shift, the deep acting is sort of necessary here versus the surface acting where it is

more inauthentic. That's interesting. Yeah. And I mean, this does cause me to reflect on something I've always thought about journalism, which is that it's like one of the weird professions. And into this bucket, I would also put like therapy, sex work, house cleaning, and some other stuff I'm not thinking of, but like jobs that involve like, and also like healthcare professions,

nursing especially, where you're like directly interacting with people so much of the time and talking to them and like, and also detectives. But these jobs where part of the job is talking like neutrally or in a way that encourages people to open up about topics that they have perhaps never talked about with anyone in their entire life. Or to just like show up and sort of like have this profession based intimacy that is socially acceptable because of the

context and in a way that feels completely different than like any of the other training that were put through in terms of how to interact in a society. That hopefully has ethical boundaries that contain it. And this is why we've brought up coaching on bad therapists too, because it's like, well, this just kind of play acts something that is actually regulated in another form. You have to learn how to do that in a way that's safe for you and the other person.

Right. And to get more specific, were you saying in your show that basically life coaching is a job for people who want to be therapists but don't want to be hindered by a governing body or anything like that? People are going to get mad at me in the comments. Life coaches are, yeah.

No, I mean, there is a place for them. I think health coaching is one version where I'm not going to check up on, maybe some therapists therapists would but it's not within my training to check up on like if someone hitting their macros and like, you know, having boundaries with your family. Like, I'm just like, just become a therapist. I don't know, there's a whole language. I love how that's a such a voice that I've heard so many times and that like, what is that? Yeah, you're really good at it. You're like alarmingly good at it.

I can dip into it, it's, yeah. Yeah. Something that the subsequent studies found is that like ways that you can kind of minimize the strain or the burnout effect of this emotional labor. One is by having a supportive co-worker environment. So you have people that you work with. Again, there was a study with nurses and it's like, okay, if the nurses can go talk to each other and be authentic with each other, then it makes it, it kind of resets them or renews them to go then like deal with the patients and like perform whatever needs to be performed.

And the other thing which I think is like, maybe it's so obvious, but also maybe under covered is like financial compensation. Like there's a lot that we'll do if we feel like we're being paid fairly for it. People don't usually talk about like therapists being burdened by emotional labor because it's like, well, that's fundamentally the expectation and you get paid pretty well to do it.

Right. And it's considered like the main thing that you're doing as opposed to like the thing you have to do on top of getting diet cokes for everybody or whatever. Right. And like, of course, what like because the industry feels like it's losing money, it's like get diet cokes for people. You have like two minutes to serve everyone two drinks and a whole meal if a meal is even provided.

And so some of the more recent flight attendants have talked about how they have to kind of condense the smile in a certain way because they only have like 30 seconds per person to give, which reminds me of healthcare too in terms of like a doctor has like 15 minutes with you go and it's like, okay, hold on. Where's my list of symptoms I've encountered in the last two years? You know? Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you get people say like, say one nice thing. So nice to meet you, you know, like you can feel it kind of the checklist. You can. It's also like, I don't know, I'm in like a weird part of my period. So I guess I was feeling very dysregulated and paranoid.

And I was like, I bet there are people in America who are voting for a lot of stuff who have felt this way for like years or just in like a, you know, and I'm speculating, but just are in like a year's long state of dysregulation. And it's so funny to think about like, we are living in a culture where I think, like, a lot of people are being encouraged in our political landscape to stay as paranoid and as riled up as possible. And then-

Totally. We have, you know, as we're talking about here, like, the counterbalance of that in a way of, like, people who have to, at least within a certain frame, like, be so in command of their emotions or at least the performance that they're providing that you have to control what you're allowing yourself to feel based on like, you know,

how many hours you have in your shift or something like that. C.N. Nagai, she's a great cultural theorist and writes books on aesthetics and things like that. I know her work because she co-wrote an article on Candyman that I read many years ago. I highly recommend her work. She really includes great film references, which I'm sure you would do. Yeah, it was a great Candyman article.

