Is Your Workplace Tangled in Co-Dependency?

Here are the bullets to this article:

• Co-dependency in Workplaces: Co-dependency occurs when individuals in a work environment become overly reliant on each other to avoid emotional discomfort, leading to unhealthy dynamics that can undermine team health, happiness, and company success.

• Manifestations of Co-dependency: This issue manifests through altered behaviors to escape emotional issues, seen in efforts to gain approval or handle disrespect at the cost of personal well-being. It's prevalent in environments where leaders struggle with emotional and social skills, pushing a culture of problem avoidance over authenticity.

• Impact on Workplace Health: Co-dependency creates a toxic environment characterized by resentment, exhaustion, and blurred boundaries. While initially seeming beneficial due to financial or job security, it damages personal integrity and overall company morale, emphasizing the need for a shift towards a healthier, more vibrant work culture.

• The Importance of Addressing Co-dependency: Tackling co-dependency is essential for fostering a successful, innovative company culture that values healthy relationships and mutual respect. Ignoring these issues risks exacerbating problems like reduced diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), hindering creativity and innovation, and ultimately costing the company more in the long term.

Understanding Co-Dependency at Work

Have you noticed how some work environments make people overly dependent on each other in unhealthy ways? This is called co-dependency. It happens when someone avoids facing their emotional troubles by leaning too much on others, who do the same in return. This kind of situation can quietly affect the health and happiness of your team and the success of your business.

What Does Co-Dependency Look Like?

Co-dependency comes about when people change how they act to avoid emotional discomfort, depending on others who are also looking to escape their issues. This can show up in many types of relationships, but it’s especially common at work. For example, an employee might work too hard to get approval from a boss, or take on disrespectful comments from the boss in order to protect other employees, all at the cost of ignoring their own needs. This often happens in places where the leaders might not be great at handling their emotions or social situations, and so unconsciously lead everyone to focus more on avoiding problems than being genuine. The result? The team’s spirit and the company's ethics can take a hit.

Why It Matters

This one-way support system can cause feelings of resentment, exhaustion, and weak boundaries, making the workplace feel toxic. While it might seem worth it at first because of the pay or job security, the long-term impact on people’s self-respect and the company’s morale is damaging. Dealing with co-dependency is about more than fixing relationships; it’s key to creating a healthy, lively, and lasting work culture. Encouraging honest talks, setting clear rules, and making sure you are treated respectfully and that work demands don’t take over your life are important steps to overcome these issues.

Taking Action

Recognizing and dealing with co-dependency at work is crucial. A successful and innovative company needs more than just smart ideas; it needs healthy relationships and respect among everyone. Ignoring these problems might seem easier, but it can lead to bigger issues like a lack of diversity (DEIB), fairness, and new ideas (which are shown to be bolstered by an increase in DEIB), which can end up costing a lot more in the end. By addressing co-dependency, we can build a workplace that’s not only more ethical and inclusive but also more successful in the long run.

Why organizations risk getting It wrong if they don’t understand the unconscious.

Much of our life is not conscious. We are designed to be efficient, life preserving beings which means that our brains will automate what it can when it can. How much of your day is automatic? Think about yourself at work (maybe in a meeting or in an interaction with a colleague). How much of how you feel, react, don’t react, hold your body even is automatic and repetitive? If organizations want change in their culture they need to focus on bringing people to the present moment. When we are in the present moment we feel our feet on the ground, we feel our sense of choice even though we’ve been in this moment thousands of times before. In the present moment we can identify fears that are not really adaptive and fears that ARE really adaptive. Here is one thing that makes being present more possible and one reason the present moment threatens people’s nervous systems and gets resisted:

1. Co-Regulation is easier when: we have another nervous system with us that is emotionally regulated (able to de-center from their own perspective and hold the other person’s without too much stress) it’s like we go from arms shaking trying to push that last rep up to a renewed strength and ability to smoothly push the bar back up. Co-regulation is increased by good eye contact, a tone of voice and emotional intensity that is in the ballpark of where the other person is but not exactly where they are (back it down a bit), reflective listening and plain listening.

2. Being present is threatening to some nervous systems because: a person may be in a self protective automatic mode. Meaning that doing something other that what they’re doing registers as moving away from safety and towards danger. Becoming present can feel relieving for some and for others it can activate an internal alarm system which may cause some anti-social behaviors. Knowing how to engage someone in those moments in order to increase safety is crucial for the psychological safety of a work place.

Why Belonging belongs with DEI

As you can see from the image above, the highest stress point causes freeze. Freeze happens on a spectrum. In the work place it might look more like going quiet in a meeting, not speaking up against a co-worker or supervisor who is being inappropriate, allowing others to take credit for one's own ideas or work, laughing and going along with things that make one feel sick inside, etc. Diversity helps us widen who is a part of the work place. This is a value to the company because it brings in more perspectives that will bring more collective wisdom. But because diversity can be limited by bias to certain categories (e.g. diversity in age but not in race, gender, etc.) Equity helps diversity stay accountable. Inclusion does the same for Equity by not only creating seats at the table for people but ensuring they have a voice. Belonging continues this trend of helping the previous letters meet their goals. With all of DEIB you are increasing psychological safety in the work place which helps people have a better chance of staying in the green of social engagement (this is good for creativity, problem solving and productivity) and out of the yellow of fight or flight and the red of freeze. Belonging brings this home by helping people feel that their inclusion is not a burden, that their personal experience is not alien or isolated but understood by the community of their workplace. Belonging helps people feel they fit. When people feel they fit they can naturally be authentic and have a voice easier. This is how Belonging helps Inclusion meet its goals and makes the green of social engagement even easier.

