Self-Blame and Self-Help   

Image credit - NEWSART/DEAN ROHRER

Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

[Editor's Note: The original research of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, the parent nonprofit organization behind Tikkun magazine, focused on the destructive impact of self-blame at the workplace and demonstrated that reductions in self-blame produce an increased sense of power, better health, and better ability to use social supports to buffer stress. We are delighted to welcome Ofer Sharone as a columnist for Tikkun who will address the ongoing impact of self-blame and the ways that our work and our economy can be organized to reduce self-blame and empower workers.]

Self-Blame and Self-Help

by Ofer Sharone

"I feel like I have a character defect, like I am flawed in some way." This is how Marsha, a forty-two-year-old technical writer, explains her difficulties in finding a new job after three months of unsuccessful job searching. Despite the fact that Marsha was one of hundreds of employees laid off by a large high tech company, and that 14 million other Americans are currently unemployed, Marsha blames herself for her difficulties in finding work. Marsha is not unique. In-depth interviews that I conducted with white-collar American job seekers, as well as numerous other studies, reveal that intense self-blame is pervasive among American job seekers.

Can this self-blame be understood as a universal human response to the experience of unemployment? No. Cross-national research shows that self-blame is far more common and intense among American workers than among workers in other advanced economies. For example, my research shows that Israeli white-collar workers typically blame the state or "the system" for their difficulties, and only rarely themselves. To explain self-blame among unemployed Americans requires examining the effects of the dominant institution that structures the subjective and practical experience of job searching in the United States: the self-help industry.

Losing one's job is a disorienting experience, and in most cases the newly unemployed look for sources of advice and support to help them make sense of their situation. In the American context, the decline of job security in recent decades has been matched by the rise of a self-help industry that consists of best-selling books, workshops, and private coaches, all of which tempt unemployed job seekers with seductive promises: you can be in control of your economic destiny, and you can get your "dream job," if only you consume self-help products and services. Self-help typically engages job seekers in exercises designed to assist them in finding, packaging, and presenting their occupational passions. Although self-help strategies come in many flavors, the dominant underlying premise is that if you can exhibit passion, everyone will want to hire you. The self-help industry's enormous success in marketing its products is rooted in its promise to fulfill job seekers' intense longings for control and meaning in their work lives. Not only is there no tension between pursuing one's passions and achieving financial security, self-help claims that one depends on the other. Anxious job seekers are reassured that upon discovering and learning to present their "true" passions, employers' doors will be flung open.

The promise of control and meaning often gives job seekers a temporary motivational boost, and undoubtedly in some cases, exuding passion can help in getting a job. Yet, the majority of unemployed American job seekers, passionate or not, do not quickly find their "dream" job, or even one as good as their last one. For this majority of job seekers, the self-help discourse of control ultimately leaves no one to blame for their unemployment but themselves. The control message obscures the structural impediments that job seekers face, such as the fact that there are currently five times as many job seekers as there are job openings. When job seekers encounter these very real obstacles, self-help's message of control backfires. Its focus on presentation of the passionate self as the central determinant in finding a job often leads those who experience difficulties to perceive their self to be "defective" or "flawed."

Self-blame, in turn, frequently leads job seekers to cease or greatly reduce their search. As self-blame sets in, each further unsuccessful attempt to find work intensifies the sense of a flawed self. Marsha had initially reported feeling "inspired" by the self-help message that, as she put it, "you can create you own reality," but when the reality she attempted to create did not materialize, Marsha joined the ranks of the discouraged workers, the over half a million Americans who want jobs but have given up and ceased searching.

Beyond subjective pain and job search discouragement, the most significant effect of self-blame is that it inhibits our collective capacities to imagine and seek transformative possibilities. The self-help description of reality fills our imaginations with highly individualized images, and obscures the larger context. It misses the fact that even if every American job seeker mastered the art of self-presentation, there would still be a wide disparity between the number of job seekers and the jobs available, as well as extreme scarcity of jobs that offer meaning and security. A real solution must be collective in nature. This will be the subject of future columns. Until the underlying labor market conditions are transformed, the well-being of job seekers such as Marsha requires a more comprehensive support structure than self-help. It requires support that clarifies both what job seekers can do to help themselves -- including improved presentation-of-self -- and elucidates the larger structural situation in which job seekers find themselves. This kind of support would combat debilitating self-blame, and perhaps galvanize transformative collective action.

Ofer Sharone is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he researches work and employment relations. Reactions to the column are welcome at osharone@mit.edu.