Being Hooked – Emotional Traps
This chapter draws on, and gives full credit to, Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster, whose book “Working with You Is Killing Me” inspired this article.
The workplace is full of emotional people, and emotional people rub each other up the wrong way. Look past the calm surface of any organisation and you will find plenty of negative feeling underneath: worry about performance, anger at colleagues, resentment towards management, stress and burnout from targets that never let up.
This first chapter is about being emotionally hooked.
Meet Maria (not her name, but an actual person). She is a senior executive, highly successful, and also a nightmare to work with. The non-executive board of a professional services firm asked me to coach her, after months of complaints from her colleagues and an unusually high number of resignations from her team. When exit interviews were run in confidence, the same line kept coming up: “working with her is killing me.”
At her best, Maria throws herself into new products with plenty of energy and drive. She is dynamic, and she moves fast. At her worst, she is exhausting to please and needs constant reassurance. Her pattern is inappropriate anger, paired with relationships that swing between idealising someone and tearing them down. A psychometric profile showed that Maria expects to be let down. She assumes people will cheat her, ignore her, criticise her, or treat her unfairly, so she stays braced for it. At work, that shows up as sharpness. She is switched on and hard to fool. But when she decides she has been badly treated, she erupts: losing her temper, shouting across the office, or sulking for days. Because she is watching so closely for mistreatment, she finds it everywhere, even where nobody else can see it. Nobody can predict when she will blow up or what it will look like, which makes her hard going. She is edgy and self-focused, and that makes it hard for her to build a team around herself.
Maria does not cope well with stress, pressure, failure, disappointment, or criticism, and she can tip from passionate to despondent fast. Across her life, she has been disappointed often, and her instinct when that happens is to pull back or walk away. The core of her character is how self-focused she is. She reads every situation through the lens of what it means for her, and she takes every comment or look personally. She processes all of this privately, though. What colleagues actually see is the outburst, the sulking, the withdrawal, not the story running underneath.
Now think about what it is like to work for her. People around her tread carefully, worried about setting her off. Her direct reports describe something close to dread: they spend more time managing her mood than doing their actual jobs. Most mornings start with someone trying to work out what kind of day it is going to be. Even decisions about when to ask for budget get timed around her, not around the business. In 360-degree interviews, her team said the way to survive is to reassure her constantly, keep her fully briefed so nothing surprises her, and warn her well ahead of anything coming up. In short, you manage her the way you would manage an anxious child.
Being Hooked
The first emotional trap is being hooked: a consistent, irritable reaction to someone or something at work. Whenever you run into this person, or this situation, you feel annoyed, anxious, or frustrated.
Being hooked means feeling trapped, in a relationship, a role, or a situation, that drains your energy, occupies your thoughts, keeps you up at night, and leaves you stuck with no good options.
A few more examples: a colleague who takes credit for your ideas. A customer who is never satisfied, no matter what you do. Work demands that never stop coming. Being forced to use a system that slows everyone down.
You might be hooked if any of these sound familiar:
- Incompetence. Is there someone at work whose incompetence drives you round the bend?
- Restrictive interdependency. Is there someone you depend on to do your job, whose way of working stops you getting anywhere?
- Maladaptive behaviour. Is there someone whose irrational behaviour wears you down?
- Withdrawal Reactions. Do you deal with work stress by overeating, drinking too much, losing hours to the television, or other ways of checking out?
Organisations expect professional, unemotional behaviour from staff. But plenty of situations at work stir up strong feelings anyway. When that happens, people feel trapped, stuck in something they cannot win. Their emotions go unexpressed, and it feels as if the only choices left are to put up with it or leave.
That feeling, of being caught in a distressing situation at work with nowhere to go, is what being hooked means. It shows up as a consistent, strong, negative reaction to someone or something. It can be mild, like tensing up at a colleague’s tone of voice, or severe, like being unable to cope with a manager’s behaviour at all.
The natural response, when you are hooked, is to blame the other person’s behaviour for how you feel. That is understandable, but it does not get you anywhere. You are still hooked. The way out starts with your own reaction: managing the automatic response that someone else’s behaviour triggers in you. If you can control that reaction, you can free yourself, even if the other person never changes.
This process, of changing your own emotional response to something that irritates you, is called unhooking. Instead of feeling insulted every time a customer will not return your calls, you can decide not to take it personally and accept it as part of doing business. Instead of getting worked up about a colleague’s incompetence, you can adjust your expectations of them and take steps to limit the damage. Instead of despising the office gossip, you can set a boundary and simply show no interest.
Easier said than done? Not necessarily.
There are four steps to unhooking. Together, they help you release the negative emotion, stay calm, and take practical action to change what is happening.
Physical action. This step releases the tension that being hooked builds up. Emotional stress tightens your breathing, so start there: breathe slowly and deliberately. If you can, get moving too. A walk round the block works well. It helps shift the physical sensation that comes with feeling hooked.
Mental reframing. Here, you step back and look at the situation from a different angle, weighing up your options rationally rather than emotionally. Ask yourself:
- What is actually happening? For example: my invoice is overdue again, for the fifth time running. The client’s finance manager has not paid it, has ignored two polite reminder emails, and has not returned my call.
- What are the facts? I need this invoice cleared within seven days so I can pay my own suppliers.
- What part did the other person play? She is disorganised, does not think much about other people, and is focused on her own priorities.
- What part did I play? I have taken her lack of response personally. I have been too gentle about chasing it, which has put me off doing more work for this client.
- What are my realistic options? I can stop taking her attitude personally. She is not rejecting me, she is just dismissive of suppliers generally. I can acknowledge she is under pressure and agree a reminder a week before each invoice is due. I can ask to meet the client and agree a clear payment process. I can propose a penalty clause for late payment.
Verbal expression. This step is proactive. It is about reshaping the situation that is causing you grief, keeping your focus on the outcome you want rather than on the small stuff that has been annoying you. What you say should carry no judgement, no blame, no finger pointing, and no anger. Take ownership of your part in it. This is not about compromising, or about being nice for the sake of it. It is clear, direct communication that gives the other person something they can actually act on. So instead of stewing over late payments, you might go to the client and ask: “How can I help you get these paid on time? I could flag it a week before it’s due. We could set up a direct debit.”
Toolbox utilisation. This step brings in something outside yourself to back up your position: simple business tools that track behaviour, set a benchmark, or put information on record. The toolbox includes things such as job descriptions, goal-setting documents, performance reviews, policies and procedures, disciplinary forms, emails and letters, meeting agendas, and general documentation.
What the Research Says
The mental reframing step in this chapter has a name in the academic literature: cognitive reappraisal, changing how you interpret a situation in order to change your emotional reaction to it. It is one of the two main strategies in Stanford psychologist James Gross’s process model of emotion regulation, alongside suppression, which means simply holding the feeling in and not acting on it.
The evidence favours reappraisal over suppression. People who habitually reappraise report fewer negative emotions, closer relationships, and more social support than people who habitually suppress. A 2025 workplace study tested cognitive reappraisal as a daily intervention. Over three working weeks, employees who practised it twice a day showed less negative feeling and more positive feeling at work, which in turn reduced counterproductive behaviour and improved overall job performance. Unhooking, in other words, is not just a coping trick. It is one of the better-supported tools in the emotion regulation research, and it works whether or not the other person ever changes.
References
- Crowley, K. and Elster, K. (2006). Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work. Warner Business Books: New York.
- Gross, J.J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Review of General Psychology.
- Gross, J.J. and John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Zhu et al. (2025). Cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation interventions in the workplace and their impact on job performance. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology.