#DEI #DEIB #PsychologicalSafety #Polyvagal #Belonging

Taking Back Yourself From Narcissistic Leadership

Whether it’s toxic leadership in religious communities and churches, companies or politics more and more people are finding a voice to call out these ways and say they are not okay. To take back yourself from narcissistic leadership we have to start with understanding what does that term even mean. Really it is a description of trauma that was never helped and so created a pattern of coping that became habit which became personality.

Trauma specialist Peter Levine defines trauma in many ways but one of them is “incomplete self protective actions waiting to complete”. When we get overwhelmed and there is no one able to help us we freeze. Freeze is the highest level of activation (not fight or flight). In freeze we experience terror, helplessness, and we shut down to cope. This is natural however what is not natural is for this biological emergency break to stay on for long periods of time. Levine discovered that most animals in the wild do not get PTSD despite going through life threatening situations (like almost being eaten). This is because they allow their nervous systems to complete the fight, flight and freeze impulses their body initiates when threatened. As humans however we often don’t allow ourselves to complete fight, flight or freeze (due to a ton of different reasons). This means that the enormous amount of energy that is initiated in the fight, flight or freeze reaction becomes stuck in our bodies. We do all that we can to not re-engage that energy because it’s overwhelming. We don’t want to feel the fear, rage, helplessness, isolation, chaos, etc. of those states especially if we don’t understand why we are feeling that way. Problem is the incomplete past won’t stay in the past.

When we experience something that has similar enough feelings, events or pieces to our original painful experiences that we are still holding our brain does what it’s supposed to do. Which is to re-engage how we survived (coped) last time. Meaning, it says something like, “I know what this moment is because I’ve lived a moment similar to this before. It’s a threatening moment and I remember how I survived last time so I will re-activate all those ways to ensure survival again.” So the way we looked away, tightened our lips, clenched our jaws, the ways our muscles tighten in our legs, gut or chest, the way our bowels felt, the feelings we had, the meanings we made about the moment, all re-activate to attempt to adapt and keep us alive and keep the feelings and survival mechanisms from completing.

Part of that will be to dissociate from those bodily awarenesses. To do that we may use outside things to distract us (e.g. needing things to be super exciting or interesting or quick hits of novelty, needing things to be zen and not upsetting at all, needing things to not be about anything meaningful to keep it surface level and superficial) or we may use inside things (becoming hyper sexual, arrogance, becoming hyper rational, staying in go mode for longer than normal, thinking everyone else is at fault, thinking everything is our fault, needing to be around powerful or attractive people, getting depressed, getting anxious, etc.). Of course we often use outside and inside distractions simultaneously. Over time this creates a pattern of feeling/thinking/behaving that is automatic/unconscious and so frequent that it becomes a part of our personality.

So what happens when this is in the background of a leader, especially a founder? Often what happens first is the company gets set up so that it’s difficult for there to be accountability for the leader. This helps the leader continue to use the original ways they have coped (e.g. maybe they become manic and make a bunch of changes really quickly - emailing late into the night, maybe they become critical and bully-ish, maybe they say sexist things or really vulgar jokes, etc.). This could look like the HR department is non existent or is hampered in some way. Or perhaps a co-dependent culture is cultivated from the start so that everyone knows implicitly you don’t cross them or you get fired. Or there is little to no Diversity, Inclusion, Equity or Belonging initiatives.

It gets so complicated when money, security and livelihood feels on the line. We stop listening to our guts and our authenticity. We utilize our own distractions in order to calm our reactions to what doesn’t feel right in order to not feel anxious about losing our jobs or causing problems in an area that could affect our ability to earn and provide. Or in the case of religion we potentially fear disconnection from the Divine.

Really, the strongest thing we can do is become more conscious. The more conscious we are of our feelings and convictions the more we can make a conscious choice as opposed to an automated one that is based on a past survival strategy. We may choose to stay somewhere because it feels worth it to us and learn to adapt through having other support systems. We may choose to confront problematic people and systems. We may choose to leave. Or something else. It’s not about right and wrong, healthy or unhealthy. It’s about being able to stay in touch with your own built in value system that lets you know what feels life giving and what doesn’t.

So how do we become more conscious? Well the first steps are to get in touch with what the signals are that we don’t feel okay. Ask yourself:

When something is off/when I don’t feel safe/when I feel uncomfortable I:

Feel what?

My muscles, bowels and visceral do what?

Dream what?

Think what?

Say what?

Do what?

Don’t feel what?

My muscles, bowels and visceral don’t do what?

Don’t dream what?

Don’t think what?

Don’t say what?

Don’t do what?