Yeah. Good stuff. But one of her small points, because it's just like her books are jam-packed, you're like, wait, hold on, can I see a whole book about that one paragraph? But one thing she kind of more or less casually mentions in and out of the chapter is what we used to see as like female competencies, which comes up in this like, you know, rise of the managed heart, then becomes assigned to men

because of the loss of manufacturing jobs. So like Walmart greeters and cable guys and she even talks about the film cable guy and kind of like the awkward interactions he's Jim Carrey is having and like customer service agents and IT people over the phone are saying yeah exactly nursing all these other like previously gendered into kind of a feminine category, but now are like assigned to men more or more. So she's assigning some of the backlash and this like fetishization of the coal mining and like bringing back car manufacturing as like, no, we don't want these jobs. Like,

we don't want these care jobs, you know, it's sort of this unconscious collective thing she's pointing out. But like the new archetypes of men in these care roles, how they come up and again, she uses like the toy, the film and cable guy and all these other ones. So it's like either like, okay, either redefine the archetype or, and you know, make it multifaceted or like we're gonna keep seeing this backlash in a way.

Yeah, well, which makes me think of Mr. Mom, a movie that felt the need to invent a new title for a male parent who takes care of children. So necessary, it's like when men babysit their children. Their very own children, yeah, it's really, yeah. It's something. Super generous of them really. Well okay, so we have this term that

is in the footnote of a book. And I assume that there is kind of like a rocky road between that footnote and regular people throwing this terminology around. And I would love to hear about that. Yeah, when Arlie Herschelde is writing her book, she's very much thinking of emotional labor, like that word labor is really important to her. And she talks briefly in the book about like other kinds of emotion management, like when it happens in an interpersonal, like a non work setting.

but it's very important for her to create a distinction. She calls that emotion work or emotion management because it's not being exchanged for wages. It's not a labor context. And these days when you hear people talk about it, they're much more likely to be talking about their intimate relationships and nothing to do with serving customers. Just kind of looking into like how that happened.

I mean, there was always a little bit of like slippage with the term, but I do think that you can trace like its current therapy speak, social media, kind of fad moment to like this period between 2015 and 2017 when it suddenly became this circulating word. And I think this is what we see sometimes with these therapy speak words, is like something will go viral,

and then it just like spawns a bunch of other content that is like maybe kind of loosely related, or everybody's just kind of like riffing on whatever's trending at the moment. And I kind of loosely related. Everybody's just kind of riffing on whatever's trending at the moment. And I kind of think that's what happened in this era to emotional labor. I think one of the first important timeline moments

is there's an article in The Toast. Remember The Toast? Oh my god, I loved The Toast. Wow. A Dear Departed website in July 2015 by Jess Zimmerman, which is about emotional labor. And she talks about like a bunch of different stuff. But like one of one of her main points is about, I don't know.

She goes through like men catcalling women on the street. And then she also talks about like her male friends who call her up and are like vent about their breakups or something. And like, don't ask her about hers and she talks about sex work and it's just like it's a little bit all over the place in its examples but it's is well written and taps into a certain emotional frustration. And it feels weird to have to describe this but I mean you and you and I actually met because we were both publishing stuff in the hairpin and the all at the same time in like 2012. Yeah.

We really I didn't know that. That is the origin. That's the origin story. And those were the hairpin was the first place that I ever published anything. Me too. I think that's gone to write hairpin is gone is no longer. I was. Yeah. Yep. There are no more. But the article went pretty viral. But then like what even like took it over more was there was a it got reposted on Metafilter. Do you guys read Metafilter? Oh, my God. Is Metafilter still around? I mean, it's just like this remnant of the old school Internet.

Yeah. And there's like just a robust community there. It feels like an old message board almost in a way. So somebody posts the toast article on Metafilter and then people just start commenting like crazy. It just hits a nerve and people are like, ah yes, like emotional labor, that's the phrase for the thing that's been bothering me in my relationship.

And I mean, it's like hard to explain how crazy this thread got. Like somebody made a PDF, like a condensed annotated PDF of like the best parts of it, which is like 50 pages long. It's like a 50 page PDF. And that's just, I mean, there are just like thousands of posts, people are like coming back, chiming in.

