Why do I keep having the same problem with every boss I have?
The job changed. The company changed. The title changed, and the industry, and at some point even the city. What didn't change was the boss — or rather, a particular quality the boss kept having. Something about the way recognition got withheld — feedback that landed differently than the words justified, the moment of stepping in when stepping back would have communicated trust — had a quality that didn't quite fit the present situation. Different people, different organizations, unmistakably the same dynamic.
On the NJ Transit ride home from Midtown, after one of those interactions, there is a specific quality to the quiet. Not ordinary frustration. Something older.
Ronald Fairbairn's central revision of psychoanalytic thought was quieter than a revolution and more consequential than most: what drives human beings is not the pursuit of pleasure but the need for relationship. And the relationships we seek in adulthood are not simply the ones available to us in the present — they are organized around internal templates formed in the earliest experiences of connection and authority. Those templates don't stay in the past. They travel. Every new authority figure — every manager, every person with meaningful power over one's livelihood and recognition — gets read through them.
The template that concerns the boss dynamic most directly is what Fairbairn called the rejecting object: the early figure whose recognition arrived inconsistently, whose approval meant something but couldn't be reliably reached, whose presence in the room changed the quality of everything. The emotional logic that formed around that figure — what to expect from authority, how recognition works, what it means when a person in power doesn't acknowledge your contribution — doesn't update automatically when the person changes. It carries forward.
Which is why the new boss can activate something that has nothing to do with the new boss.
Most professional frustrations resolve when the situation does — a difficult interaction, a misread, an unfair decision that gets corrected or doesn't but eventually moves on. The ones that carry a different charge feel larger than the situation warrants, and personal in a way the situation doesn't quite explain. Something between old frustration and older hurt arrives when that particular dynamic surfaces, and it tends to linger past the point where the specific incident has been processed.
What also happens, and is harder to see, is that the template shapes not only how the boss is perceived but sometimes what gets elicited from them. The person who expects withholding tends — in ways that are often outside their awareness — to position themselves to receive it. Holding work back before it's ready, or pre-empting criticism by not seeking feedback, or reading neutrality as dismissal — small adjustments that together produce exactly the outcome the template is predicting. The dynamic the template anticipates, it sometimes helps create. This is the part that makes changing jobs feel like the solution and then, over time, not be.
Object relations therapy in this context isn't about managing the difficult boss more skillfully, or developing better strategies for the workplace dynamic — that work addresses the surface of the problem. The work here is underneath: understanding what the template is made of, where the rejecting figure came from, what emotional logic organized itself around that early experience of authority. That understanding changes what the boss is encountering — which is the only part of the equation that can actually move.
The people I work with in New Jersey — in Summit, Montclair, Ridgewood, Maplewood, and Short Hills — often arrive having changed jobs, sometimes more than once, and found a version of the familiar dynamic waiting. What they are looking for, usually, is some way of understanding why the boss keeps showing up.
I work with adults throughout New Jersey via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Object Relations Therapy
What is object relations therapy?
Object relations therapy explores how early relationships with caregivers and authority figures shape the internal templates we carry into adult life — patterns of relating, expecting, and experiencing others that often operate below conscious awareness. It treats present difficulties as partly organized by these internalized relational structures.
Can object relations therapy help with workplace problems?
It is well-suited for recurring dynamics with authority figures, the sense that a particular kind of boss or colleague keeps appearing across different jobs, and reactions that feel disproportionate to the actual situation. When the workplace pattern keeps reasserting itself despite changes in circumstance, the source is often not the circumstance.
How is object relations therapy different from coaching or CBT?
Coaching and CBT typically work at the level of behavior and thinking in the present — skills, strategies, thought patterns. Object relations therapy is interested in the relational templates underneath, and why the same dynamic keeps surfacing regardless of what strategies are applied to it.
Who is a good fit for object relations therapy?
It tends to work well for people who have already tried changing their approach — a different job, a different communication style, a different way of managing the relationship — and found that something essential stays the same. The insight that it might not be about the boss is usually what brings someone to this kind of work.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering object relations therapy via telehealth in New Jersey and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.