The boss who reminds you of your father: why we slip into old family roles at work

“When my manager says we need a quick word after the meeting, my heart starts pounding as if I were fifteen again, waiting for my father to come home.”

The sentence is said in passing, almost with a laugh. The person who says it is an adult, capable, respected at work. His manager has never once raised his voice. And yet every time that name appears on the screen, something happens in his body that has almost nothing to do with this manager. Something that was learnt much earlier — in a kitchen, at a dinner table, in the hallway outside a child’s bedroom door.

That is what this piece is about: why at work we so often find ourselves in roles we played at home, and why some managers, colleagues or even office habits hit us far harder than the circumstances would seem to justify.

Transference doesn’t only live in the therapy room

In psychotherapy we call this transference. Sigmund Freud described it in the relationship between patient and analyst: a person unconsciously transfers onto the therapist the feelings, expectations and fears that come from early relationships — most often with their parents. You can find a short explanation in the knowledge base under transference and countertransference.

But transference isn’t reserved for therapy. The therapy room is simply a place where we can observe it slowly and out loud. In everyday life it happens all the time, and most strongly wherever relationships resemble those of childhood: where someone has more power than you, where someone evaluates you, where you are part of a group in which you compete for space, attention and recognition. A workplace has all of that.

The social psychologist Susan Andersen and her colleagues spent many years studying transference in the laboratory, far from any therapist’s couch. In their experiments, people first described someone who had been important in their lives. Later they read about a complete stranger who shared a few features with that important person. It turned out that they then “remembered” things about the stranger that had never been in the description — they attributed to him the qualities of their significant other. More than that: they felt towards him much as they felt towards that person, and they expected a similar response, acceptance or rejection. From this Andersen developed the theory of the relational self: who we are is never activated in a vacuum, but always in relation to someone who reminds us of someone.

And who at work is better suited to such a reminder than the person you report to? Researchers at Gallup, in a large-scale analysis of work teams, estimated that the manager accounts for at least 70 per cent of the variance in how engaged people are across teams. Your boss, then, isn’t just one more person in the office. They are someone with a power over your working day similar to the power your parents once had over your home. No wonder that what wakes up around them is exactly what learnt to live around your parents.

A workplace is a system, just like a family

In marriage and family therapy we see the family as a system: a whole in which each member carries a role, and a change in one moves all the others. I wrote more about this in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

A work team behaves surprisingly similarly. It too has unwritten rules — what is talked about and what isn’t, who is allowed to be angry and who isn’t, who tidies up after the others. Alliances and camps form in it too. And in it too, tension between two people often spills over onto a third. As early as the 1980s, the American rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman showed that the patterns Murray Bowen described in families repeat themselves in every community that matters enough to people — parishes, schools, companies.

The difference, of course, is that you don’t arrive at work as a blank page. You bring with you a role you have already mastered once. And because you have mastered it, the system is happy to welcome you into it.

Authority: who was the “boss” at home

The first question I almost always ask about transference at work isn’t “what is your boss like?” but “what was authority like in your home?”

If a father was strict and unpredictable, the child learnt to read his face before he had said a word. At work this person is often very good at anticipating the manager’s mood — and at the same time exhausted, because they are tracking it constantly. If a mother was quiet but disappointed, the child learnt that the worst punishment is silence. At work, an adult can feel a small but real panic when a manager doesn’t answer an email for two days. If the parents were hardly there because they worked a lot, the child learnt that they had to do everything alone. At work such a person often won’t ask for help even when it is their right and their responsibility to do so.

Authority has its own colour in every family. In some it was warm and reliable, in others chaotic, in others absent or frightening. That colour doesn’t wash out when you grow up. It remains as the first, most practised answer to the question: what happens to me when someone has power over me?

That is why two colleagues can feel completely different around the same manager. For one, the manager is demanding but fair. For the other, the same manager is a source of constant tension. Both are partly right. The manager is a real person with real qualities — but each of them is looking through a different window.

The roles you bring with you

Authority is only part of the story. The other part is the roles we were given in the family, or took on, so that the system could keep functioning. I wrote about them in more detail in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?, and there is a shorter explanation in the knowledge base under roles in the family.

