Rabbit Write

At work sometimes it feels like you are dealing with people that are closer to barbarians than the empathetic and aware people we all have the capacity to be. Kind of like gradeschool. Which makes sense, you aren’t dealing with savages but rather with everyone’s inner child.

Time Magazine came out with a piece about this whole topic, diving into how we re-play our childhoods in the workplace.  This story relied on data from Sylvia Lafair, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology whose book on the topic, Don’t Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success, was recently published.  Lafair’s studies show that unconsciously we react in accordance to the role we played in our family, because this is unconscious and so often unexamined we play these same situations out over again and again.

“When a co-worker tries to one-up you and make you feel stupid, you may suddenly find yourself reacting to the older brother who always put you down. Or when your boss demands that costs be cut, suddenly he is your parent who could never make ends meet,” says Lafair, adding, “Reactions happen in milliseconds. The trigger is usually stress. As anxiety rises, people’s ability to respond in a mature manner goes down.”

You may see this in co-workers or in yourself. At work I am very aware when people are airing their insecurities and letting their unconscious and inner child roam (sometimes terrorize or bully.) I’ve found myself thinking of the work-space like a playground where the work we do is like a giant game. When I first imagined it this way it seemed silly that we all took it so seriously, dressing up and emotionally investing so much  into it. . In the playground of work I fear I am not all that much different than in the playground of elementary school: I am still stand-offish, easily hurt and feel like I don’t fit in. In my family I was the one who was made to process and feel emotions for my parents, taking in sadness, stresses, worries.  I still have problems doing this in my day to day life.

A technique  that I have found somewhat helpful is to actually imagine your co-workers and everyone you interact with for one day as children. Try to see that inner child, what they looked like, sounded like, what their lives must have been like. I think this does wonders for the ability to empathize with people, and it also sheds new light onto why people react the way they do as well as bringing sympathy and understanding for bad moods or overall sourness.

I’ve talked before about how what we don’t process from our childhoods, we will go on to replay in our adult lives over and over, eventually repeating it to our own children.  In regards to this the thing that stings me the most is the person who hears this and says, “Well you can’t blame your parents — you can’t just blame the past — you have to take responsibility.”  Woah.  So examination of your past means blaming someone? Asking questions and learning about who you are and where you came from is not a crime, but rather a positive move.

Taking responsibility means not reacting agressively to co-workers or ultimately passing it along to the next generation. Taking responsibility means examining the past, processing it and working through it weather through meditation, therapy or deep reflection, as tough and long as that journey is. It is hard because that is breaking the cycle, who knows how long the same abuse has been filtered through your family tree. When you break out of that mold, you change history, you create a new path, new hope, and new life.

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