It's just like when something hits a nerve, like this totally hit a nerve. Or is this when people start using it to talk about relationships and I mean, not to put too fine a point on it are like women being like, I have to do this with the men in my life all the time. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think like, first of all, it's like women being like, I have to do this with the men in my life all the time. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think like, first of all, it's like explicitly very gendered, you know, in the

Hush Hull book, she's like talking about the gender aspects of the way that like emotional labor can be like gender coded or there's like a gender layer to it. But what starts coming up here is like, first of all, like, emotional labor is something that like, basically, like women do for men or to compensate for men. So people are talking about their intimate relationships, their friendships, and their romantic partnerships. One of the really stuck out in my mind was a woman saying, my mother-in-law gets mad

at me when my husband forgets her birthday. So just like these kind of like things that get like emotion relationship management that gets like routed through women. Yeah. I feel like we grew up in the era of like the commercials that were like making dipshits of husbands. Like, oh my gosh, my husband, we need this cereal bar because he's trapped in the blinds behind me, you know,

I don't know what he's doing. And it just feels like it's a little bit, it's giving a little tiny bit of that in a way. Oh yeah, there's a Robitussin commercial from the late 80s that just happens to be on something that my family taped at that time that I always, that makes me think of where it's like, Robitussin, because when mom is sick,

your husband is obviously no goddamn help. I remember, I know the end of that somewhere in the archives. It'll come to me. Yeah, and one of them is like, look, mom's better. And she's like, oh brother, it looks like I'm clocking in again. And it's like, let a woman take a sick day for God's sake. That overworking woman could have showed up in one of the Kool-Aid commercials. I'm clocking in again and it's like let a woman take a sick day for God's sake. You know what?

That overworking woman could have showed up in one of the Kool-Aid commercials because it's like who's going to clean that wall up? She's just like wandering from commercial to commercial in a bathrobe cleaning up after her and then she's like in the like Jeep ads just like sweeping all the mud. Her hair getting grabbed by getting frazzled. It's like slugging Robitussin as she goes. Yeah. But it also seems like this is where and I forget who came up with this term, but this this idea of kin keeping totally.

Because I mean, it's it is. And this is accelerated so much in the past 10 years. But this thing where like we now sort of have ideas in the shape of trends. And I'm sure that we always have. But it's just that the trend machine is so accelerated and so like you can monetize it so quickly that it feels different than it used to, I guess. But it's yeah, it's interesting that this is clearly like there have been a lot of attempts that have, you know, in many cases, named something pretty incisively of like the things that women are doing that nobody realizes women are doing.

But it seems like they all got kind of rolled into it. I'm imagining an Indiana Jones folder. Yeah, totally. I imagine this like starts to show up in the therapy realm too. This term that was once super precise is now being used to apply to a bunch of different stuff that fall under that umbrella. Totally. It's become this omni-clump of emotional labor, division of labor, what else? Mental load. It just like sometimes, and you know, you don't want to be like correcting someone in a couples therapy session necessarily,

getting in the semantics. You're like, actually. Actually, you're talking about mental load. You're crying about something other than what you're calling it. And what is mental load while we're on the topic? Well, okay, if emotional labor is like having to perform through service or deep acting acting like an emotion that's

commodified generally, mental load is more so like, I have to keep in mind the kids dental appointments and I have to, OK, so yes, you're now feeding the cat twice a day, but I'm having to make sure the food is stocked up and I have to also maybe possibly remind you. And I feel like I do, I see that one or lately, I feel like I've seen that one described in terms of like,

when I asked my husband to decide what we're going to have for dinner and he says, babe, what do you feel like that's mental load? And it's like, kind of, but like, it's not the best example I can possibly think of. Yeah, I would say it's, it has to be to be more to me a more of a burden than that. And like I get that we're fed up with men and we want to find fault with them. But let's just at least convict them of what they're actually guilty of. And I mean, another thing that I think about a lot as someone who is like, you know, ADHD and like fairly incompetent in like a genuine way. Like I think the term weaponized incompetence has also perhaps

been one that we started to use a little bit too freely. Cause this idea that anytime you tell a guy to do something and he can't do it right, that that's weaponized incompetence. It's like, well, some men, a lot of men know what side their bread is buttered on and they have made a lifelong practice out of squirming out of responsibilities they don't feel like doing and that's very real. But also like a lot of these things you're doing are skill sets that they don't have. And I do think sometimes sometimes the emotional labor, you know, this vague use of emotional

labor does even it's like thinks that it's a gender critique that ends up just like reinforcing gender norms in a way, you know, it's just like, oh, as a woman, you know, like I have to like cook and I'm like, you know, expected to like keep a really clean house. And yeah, as a person who is like, also in competent at things, I'm just sort of like, you're like, and my husband is displaying weaponized incompetence and not replacing the throw pillows where they're supposed to be and it's like look Maybe it doesn't matter that much where the throw pillows are Just possibly and women can be incompetent too. I know look at me. I Haven't cooked in so long. I am like the queen of girl dinner. I'm glad there's finally a name for it