At work these roles show up very concretely:

• The hero is the one you never have to ask twice. They stay late, fix other people’s mistakes, “save” the deadline. Managers love them. They themselves often don’t know how to say “no”, because at home they learnt that their worth lies in not causing anyone worry.
• The peacemaker is the child who stood between their parents and smoothed over the tension. At work they are the one who explains to the manager what the team really meant, and to the team what the manager really wanted. Everyone trusts them; no one notices what it costs.
• The invisible child learnt that it was safest not to take up space. In meetings they stay quiet even when they have something to say, and when someone takes credit for their idea, they say nothing.
• The scapegoat was the one at home onto whom family tension poured. At work they often end up in a similar position — not because they want to, but because they are used to the fault being theirs first, and so they apologise too quickly, even for what wasn’t theirs.
• The carer is the child who grew up too fast and looked after a parent or younger siblings. At work they comfort colleagues, remember birthdays and carry the emotional load of the whole team.

None of these roles is bad in itself. Each once solved something — and each brings real strengths to work as well. The trouble begins when the role is no longer a choice but the only thing you know how to do.

Triangles in the corridor

Murray Bowen noticed that two people in a tense relationship rarely talk to each other directly. Far more often they draw a third person into the relationship — a child, an in-law, a friend — and the tension is spread across three corners. We call this triangulation.

At work, triangles are everywhere. Two colleagues who don’t trust each other complain to a third. A manager who avoids a difficult conversation with someone tells a colleague of theirs instead, in the hope that they will “mention something”. Two managers from different departments pass their rivalry down to their teams, who are then not allowed to work together.

If you grew up as the child who mediated between your parents, you will find yourself in a triangle like this faster than others. Not because you are a schemer, but because the position is familiar. When someone pulls you into it, your body says: I know this, I can do this. And when later you feel exhausted and caught in the crossfire, you don’t quite know when or how you got there. I describe how a team splits into camps in Office coalitions.

How it sounds in conversation

This is how part of a session might go when the topic first opens up (a composite, not a real person):

“I don’t understand why I fall apart like this. All he said was that the report wasn’t good enough.”
“What happened inside you when he said it?”
“First I went hot. Then I started explaining. I was trying to convince him I’d made an effort.”
“Who were you trying to convince, in that moment?”
A long silence. “It was like at home. When I brought home a B, my father’s first question was why it wasn’t an A.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I explained. I always explained.”

At this point the conversation turns. We are no longer talking only about a manager who may indeed be a little curt, but about which part of the person is sitting at the office table in that moment: the adult professional, or the boy waiting for his father’s verdict. Only once we separate the two can we think about what the adult would do with the feedback.

Signs that it’s an old story

We don’t notice transference directly — we notice its traces. A few signs that often suggest you are bringing something older into a present relationship:

• The reaction is bigger than the event. A short email keeps you awake. A comment in a meeting stays with you all week.
• You feel younger than you are. Around your manager you feel you have no right to your own opinion, as if you were a child again.
• The pattern repeats. You have changed jobs, maybe twice, yet once again you are in the same relationship with the person above you. The office has changed, not the story.
• Your body reacts before your mind. Your heart is pounding before you even know what your manager is going to say.
• You respond to what they might say, not to what they said. In a neutral sentence you hear a reproach; in silence, a verdict.

It matters that these signs are not proof. They are a question. Perhaps the manager really is unfair. Or perhaps your inner system is replaying a recording that was made much earlier. Most often it is both at once — and that is exactly why it is worth looking at both layers.

Why the role doesn’t simply switch off

Recognising transference doesn’t switch it off automatically. This often disappoints people: “I know he isn’t my father. So why do I still feel sick when he calls?”

The reason is that patterns from early relationships aren’t stored as thoughts that another thought could simply overturn. They are stored as expectations, bodily reactions and relational habits. Christian Gostečnik, the founder of relational family therapy, in which I am training, describes how people unconsciously recreate the emotional atmospheres they know from their family of origin — not because they like them, but because they know them, and because within them they hope that this time the story will turn out differently. Someone who sought their father’s approval at home seeks it from their manager at work. And when they don’t get it, the hurt isn’t only about the manager.

