In my years of counseling FPs, I have seen certain behavioral patterns emerge among superiors and subordinates.
For instance, I had a female patient, by most outwardly appearances, a successful Director of Administration for a New York-based investment boutique firm. She was 52 years old, divorced 20 years ago and currently single. She never had children.
My patient had been reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer for more than 12 years, in an administrative capacity, which involved participating in establishing two start-up businesses that are now thriving operations. Her role in those projects was to create the administrative infrastructure in each company.
While she was very good at what she did, it was not her intention in life to be an administrative executive. She originally wanted to be an opera singer and actress. She studied voice and music in college, and even earned a master’s in theatrical directing before circumstances led her to Wall Street.
The CEO she reported to was very wealthy and obsessed with money, according to my patient. He owned multiple residences, had children placed in the very best Manhattan private schools, and enjoyed all the trappings of a successful Wall Street executive.
The CEO had taken my patient under his wing, and she performed a wide range of personal tasks for him, in terms of social appointments, bill paying, gift shopping, arranging decorator and designer appointments, travel planning, and so forth and so on.
Over the years, this close, symbiotic, yet always subordinate role has essentially resulted in my patient developing a co-dependent fixation on her boss. Not surprisingly, on a secret, unconscious level, she was in love with him, or so she fantasized. She identified with his power and money and she felt that since she had helped make him rich, she therefore had entitlements to his fortune.
This mini-delusional system was not helping her. She acknowledged that she fantasized about him when she masturbated; she was, in fact, a chronic masturbator. This behavior modulated her rage and depression, and soothed her pain to some extent.
Making matters more complicated, her mother was quite ill and she frequently went to Arizona on an emergency standby basis.
Her CEO has little, if any, genuine interest in her feelings.
For the past 20 years, my patient has basically squandered what material wealth she possessed. She had taken her mother all over the world literally, and spent a good deal of her money on these elaborate trips. She now rents an apartment a few blocks from her midtown office; she has never been able to accumulate enough for a down payment to buy her own place. This is another source of a deep-seeded resentment, as she traded her dream to sing and dance for the seeming financial security of a Wall Street administrative position.
Burdened by her unrealized expectations and relationship disappointments, she is bitter, critical, perfectionist, hurt and angry. She claims she has mismanaged her life. With men she is invariably caught up in power and control struggles, expectations no ‘humanoid’ man can ever meet, and massive emotional and sexual intimacy issues.
Her obsessions, frustrations, and depression stem from the co-dependent relationship with her CEO.
In her mind, she sees herself as integral to his success. She is a facilitator for his addiction to money and power. She has even incorporated his mentality in certain ways, in spite of the fact that he profoundly disappoints her, vis-à-vis her mother, and the fact that he has not made a pass at her. She has even said: “He should know how much I am suffering.”
As with many co-dependent relationships, she has assumed his money addiction as her own. She, like he, became pompous, absorbed in money-talking and one-upmanship, ever competitive, and subtly blowhard-like about money, trips, and obscenely overpriced and overvalued material goods.