Yeah, my partner, my male partner called it weaponized incompetence. I would be like, excuse me. Excuse me, that is my word for you. Exactly. Yeah, it feels like these are useful terms, but also we can use them in a way that like more deeply entrenches us in this idea of like, well, women just have to take care of everything and men are just, I don't even know why we keep

them around. And it's like, if you don't know why you keep them around, then don't keep them around. Exactly. There's like, there is a, there is this nihilism in the way that some people talk about it, where it's just sort of like, well, this is how it is and this is how it will always be and I'm just gonna vent about it but not actually expect anything to change. This kind of reaches its apotheosis in some ways in 2017. So in the kind of degraded virality of people trying

to wring more content and more money from the subject. There's an article in Harper's Bazaar, again, in 2017. So this goes so viral that it becomes a book. It's one of these kind of classic, quote unquote, relatable stories where it's her birthday and she asks her husband, she's just like, all I want is a professional cleaner to clean the bathroom.

And instead of making that happen, he's like, I'm gonna clean the bathroom. I mean, it's just one of these stories, it's like listening to somebody else's dream, like listening to somebody else's domestic drama. You know the meme where somebody is like, I'm not reading all that happy for you. Or sorry that happened to you.

That's the beginning of like I have a no bandwidth, right? That was the viral moment of like I have no bandwidth anymore. Oh, yeah. Yes, that was one of my favorite ones. I have I have many theories about this in the therapy space and we'll get to it. But I also have a cultural theory that people work out in their domestic orientations and relationships what like we want to collectively, especially dominant culture, avoid working out in a more systemized or systemic way, where it's like so many hours get spent on this and it's like, okay, well, what,

let's talk about fairness culturally, at large right now. I mean, I think it's very notable that this is happening in 2017. You know, just like the period of me too. And like, we'd also just discovered mansplaining. It feels like it was like the last moment before social media just like completely segmented and balkanized. And so the last thing we all, not we all, but the last thing a lot of people of a certain at least sort of age group shared was this like massive like are the straights okay moment and like, yeah, like what you're saying, right, like we were having this like, this kind of like

shocking moment of like kind of civil war between men and women broadly in the United States. And so we we enacted it partly in the housework sphere, like we probably always do. But I mean, but it's also like, this isn't emotional labor. Yeah, I mean, we all have a right to complain at any time. But it's like, but at a certain point, it's like we're getting farther away from the thing we're trying to name. Maybe it's abstracting, giving it the wrong name means that we're never actually talking about what we're talking about. Or it seems like there's we're obfuscating like what the conversation

actually wants to be. Well, and it occurs to me as you're saying that, because I've always framed it to myself as like, isn't it funny that this term that like originated to specifically talk about the way people have to behave to customers at their jobs or, you know, to other workers as well, but like customer facing, you know, a lot of the time that like, it has moved over to marriage and to the home.

And I always thought that was sort of a mistake. And now I'm like, what if it's a tell? And one of the tell here is that marriage is a job. And marriage is the job that like, you know, women are expressing an awareness that they are working by talking about it that way. But it doesn't feel like that got explicitly named inside of this moment of like, marriage is work. And that's why we're all talking about it this way. It's not working hard at it as if you're like, you know, inside of a mind like, come on, just keep digging. But yeah, it is actual labor. But the thing that's different about like the the work that you do in a relationship

versus the work that you do at your job is like, ostensibly, you're in a relationship of peers, and you can, I think like there's, I guess that's one of the things that bothers me about it is like some way in which people seem to be not admitting that they have the power to leave the relationship, kind of like, it's different when your boss exists in this corporate,

you're in this corporate structure and your boss is telling you you have to perform a certain kind of like it's different. Like when your boss exists in this corporate, you're in this corporate structure and your boss is telling you, you have to perform a certain kind of way in order to keep your job, which is like how you get your health insurance. I don't know, like that's just like not the same dynamic as your relationship. It reveals how we believe our relationships with men are,

I think, because it's, you know, because this phenomenon, you know, was like mostly, you was mostly women writing about men that they were married or partnered with or living with. And it does feel like, the more I think about it, this revelation of this grand passive aggressive dance that's been going on for decades that culminates. And the husband is not your coworker.

