The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [39]
If you’ve managed to succeed in creating this kind of balance with a job you love, trust me when I say that I envy you, and suspect you’re in a very happy minority. Dexter would probably envy you as well—if he felt emotion, that is.
The Spillover Model: Blood Isn’t the Messiest Thing, After All . . .
Compensation, with its focus on needs, ends up being too simplistic. Segmentation, which suggests that we can create a hard separation between our work lives and our non-work lives, ends up feeling utopian, if a step in the right direction. The reason that segmentation fails is that the roles we adopt in one environment do not cease to be part of who we are when we leave that environment. A manager does not stop being a manager when she leaves the office; the doctor who is not on-call will not turn a blind eye when the man at the next table chokes on a chicken bone while she’s out to dinner with her family. The reality is, who we are is defined by a multitude of roles, and our task is figuring out how to manage those competing and potentially conflicting roles on a daily basis.
Spillover theory would suggest that because our roles are part of our self-definition, attempting to isolate them by linking them solely to specific activities is almost always going to fail. What we need to do instead is accept that spillover is going to happen. Work will influence non-work, and vice versa. Barring fringe cases, we are generally not able to keep the domains separate—and it may be the case that we shouldn’t try.
One of the important things to recognize about spillover is that it isn’t necessarily negative. When we think about work affecting non-work life, the easiest examples are the most painful. Debra was targeted by the Ice Truck Killer because of her connection to Dexter. Dexter’s vigilante activities led to conflict at work with Doakes, and the inevitable showdown at the cabin in the swamp. In fact, Dexter is something of a poster child for negative spillover. His interactions with Doakes, Lila, and Miguel all blurred the lines he carefully tried to draw between work and non-work life. All of them ended up dead.
You don’t get much more “negative” when it comes to spillover than dead bodies of good people. Lila notably doesn’t fit into that category, but her knowledge of Dexter’s nature put Astor and Cody at risk, much as Brian’s did Debra at the end of season one. Ellen Wolf died because Dexter allowed Miguel too much insight into his non-work life.
However, we also see examples of positive spillover in Dexter’s life. It could even be argued that positive spillover, rather than segmentation, is what Dexter was striving to achieve when we first met him.
Take, for example, his interactions with Batista, Vince, LaGuerta, even Debra. The lengths to which Dexter went to make himself appear normal—going out for drinks, joining the bowling team—can be read as an attempt to keep his work and non-work lives fully separate, but they can also be read as a way for him to create a unified picture of the roles expected of a functioning member of society. Dexter wasn’t compartmentalizing his work role from his non-work role, viewed this way; he was creating one integrated set of roles that matched the expectations people had of him. He designed spillover into what he did, because that was how he believed (based on Harry’s training and his own scientific observations of the world around him) that he ought to function.
Positive spillover from work to non-work occurs for Dexter because of the resources work offers him, too. Earlier, I mentioned access to criminal databases as a perk of his job. These databases undoubtedly make his unpaid vocation easier to accomplish. Access to DNA testing equipment, satellite imagery, detailed crime scene photos, and criminal histories makes it possible for Dexter to meet one of the key requirements of the code: being certain.
Work can therefore positively affect his non-work activities, but is the opposite true? Does killing people have any positive effect