Video 10
Cynthia McFadden: Robin Cohen gets going early.
Robin Cohen: Go to a spinning class. I’ll shower, get out of the club. Taxi! I’ll
head towards work.
Cynthia McFadden: She pretty much never stops.
Robin Cohen: Hi, Jerry. It’s Robin. I’m OK. I’m in a cab.
Robin’s receptionist: Good morning, Robin Cohen’s office.
Cynthia McFadden: Cohen is a highly charged New York lawyer.
Robin Cohen: Robin Cohen. It’s Robin Cohen.
Robin’s receptionist: Can I put you on hold for a second?
Robin Cohen: I’ll be here for at least fifteen minutes.
Cynthia McFadden: She works twelve to
fourteen hours a day. Job requirement or your
requirement?
Robin Cohen: It’s definitely not a job requirement.
Cynthia McFadden: You Jove it.
Robin Cohen: I love what I do.
Cynthia McFadden: But if she works a lot, clinical psychologist Chad Emrick
works even more. It’s 4:00 A.M. in Denver, and Emrick is already on his way into
the office.
Chad Emrick: I would say, in a sense, work is my life. It’s most all of my life.
Cynthia McFadden: Emrick finds work to do even though his first patient won’t
show up for hours.
Chad Emrick: I am here early in the morning ‘til late at night. I, most of the time,
shower here. I keep my clothes here so that when I change clothes for the day, I
do that here.
Chad’s receptionist: Does he ever take a day off? No. He’s usually here every
day.
Cynthia McFadden: 1-le sees patient...
Chad Emrick: Let’s do it.
Cynthia McFadden:. . . after patient, long into the night.
Chad Emrick: It’s been pretty much this way for at least ten years. But I love
doing what I’m doing.
Cynthia McFadden: The question for him and anyone that works crazy hours
because they say they love it is this—at what cost? Emrick was separated from
his wife for over a year and believes he also damaged his relationships with his
other children due to his work.
Jason Emrick: I bet you he feels that way, that he lost his family. He just kind of
disappeared. You know, he was just at work.
Cynthia Mcfadden: Professor Bryan Robinson of the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte, is the first person to ever study the children of workaholics.
He wrote about it in this book called Chained to the Desk.
Bryan Robinson: My office is filled with adults who come from workaholic
homes, who have this hole. And the hole is usually, “I never really had my father
or my mother there. They were always too busy working.” And the feeling is, “I
wasn’t important enough in their life.”
Cynthia McFadden: Robinson is convinced people can become addicted to work
just like they can to alcohol. Regardless of what that does to their lives, his
groundbreaking research shows that their children can suffer the same sorts of
problems that have been previously reported for children of alcoholics. Far
beyond just wishing daddy or mommy was home more, Robinson is talking
about depression, anxiety, and other disorders that he believes can emotionally
cripple these kids later in life—all caused by their parents’ attitudes towards
work. Robinson has been nationally recognized for his research, yet he still faces
a lot of skepticism about his conclusion that workaholism is a disease of the mind.
But he maintains that is exactly what separates workaholics headed for trouble
from people who are just hard workers. So what about Chad Emrick and Robin
Cohen, who agreed to let Robinson review their attitudes about work?
Cynthia McFadden: So what about Chad Emrick and Robin Cohen, who agreed
to let Robinson review their attitudes about work? As much as they may seem
the same, when we showed tapes of the two to Robinson, he saw a big difference.
In general, how hard do you work? That’s because he says workaholism has
nothing to do with how many hours you work.
Bryan Robinson: There’s nothing wrong with long hours. It’s not about long
hours. It’s about inability to turn ii. off, the obsession.
Cynthia McFadden: While we were there, Chad Emrick never turned work off.
From 4:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night, the only non-work we saw was a
quick stop to buy frozen food.
Chad Emrick: How are you tonight?
Cashier: Pretty good, how are you doing?
Chad Emrick: OK, thanks.
Cynthia McFadden: He had virtually no interaction with people that was not
work related.
Robin Cohen: How could you not say a $50 million loss is a loss?
Cynthia McFadden: Robin Cohen, on the other hand, while working very long
hours, started her day in an exercise class and ended it with enough time left
over for her husband.
Robin Cohen: How was your day?
Husband: Great.
Robin Cohen: 1 definitely work hard, but I think I play hard. I think I do pursue
things I want to do outside of work.
Chad Emrick: I know that there are people who put in an eight-hour day, and
then they go home and they watch television or tinker around in the garage or do
other things that they enjoy doing. To mc, 1 would be rather bored by that.
Bryan Robinson: He’s eliminated such huge chunks of what makes life for most
of us important. He’s totally defining himself in terms of his work.
Chad Emrick: There are a lot of things that people do that enhance their lives in
wonderful ways, and I’m all for it. That’s just not the way that I live my life.
Bryan Robinson: If this were alcohol and it were this excessive, it would be clear
to us, to probably everyone watching, man, this guy’s got a big problem. The
woman, she seems more balanced to me. She desires to have other things in her
life.
Cynthia McFadden: Do you take vacations?
Robin Cohen: Yeah, I do. I work really hard, and I don’t feel bad about taking a
vacation at all.
Bryan Robinson: Well, that’s the clincher. Workaholics would n ‘t have taken
that vacation to begin with. Someone who’s really a serious workaholic would
have been terrified to take that vacation.
Chad Emrick: The last time I took a vacation where I didn’t have any work that
I focused on while 1 was on the vacation was in 1983. That’s been a long time.
Cynthia McFadden: Are you thinking about having children?
Robin Cohen: Yeah, we want to have children.
Cynthia McFadden: That’s why Robinson believes even a hard-working,
non-workaholic like Robin Cohen needs to watch it if she ever does have children,
that she keeps the balance that she now has. Can you keep doing it and have a
baby?
Robin Cohen: I think that I’ll probably have to cut back.
Cynthia McFadden: Dr. Robinson agrees. But cutting back is the one thing Chad
Emrick has never been able to do.
Bryan Robinson: The one thing I just want people to know is that this is serious.
It’s devastating—not just for the workaholic— for the people around them. it’s a
devastating disorder.