He is actually customer and your job is to like maintain this like generationally, you know, taught facade of happily doing stuff you don't want to do because if you don't he might kill you. And now we're in a moment of kind of, you know, I mean, we've been we've been in many moments for for a long time and we will keep having them in a fairly nonlinear fashion. But this idea of like feeling like we should feel freer than we are. And it does feel like, yeah, that a lot of those pieces and revelations were like, I hope by people who aren't in those marriages anymore. Exactly. I read that was my notes on the Harper's

Bazaar article was just sort of like fundamentally like bad marriage exclamation point exclamation point. I don't know. Fundamentally. Nope, just a note. That's that's going to be our other spin off podcast. We're going to do what's it like bad neighbor and bad marriage. Yeah. But I was just like, you don't like your husband.

Exactly. Like get out of this. You know, it's not to diminish gendered expectations and the damage that's done or the economy of gratitude and how that plays like back and forth within relationships, friendships too, on equal distribution. But yeah, often it's like, okay, if someone's coming in week after week after week after week to couples therapy, not necessarily my consulting room, but in general, and all they're talking about is division of labor. And can you believe he did this again? It's like, maybe we're talking about compatibility and not being there. Right. And like the fact that you grew up being sold this idea that like, you have to

just pick the least objectionable man you can find as soon as you can and just marry him. And then and you deal and you just like deal with him being annoying by like venting about it. You have some sort of, you know, like emotional authority by being like put upon by- Yes, and then your reward is being a martyr, which I actually said to my mom the other day. I was like, you know, you're not gonna get a prize

for doing stuff you don't wanna do. I don't know if maybe you've been thinking that, but there's no prize coming. So you should probably not. I think our mothers were sold that, unfortunately. I think it was a bad bill of rights that they were sold. Definitely. And we're existing kind of in the working out and working through of that. We just have these ideas in our head of like, no, you have to do this.

This is what it has to look like. And it's like, well, not not actually so much. But even though there are social, economic, actual repercussions for, you know, trying to bust out of that system, but the repercussions for staying in it, too. Yeah, I feel like some of the job of a therapist is not just to like listen to venting that, you know, I'm a psychodynamic therapist. So I always want to go beyond that. And like, what's not in the room is more interesting to me than what is often. But it's like, removing this feigned or fake or externalize or internalize often responsibility that is actually just outmoded or was gifted, cursed by your parents or culture, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, like people are carrying around these amulets and you're like, you could put some of those down.

And they're like, I literally never thought I could put any of these down. Yeah, God bless therapy. That also makes me think of, you know, Gone Girl was such a big movie in what, 2014? And I think was part of this whole stew as well. Cause that was like, I don't know if, I don't know if Gone Girl was such a big movie in what, 2014, and I think was part of this whole stew as well, because that was like, I don't know if, I don't know if Gone Girl scared men

the same way that Fatal Attraction did. I think it did though. They still, they still reference it. It still freaks them out. And women still reference it in a different way, because like I've had, you know, just recently an experience sort of watching it with a female friend and just like wordlessly looking at each other and being like, yes, you know, to me, you know,

it has flaws and it has certainly been used to prop up really misogynistic agendas. But at bottom, I think that it scans as a story, which is that the only way to escape from the bind of the role that you have to perform to be a lovable woman in society is to, spoilers, spoilers for Gone Girl, metaphorically murder yourself and then you get to go sit on a pool floor and eat Cheetos. That was all she wanted to do. But I think it's also like there is something, it doesn't necessarily need to be like seceding from the world or like seceding from relationships.

