Villains Become Teachers
We all experience people at work that frustrate us and occupy valuable mind space. Much of the time, there is a pathway to alignment and peace when we stop giving up our power to these people and learn about ourselves instead.
“In your angst is your liberation”
- Junpo Dennis Kelly
Businesses are webs of humans orchestrating as a system, and given the emotional operating system that humans possess, human systems are notoriously frustrating and challenging. Logical processes break down because of people's feelings; passive-aggressive avoidance patterns, toxic politics, and emotional reactions in meetings or Slack channels. Even in the most “healthy” (if that actually exists) businesses, problems arise and managers are trained and coached around a set of behavioral competencies to help them manage other humans. The transition to manager means learning about how people work. And, it's not easy. Some managers realize that it’s such a pain they want to return to the technical role that they had previously. This is a perfectly appropriate choice and the right one for many. There is, however, an opportunity for deep learning and growth when we learn from those difficult people around us. The learning starts about them and leads right back to the human heart.
There is something about “those people” that we work with that agitates us. Usually one or two, in particular, may broadly agitate others but much of the time they curiously have an impact on us but not on other people. We think about them driving home. We think about them before falling asleep. We think about them when we wake up. Such valuable time and space spent on them! They are out to get us, make our life miserable, make work ineffective, want to run us out of the company, want our resources, want us to fail, are narcissists, are unconscious, are incompetent...pick from this list and all of the others that play on repeat in our heads.
When we have an exaggerated emotional response to another human, especially if others do not, that is the first clue that it may be more about us than them. We are giving up our power to them, letting them in our heads and hearts, and giving them outsized license to determine our value. Byron Katie has an elegant process for deconstructing the villainous other and demonstrating how our thoughts, and our absolute belief in our thoughts, causes us to suffer.
The process is paraphrased as:
1. What is the person doing to us?
2. What is our deeper truth/belief (“they are out to get me,” etc.)?
3. Examine if we can actually know that this belief is true and
4. “Who would we be without that thought?”.
“Who would we be without that thought?” reveals how we would likely be far more peaceful and grounded and the thought, not the person, is causing us to suffer. This can be enough! With practice, we intervene with a form of Byron Katie’s four questions, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, or Zen inquiry to deconstruct our thinking and reframe it. As we do this, we rewire the brain and nervous system, the emotional response is lessened, and the person occupies less space.
There is another level beyond deconstructing our thoughts, which goes to the place of greater learning by integrating and even healing the parts we are projecting on others. Byron Katie refers to this as “the turnaround” and we know it as the shadow as described by psychiatrist Carl Jung: the parts of ourselves we hide, repress, and deny. As we repress aspects of ourselves that are less presentable in the world, they find a way out. To say it again, what we repress, finds its way out, usually on to other people. We give up our power and make them two-dimensional constructs that we project our repressed shadow on, seeing in them accurately or not aspects that are really ourselves. These aspects are our inner critic, our judge, our competitiveness, our aggressiveness and feelings of entitlement, our shame. We also project these qualities onto others as embodiments of people from our past that held power over us and wounded us. Our dads and moms are everywhere we look. The workplace is where the old drama of our family of origin plays out.
The work then becomes pulling the projection back into ourselves. Integral theory has a 3-2-1 process that elegantly transforms shadows we project onto others by seeing it in others, pulling it in, and actually embodying it for ourselves. It can be scary and dysregulating to pull back our projections and own them for ourselves, but to have a shadow is to be human and it is an essential part of us that needs attention, care and witnessing. By pulling back and owning a projection, it loses its power and we start to feel more integrated and more skillful with the other, with the grip of emotion no longer blocking our prefrontal cortex and complex processing. We become a fully functioning adult manager again, with a bit more wisdom about ourselves and our world.
Those around us are not villains. They are teachers. In our angst, we can find pathways back to the early years of our family constellation and become more whole as humans. We learn and become conscious about who we are and this provides more choiceful skills with others. We understand that human systems are messy webs of projections and instead of perfect are actually grand opportunities to learn and grow from others. We understand people are doing the best they can with what they have and are rarely evil. Humanity contains both light and shadow, for others as well as us. As we do this, we become integrated and feel more peaceful. Wisdom and power come from the integration of shadows and we become those that are sage-like and peaceful in the midst of turbulence. Our head may begin to hit the pillow with space and our drive home may become a quiet respite as we pull back the power to learn and become more of ourselves.
