How to leave work at work?
Part 1 of 2— Understanding the Process
Dear Reader,
If you are reading this, you may be asking yourself: what is emotional containment? Is it taking your emotions and putting them in a nice Tupperware box? Unfortunately, no. As much as some of us may wish to put some of our emotions — particularly the troubling ones — in a box, that is not physically possible.
If you want to understand emotional containment, ask yourself this: after a day of anger and frustration at work, do you keep that anger and frustration with you when you come home, perhaps even letting it out on the people you live with? Or does it leave your mind-body system once you are back home?
Emotional containment is your ability to keep an emotion within its context in time and space.
Dear Reader, I now invite you to reflect on whether you let your negative emotions from work spill into your personal life or whether you are able to keep your emotions to the context they belong to.
If you are among those who let their emotions spill out, you are like my client, who was struggling in her personal life because she was letting the negativity from work affect her personal relationships. But if you are able to keep an emotion to a particular context, you are more like my husband, Andy. Once he stops working, all his work troubles and negative emotions seem to disappear into thin air.
As my client talked about how poor emotional containment was adversely affecting her personal relationships, I started thinking of ways to help her. One way was to understand how someone like my husband does it, and then model his behaviour.
So I asked my husband: ‘How do you do it?’
And he said: ‘I don’t know.’
An ‘I don’t know’ would not be helpful to either my client or you, Dear Reader. So I coaxed my husband — now turned guinea pig — into my coaching chair and profiled his emotional containment through the Matrix Model [1]. My hope was to identify the frames that enable him to emotionally contain so well.
This article will take you into his emotional containment matrix to understand how the process works. For non-coach readers, the Matrix Model can be understood simply as a way of exploring how a person experiences emotions, creates meaning, forms intentions and lives those patterns through different life contexts.
In this first article, we will look at the three process matrices: State, Meaning and Intention. These three matrices help us understand what is happening inside the person in the moment: what state they are in, what meaning they give to the experience, and what intention the pattern serves.
In Part 2, we will look at the five context matrices: Self, Others, Power, Time and World. Those will help us understand how emotional containment fits into identity, relationships, capability, time and contribution to the wider world.
Once we have identified the governing frames of emotional containment within each matrix, we can begin to see how the pattern works. Someone like my client may then develop similar supporting frames to improve their own emotional containment abilities.
State Matrix
Before jumping into the State Matrix, let us ground emotional containment with an example.
My husband once built a data model at work that hundreds of people relied on to complete their tasks. One day, the model broke down. His colleagues, manager and stakeholders were not happy. He was under a lot of stress at work. Yet when he came home, his behaviour did not indicate any particular stress, beyond informing me that he would need to work a little over the weekend.
So, what was his state at that time?
· At work: stressed and worried.
· At home: relaxed. He even used the expression “free from the burdens of work.”
Dear Reader, imagine this. You finish your last task of the day. You close your laptop, lift up your head and see your family. Instantly, you feel freedom from the burdens and obligations of work. You are free. You feel relaxed.
One possible explanation is that my husband-turned-guinea pig has linked the act of closing his laptop and seeing his family with a state of relaxation. The workday ends, and a different state becomes available.
That is important because emotional containment is not only about controlling emotions. It is also about being able to move from one state to another. If the work state continues to run in your body at home, work is still with you. If a new state becomes available, home can actually feel like home.
Reflection: How do you transition from your work state to your home state? What action helps you break the state you were in at work and move into the state you want to feel when you are away from work?
Meaning Matrix
Now, Dear Reader, you may be asking: what is the Meaning Matrix for? Haven’t we already spent several paragraphs above explaining emotional containment?
Here we are looking at the specific meaning my husband gives to emotional containment.
Because emotional containment seems to operate so automatically for him, when I first asked him what emotional containment meant, his first response was an attempt to parrot “Figuring Out People” [2] back to me. Fear not, Dear Reader: I did not let him get away so easily.