You just the immediate version. No, I think that that's just the only thing that we can allow ourselves to imagine in a dystopian kind of in that kind of dystopian worldview is like, well, there's no escape for me kind of what you're saying, Rachel, about like, we get more kind of deeply dug into these gender roles of like, I can only be a martyr. And so the only way to live freely is to fake my own death and fundamentally not exist and like live in a lacuna until Lola Kirk takes all my money. Right? Well, communication is baked into all of these forms of labor, right? And it's like, can you this is sounds really simple. But

again, this is such a huge pain point. It makes me think a lot of people are not contending with it. Can you in your romantic or other relationships, talk about what you feel like you're doing and what you wish someone else would do. And again, and I think like there's usually a deeper desire hidden underneath that like request. We're getting also the thing of like, okay, so Rachel, if you and I are having like a very bitter relationship, right. And it is my expectation that when I come home from a long day of work in the pawn shop, that you will have done all of the dishes,

but you feel that because you are making dinner, you really shouldn't have to do all the dishes, but you feel that because you are making dinner, you really shouldn't have to do all the dishes right now seeing as they're your dishes anyway, and you can just do them in the morning anyway and what difference does it really make? And it's like, clearly the problem is not the dishes or like, even right? It's like the problem is that neither of us is saying what we want from each other. And that could be like, I wish I had a different job or like, I hate this house or I've not been attracted to you for seven years.

Which are all like way more threatening conversations to have you can understand why people avoid them. Yeah, I think unconsciously avoid them, you know, it's sort of a shame that this has happened to emotional labor as a concept and that it's gotten so bloated and it's like, we're an umbrella that we're trying to fit so many things underneath that nothing is staying dry and everything's getting wet anyway. It also feels like, I mean, this is kind of what,

part of why I was motivated to have this conversation or to ask about the path that this race has taken because it does seem like now we've reached a point where emotional labor, like gaslighting, like a lot of other terms, has become so diluted and popularized that it now becomes something that people who have not really been paying attention but have picked up enough therapy speak-stounding stuff to say that they can

effectively denounce any responsibility for what's going on, can therefore accuse their partners of wanting them to do, which I find really funny because it's like you should be doing some work for me. I am in a relationship with you. And there are just things that have to be done within a house or if you have pets or you know children or there's a ton of jobs and tasks that are not necessarily fun. Or you think just you know like maybe actually when you get right down to it, it's like the when the term has sort of lost all meaning, which I don't think is true across the board, but maybe is true for some people.

People can use the term emotional labor to actually refer to the act of communicating or to trying to talk about emotions. Or care, just like actual kind of like care that happens in relationships. I mean, it starts to be like at its worst, it's like all of this therapy speak stuff can be this one-sided, when it becomes like an attack, like something that you do to me

rather than the acknowledgement of like a dynamic. And that makes sense in like a labor context, right? Where you have like a boss who is employing you, but like in a friendship or a romantic relationship, like that's, you're in it together. But you don't want to be in a relationship with someone who acts like they're the AFL CIO and you're, you know, GM. Right. If it feels that transactional, maybe it just shouldn't be happening.

And so it can. Yeah. I think like weaponized therapy speak is just a way of saying like, I don't like what you're doing, but I want to like have an aura of like self-righteousness about it. Right. And rather than giving validity to my own emotions, because that's difficult and you know, we all are most of us have to learn how to do that. I'm going to use the citation to say that it's not that I don't even have to think my feelings are important because all I'm saying is that you're bad. I think it's interesting too is like actual like you know health care as an industry gets bigger and bigger and bigger you know like like part of this was happening, emotional labor was happening

when it started eclipsing manufacturing jobs. But now it's just growing, you know, every year after year. And it will because of an aging boomer population. Then how care is talked about within relationships seems to change or get more diluted alongside of that. I don't, you know, I don't have any studies to prove that there's an actual correlation, but it just seems interesting that like all we're doing

and so much money is around care, quote unquote, and all the emotional labor in that. And then what is happening to relationships alongside of that. This feels very 2017. I think it's like not happening as much anymore, but this idea that like, pay me for my time. You know, like my friend calls me and is like venting about his relationship, like, pay me 50 bucks.

And it's like, well, why? I don't know. Like, ideally, this is, you know, I like to think that our like relationships can exist, not sort of like outside of the economy, but like, it doesn't seem like we kind of solve these problems of unbalance or inequality by like making it more monetized. And it feels like for a lot of us, understandably, it is less thinkable to develop strong boundaries than it is to do something you don't want to do and then ask to be paid for it. Right, right.

Exactly. I've been thinking a lot about like, what is the role of emotional labor? Not so much this like therapy speak version of it, but the actual like how it exists in a work context in this realm of like gig work, remote work and chat GPT. I mean, I feel like they've programmed chat GPT to try to do emotional labor in a way that like almost undermines the whole concept of emotional labor in a way that I find very funny. Like I asked. Right. It turns out the person who's best at it is not a person and has no emotions.