The system around you plays its part too. A team that has a “hero” will load them with even more work. A manager who has a “peacemaker” will leave the hard conversations to them. Systems resist change because the old arrangement suits them. That is why changing your role at work is almost always a little uncomfortable — for you and for others. This is especially strong where a company likes to describe itself as a family — then the old family roles receive an almost official invitation.

Bowen’s word for what helps is differentiation: the capacity to stay connected to others while keeping your own thinking and feeling. It isn’t about emotionally disconnecting from your manager or your team. It is about staying an adult within the relationship — feeling what you feel, and still deciding with the mind that belongs to the person you are today.

Exercise: two columns after a hard moment

When something at work hits you hard — a comment, a silence, a tone — take ten minutes and a sheet of paper at the first opportunity.

1. Write down what happened as a camera would have recorded it. No interpretation: “At the meeting my manager said the report was late.”
2. Write down what you felt and where in your body. Heat in your face, tightness in your throat, the wish to disappear.
3. Ask yourself how old you were in that moment. Don’t think too long — write down the first number that comes. It is often surprisingly low.
4. Divide the page into two columns. In the left one, write what this moment reminds you of from your family. In the right one, write what is actually true in the situation now — what this manager really said, what you know about them, what options you have today that you didn’t have then.
5. Choose one small adult step. Perhaps a question asking for clarification, perhaps nothing, perhaps a conversation next week. What matters is that the step is chosen by the right-hand column, not the left.

If you do this exercise a few times, you will start to notice patterns — people, tones, situations that open the same left-hand column. That alone is an important part of the work. If you would like to look at the story of your family of origin as a whole, a genogram can help; we can draw one together in a longer session, A Look into the Past.

Do the exercise gently. The left-hand column isn’t proof that you are immature. It is proof that you once adapted very well to circumstances you didn’t choose. That adaptation was clever. Now you can simply ask whether it is still needed.

When it isn’t transference

I want to be careful here, because the idea of transference can be turned against the person who is suffering.

Not every difficult boss is your father. Some managers really are unfair, intimidating or humiliating. If the person above you systematically humiliates you, threatens you or shuts you out, that isn’t your transference but their behaviour — and your reaction to it is reasonable. I describe how to tell bullying from a difficult relationship in Workplace bullying or just a difficult relationship? How to tell them apart and what you can do about each. Where your rights are seriously violated, the right path is a trade union, HR or legal advice, not self-reflection.

Not everything is about family. How you feel at work is also shaped by overload, poor organisation of work, insecure employment and leadership culture. Someone who is burning out because they are doing the work of three doesn’t mainly need to reflect on their father; they need less work. How your attachment style plays out is another topic, which I wrote about in Attachment at work.

Understanding isn’t an excuse. If you realise you are the “peacemaker” around your manager, that doesn’t mean you have to keep carrying all the tension in the team. Quite the opposite: understanding gives you the choice to slowly put the role down.

Transference, then, is one layer, not the only one. It is most useful when you treat it as a question that widens your view, not as an explanation that accounts for everything.

What can change

When people recognise old roles at work, there is usually no dramatic turnaround. Small changes happen instead, but they have a big effect. Someone asks for clarification for the first time instead of apologising. Someone turns down an extra project and notices that nothing collapsed. Someone stops mediating between two colleagues and sends them to talk to each other.

Often the relationship with the manager changes too. Once a person stops seeing them through their father’s eyes, they can see them as they are: an imperfect human being with pressures of their own, with some qualities that are hard and some that are perfectly fine. Sometimes that brings relief. Sometimes it brings the clarity that it is time to leave — this time for the right reasons, and not to escape an old fear.

And sometimes something shifts at home as well. When a person stops explaining and apologising at work, it can encourage them to speak differently with their parents too. A pattern that formed in the family and repeated itself at work can begin to change in both places at once. I described how patterns pass from generation to generation in Intergenerational transmission: how patterns pass on without us noticing.

What to remember

• Transference doesn’t only happen in therapy — at work it is strongest around people who have power over you, above all your manager.
• A workplace is a system with roles, triangles and unwritten rules, which is why roles from the family of origin readily repeat there.
• A sign of an old story is a reaction that is bigger than the event, and the feeling of being younger than you are around your manager.
• The two-column exercise helps you separate what is memory from what is actually true now.
• Not every difficult boss is your father: unfair behaviour is unfair whatever your history.