After further probing, he described emotional containment as “compartmentalisation” and “the ability to not let the emotions from work affect his personal life.”
What we can see here is that my husband has a clear picture of where his emotions fit in his life. It probably looks something like this:
Figure 1. Compartmentalisation
Compartment 1 Work Emotions Compartment 2 Personal Life Emotions
More importantly, he used the word “ability”. To him, emotional containment is not simply something that happens to him; it is an ability, and one that he is skilled at.
Some people experience emotions as something they are subject to. The emotion arrives, takes over and dictates what happens next. My husband does not seem to hold that belief. To him, emotions can be managed and contained. He puts his executive mind to work and just “does it”, as he unhelpfully puts it.
This meaning matters. If I believe emotions are uncontrollable forces, I will relate to them one way. If I believe emotions are experiences I can manage, contain and direct, I will relate to them very differently.
Reflection: What meaning do you give to emotions and containment? When you put those two words together — emotional containment — what meaning arises for you?
Intention Matrix
What is my husband’s intention when exercising his ability to emotionally contain?
At one level, his intention is to make the most out of his life. I probed further and found several frames that seem to support and reinforce emotional containment.
What really gives meaning to his life is the amount and quality of time spent with the people he loves. His professional career does not, in itself, give meaning to his life. It is something he does, and it is important, but it is not the centre of his identity. It is also something he does to support his family.
The interesting point here — and perhaps some of you, Dear Readers, may recognise yourselves — is that he has very little conflict between his personal life and his professional life. For him, it is clear: when he is at home, he puts his attention and energy towards enjoying time with his family.
I, and perhaps you, Dear Reader, may have more conflict here. You may see your career as more than a way to obtain resources or support yourself. It may even be part of your identity. After all, many of us introduce ourselves by our job. For me, it used to be:
‘Hello, I am Annabelle. I am a lawyer.’
But the more semantically accurate version — and the one my husband would use in personal-life related contexts — would be:
‘Hi, I am Andy. I work in data analysis.’
There is a significant difference between “I am my job” and “I do this work.” In his case, it is clear that his job is his job, not his identity. With such clear boundaries, it becomes much less surprising that once he is home, work leaves his mind. Work stays in the workplace and within its allocated hours.
Conversely, his highest intention when at work is to be the best employee he can be and to be a “stable rock” for his colleagues. He uses his ability to emotionally contain to do just that. Any trouble from his personal life also disappears when he steps into work.
Dear Reader, my husband is a little like Batman in that:
· He does something many of us struggle to do; and
· He has two lives that he keeps separate, and doing so lets him engage in each one fully.
This is where intention becomes powerful. Emotional containment is not only about leaving work at work. It is about protecting what matters. For him, the intention is not “avoid emotion”. The intention is to be present, to enjoy family life, to contribute at work and to give each context the version of himself it deserves.
Reflection: If you were able to emotionally contain more successfully, what would be your highest intention in doing so? Does your current intention support emotional containment, or does it pull your emotions across contexts?
Conclusion
In this first part, we have looked at the process of emotional containment through three matrices: State, Meaning and Intention.
For my husband-turned-guinea pig-turned-batman, emotional containment seems to involve a shift of state, a meaning of compartmentalisation, and an intention to protect what matters most in each part of his life.
But this only tells us how the process works internally. It does not yet tell us how that process is supported by his sense of self, his relationships, his beliefs about personal power, his experience of time or his view of the wider world.
That is where we go next.
In Part 2, we will look at the context matrices: Self, Others, Power, Time and World. These contexts will help us understand why emotional containment is not merely a technique. It is part of a wider pattern of meaning that shapes how a person lives.
References
Hall, M.L., (2003). The Matrix Model. NSP: Neuro-Semantic Publications. https://www.neurosemantics.com/products/the-matrix-model/
Hall, M.L. and Bodenhamer B.G., (2021). Figuring Out People. Neuro-Semantic Publications. https://www.neurosemantics.com/products/figuring-out-people/
