My Boss Treated Me Like Her Therapist … And It Blew Up

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Warning: contains mentions of a suicide threat.

A reader writes:

I had an insane boss situation a few years ago that still lives rent free in my head and I’d love to see if there’s anything you think I could have done differently. While I don’t think I’ll ever be in a situation quite like this ever again (one can only hope), I probably spend more time than is healthy thinking about how I should approach it if I’m ever thrust into a similar situation in the future.

My old manager, Lily, was originally a coworker and friend. We had both left the original job we worked at together, and I was miserable in my current role. So when she became the general manager for a new retail installation, she reached out about me joining her leadership team and I jumped at the opportunity to start fresh somewhere new.

Initially, our working relationship was good, albeit with very few boundaries. I realized pretty quickly that Lily had some narcissistic tendencies as a leader, and I was clearly her Golden Child. Another member of our leadership team was her scapegoat, who always got the blame for anything bad, and the last member got lost in the shuffle. It was a mess, but at the time I leaned into being the favorite because I was the only person who could talk sense into her and whose suggestions she would take seriously. This favoritism caused the boundaries to blur even more and I also started feeling anxious about what would happen if I fell out of favor, so I picked my battles very carefully and ultimately enabled a lot of very bad behavior.

Unfortunately for everybody, Lily’s partner left her, and she had to navigate a messy divorce and custody battle. Her mental health completely tanked, and it caused everything negative at work to ramp up tenfold.

I was still the favorite and the confidant, and this turned into me becoming, essentially, Lily’s work therapist. We spent hours locked in her office with her crying and telling me every detail of her personal life, and my anxiety reached a new high as I tried to navigate supporting her erratic and turbulent emotions while also picking up the slack of things she wasn’t doing at the store — things that were technically beyond my role and ability. Lily was terrified of losing her job and she knew she was dropping balls, so I felt like it was my responsibility to keep everything running smoothly. I was also terrified that if I upset her, she would turn on me and fire me. At the time, I thought that I was doing the kind thing, the right thing. I now recognize that I was in an impossible situation, and I was setting myself on fire trying to keep everyone else warm.

Lily eventually shared with me that she was suicidal and said the only thing keeping her going was my support and friendship. So now, on top of feeling responsible for my job, her job, the store, and her emotional well-being, I found myself in a position where it was my job to literally keep her alive. I was wildly stressed out, so afraid that I’d say or do the wrong thing and then she’d die, and it would be my fault.

The culmination of all of this was that one day, on her day off, when I was in charge of the building, she texted me and said that if I didn’t get to her home immediately, she was going to kill herself. She needed me to come stop her. I didn’t have a car that day, my husband had dropped me off, so I gave the keys to the building to one of my employees, and called an Uber to rush to her home.

I should have called 911, but the state we are in has some pretty intense laws around wellness calls, and I worried that if I called and she got put into an involuntary hold, it would financially ruin her and make her life crumble even more. So I rushed over, broke in through an open window because her door was locked and she wasn’t answering, found her unharmed, removed all of the pills from her general vicinity, and then pulled her sobbing, terrified child out of the closet she had barricaded herself in when her mom’s episode started. I stayed for hours watching Disney movies, trying to take care of and soothe both of them.

Lily ended up going on a forced paid medical leave because her out-of-state boss realized something was off and called me, and I spilled everything. She was appalled that I hadn’t raised things with HR sooner.

The end of the story is kind of anti-climactic: Lily went on leave, I took over as temporary GM, my mental health improved some because I wasn’t seeing her every day, and she was finally in intense daily therapy instead of relying on me. She ended up coming back after her leave but immediately leaving for a new job because she felt betrayed by the company for forcing her on leave. Once she wasn’t my boss and didn’t hold my livelihood in her hands, I let her know via text that while I wished her the best and genuinely hoped she’d be okay, I couldn’t continue our friendship to protect my own mental health. We haven’t had contact since.

Typing this out, I wouldn’t believe any of that had actually happened in real life if I hadn’t lived it myself. I recognize that I had a lot of missteps along the way and that I shouldn’t have let things go as far as they did … but I’m having a hard time determining exactly what I should have done differently. I still have a lot of guilt and anxiety around that period of my life. What would you have advised I do had I reached out while this was happening?

HR, HR, HR.

This was all so above your pay grade, and you got drawn in at a level that an employee should never be expected to take on.

I suspect there was a frog-in-the-boiling-water effect here, where things escalated gradually enough that it was hard to spot when you needed to send up a cry for help to someone above you … which is often how dysfunctional workplaces evolve (and dysfunctional relationships too, for that matter). If you’d been dropped into that final terrible day out of nowhere, you likely would have realized immediately that this wasn’t something you should or could handle on your own … but things deteriorated gradually enough that by the time that day came, you had already been primed and wired to see your role as Save Lily.

But really, once Lily had shared with you that she was suicidal, that was a sign that you were in over your head, that she was looking to you for things an employee absolutely cannot provide, and that you needed to loop in someone else in your company (presumably HR). Since you’re struggling with what to do if anything remotely similar happens in the future, hopefully it’s good news that you can simplify it all dramatically: it was not your role to fix what was happening with Lily, and the right step in the future would be to alert someone whose job that actually was.

It will also never be your role to do someone else’s job for them on top of your own to cover for them; if you’re ever in that situation again, you can let those balls drop. If your presence is the only thing keeping someone else stable (or employed), that’s a sign that the solution you’ve landed on is the wrong one.

I do think it’s worth noting that you fell into this role not just because you believed your job was to save Lily, but also because you thought your job was to save everyone else too: you stayed in a bad situation because you were the one who could talk sense into Lily and who she would listen to — no matter the personal costs to yourself, and no matter how many indications that you’d never be able to fix the fundamental conditions there, only small things around the edges. I strongly believe there’s a certain personality type that is way too willing to walk into that role — to embrace it, in fact — while most other people would take a look and nope out of there. So I do think it’s worth asking whether there have been other times where the pull of being The One Who Can Fix Things has led you to stay in bad situations longer than you should have (and perhaps whether your family dynamics early on set you up for that assignment), and to spend some time thinking about how you want to handle it the next time you feel that pull.