It just is always like whenever you ask it a question, it always like gives you a little Trader Joe's compliment, I guess. You know, we were having a party the other day. We were like, what what snacks should we provide for the party? And Chachi Bibi was like, sounds like such a fun party. And you're like, no, it doesn't. I haven't said anything about it. Yeah, exactly. Come on.

I wonder if there will be a turn against that form of emotional labor as we all get frustrated with bots adding steps of fake emotional validation. Because it's fake and it's some version of fake and performance and real and simulated when you're dealing with a customer service representative in the real world. But when it's not even a person, it's like, okay, come on, let's just drop the facade here. None of us has time to do this. Well, and it's misguided emotional labor, because I'm

asking for help because I need help, not because I want to feel like I'm in my living room in an airplane. Yeah. Something compelling to me about the fact that we have had a couple of years now, I guess, of all trying to figure out what our relationships with artificial intelligence will be. And I think that like, no matter how right we are about predicting how it's going to go or what they're capable of, we're revealing a lot about ourselves the whole time. And I appreciate that we're able to do that. Totally. Well, what is the future of poor old emotional labor? Will it is it still useful?

Is it what is what will happen as it struggles forward into the future? Right alongside the gig economy neoliberal automation and I mean, I to me the thing that I keep going back to is like the idea that it's not necessarily a terrible thing to be asked for as long as you're Compensated for it and you get breaks and you have other people to be real with. And I think that's just a lesson in all work, but also maybe all interpersonal relationships too. Is there some sense that I'm being recognized for what I do and that even if I have to be fake sometimes,

there are other times, other places where I get to be real. It is I think again, part of like living in civilized society. But yeah, how is it being compensated? And is it fair? Is it you know, is actual labor that's fair? Right. And I would say doing the show is emotional labor, like no matter what's going on in my life, like I have to and also get to like sit down at a scheduled time and be like, hello, I am the side of myself that is the host of the show, you know, I am gracious.

I am thinking on my feet. I am making you feel, you know, like you're ready to learn and to get excited about the thing we're talking about. And like, you know, if you're doing something that you enjoy, I think like almost inevitably there's some element of emotional performance or of inhabiting a certain side of who you are. But also like, that's nice.

Like I, if I didn't have to sort of, you know, rally emotionally for certain roles in certain parts of my day, then like, I would maybe spend too much time in a part of my brain that I don't like being in as much, you know? Totally. Yeah. And we are all in relational mode. I mean, all three of us have emotional labor as part of our jobs. But to your point, Sarah, like, I think being alongside humans means that you do have to like even if you're on the upside-down bug part of your period like have a persona that is more like grounded. How did you know? That's what I call mine.

I started crying while listening to MC Hammer this morning it's really something. Yeah, not because of it, just during it. That's great. I'm not like sad for him. To be clear. So I guess maybe my takeaway is that language is as useful as we let it be and that you know, probably any useful language can be weaponized, but that doesn't mean that we have to do it and also if you resent your husband that much, then like, you don't have to be married. It's fine. It's fun to be divorced and happy Valentine's Day. And I don't know who needs to hear this, but dump him.

Tell us about your podcast. Tell us about where we can find you both and more of your work. And yeah, happy Valentine's Day to us all. Bad Therapists can be found wherever you get your podcasts. And we are at Bad Therapist Pod on Instagram. We have a hotline. Oh my gosh. All right, they have a hotline. Check it out.

And Rachel, you have written many wonderful things. Is there anything that, not even necessarily most recent, but like what of yours do you want people to experience? What have you liked lately that you've done? I want them all to do the emotional labor of making me feel better by buying my book. Great. Savage appetites. I like to call it Meta True Crime.

It's sort of about why true crime has such a fascination, particularly for women. What is happening there? And Ash, anything to promote? I mean, that's tough because I have a private practice. You can find it at Mood Psychotherapy, but this is not necessarily where I'm going to get clients. But I have a website ashnorthcompton.work. And that was our episode. We've learned so much. Thank you for being with us.

Thank you for being our Valentine. We couldn't do any of this without you. Thank you to Rachel Monroe and Ash Compton of Bad Therapist for being our guests today. And please check out more of their work. It's fantastic stuff. Thank you, as always, most of all, to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing.

And we will see you in two weeks.