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.

The 5 Reasons therapy or counseling is actually valuable for you!

Therapy or counseling is often under sold or over sold. When it’s under sold people say it’s just talking to someone and that helps you feel better. It’s much more complex than that with a well trained and experienced therapist. When it’s over sold it’s put inside of marketing language that says it will solve all your problems instantly: all of a sudden you’ll be great with money, relationships are a breeze, you feel balanced emotionally all the time and you find $20 in your pocket. Obviously that’s not right either. So what makes therapy or counseling actually valuable?

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to feel seen and known.

Don’t under-estimate this. Feeling seen and known is important for everyone and it causes us to feel better. It helps our emotions to express and feel relieved. It helps us feel like we’re not an alien and that we’re not alone. It helps us feel connected. All of this moves us into a place where we can be ourselves more naturally.

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to change the memories that are responsible for the automatic ways you interact with yourself and the world that are a problem for you.

Likely the brain mechanism at the core of any real change in therapy is something called, memory reconsolidation. When we go through something enough times or intense enough one time we remember it and our brain creates an automatic way to “adapt” to such a moment. This includes what emotions to feel, the meanings we make about ourselves and others, how to hold our body, what to do with our voice and our gaze, how intense to feel, what to do behaviorally, etc. This automatic thing becomes unconscious and then starts to control our lives around those situations or similar situations that still activate those automatic ways. Impacting those memories (whether they are memories we think or memories we just feel) causes new automatic ways to begin to be made.

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to gain skills of self regulation.

This is not easy and a lot of therapies don’t teach this well enough. Knowing how to regulate your emotions and re-balance your nervous system is not intuitive to most. Learning this skills can change your life. In therapy we learn these skills both through education and practice together but also through the co-regulation of being with the therapist’s nervous system. Having a steady AND open person with you when you start to feel deeply helps you hold and manage your feelings better.

Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to learn about yourself.

Who doesn’t like to learn about themselves!? In therapy we come to know things about how we really feel or think or what desires we have that might be tough for us to come in touch with on our own or in our normal life. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me or I have said myself in my own therapy, “I am just realizing this right now as I say it…”. Would you rather be on auto pilot or know what you really want?

Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to make sense of your life.

There’s something calming to the brain when we can name what emotions we’re feeling, when we can put together a narrative that helps us make sense of why we feel the way we do or why we do what we do, etc. In therapy we work towards this often so your brain can calm down and be more present.

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?

Transference

Transference is when we treat the present like the past. Transference is an automatic, unconscious process. I’m psychotherapy this happens when our bodies start to experience the therapist as not safe enough to express what you really feel or think even though they have not given any objective reasons to not trust them and after a trusting relationship has been established. This is because something has occured that your system read as similar enough to a dangerous or painful experience in the past (may even be as far back as the first two years of your life) and determined the present is not safe and should be treated like you treated the moment in the past. This self protective conviction might be unconscious and only symbolized in how you act (as opposed to being symbolized in conscious thought). Some examples of what that could look like are: you might start being pleasing, lying, coming late, going late, not knowing what to talk about, avoiding your feelings and chit chatting more, getting upset, shutting down, feeling suddenly tired, getting a headache or having stomach pains, blaming the therapist for something, etc.

These actions could symbolize something vulnerable is being felt but for any number of reasons (perhaps you’re angry at the therapist but anger is not comfortable or safe to express for you, perhaps you felt misunderstood by the therapist and hurt but expressing hurt feels too vulnerable, perhaps because the therapist is a different gender than you and you have a history with someone of that gender not being supportive, perhaps because you saw the therapist look away and they seemed disinterested for a moment, perhaps the therapist was late themselves or made some kind of scheduling error, perhaps you found out something about the therapist like that they’re religious or have a family or are different in some way than you thought, etc.) your system has automatically decided they are not safe to express what you’re feeling.

Because this is such a relationship dependent process usually one to three times a week for an extended time (6 months up to several years) is best for this process to occur.

Now I realize that this all sounds very vulnerable and perhaps you might be thinking that this is way too intense (and expensive!). But think of it this way, you have one life and these things are going to happen with people in our lives either way, why not find out if they can happen with someone trained to help us with these things so real change can occur?