Emotional detachment – where did this idea come from?

“You should detach yourself emotionally from the situation” – I've seen variations of this advice in different places and contexts for maybe all my working life (I'm in Britain).

When I first came across the concept of 'emotional detachment', it was linked to workplace professionalism or 'decorum', and in my opinion, had some validity. The idea wasn't that you should be unemotional, but that you should refrain from an emotional reaction in the immediacy of a conflict or difficult situation, and if necessary also physically withdraw, so that you don't lose control of yourself in front of customers and/or work colleagues and make a bad situation worse.

This fairly sensible advice seems to have morphed (and in my view, has been twisted) into the idea that if you are in an abusive or hostile work environment, your response should be to somehow change your mental setting to emotionally cold, keep your head down, and go about your work until you can find something better. This advice is sometimes linked to, even underpinned by, meta-cognitive strategies such as mindfulness and other New Age stuff that we don't need to go into here.

Obviously, on a basic level we can all understand that somebody who really needs a job to support themselves and/or a family may decide to put up with some crap until they can find something else. I think most of us have been in that situation at some point and that has always been so. It's a universal experience. But there is a difference between that and a more serious situation in which the whole environment is abusive and hostile towards you or multiple employees, or you are the target of a workplace bully or abuser.

What the latter argument for 'emotional detachment' seems to be saying is that you should not respond emotionally to this, and I find that disturbing. The original, or earlier, meaning of 'emotional detachment' is simply that you should keep your emotions in check to avoid situational escalation - which seems like sound and pragmatic advice - but the latter school of thought is saying that you should not be emotional at all and should maintain this unemotionalism ("emotional detachment") continuously during your employment.

It sounds like something a psychopath would tell you to do, but this advice seems to be quite common.

I can't be "emotionally detached" from interactions with others because I am a human being and I'm not a fucking psychopath. A human being is an emotional being, not a robot. You can't detach yourself emotionally from social situations such as work.

I have the distinct impression that most people who dispense advice like this are just repeating something other people say and I genuinely wonder where it originated because it's so obviously unrealistic and wrong, and probably the thinking behind it was originally more nuanced, even completely different.

It may just be a coincidence that telling people to check out emotionally and obey and comply dovetails with the interests of the boss. As does 'quiet quitting', a piece of advice that comes from some of the same sort of people, some of whom (rightly) make fun of corporate buzzwords, but surely 'quiet quitting' embodies a ridiculous paradox too. You either resign or you don't, and if a workplace is unbearable, you should have the courage to stand up to your abuser(s) or resign and go to law.