It’s easy to get stuck in our own story, perceiving conflict when none exists. Even when we try to keep a professional lid on our behaviour, our subconscious mind is still tick, tick, ticking, often making irrational guesstimates, and reacting to others from lopsided conclusions. Conflict, drama and chaos result.
Our backstories matter. The beliefs we develop in our early years influence our relationships now, both personally and professionally. Much of the conflict I see in my coaching comes when people act out unresolved childhood issues that govern how they see the world.
We form irrational beliefs based on our childhood experiences, which crowd out other people’s side of the story. We look for evidence to confirm them. Often, that’s binary, black or white thinking:
Life is cruel
Only the tough survive
I can’t trust anyone
I’m not good enough
It won’t get better
I have to fight for everything
I have to be perfect
They don’t want me here, etc etc.
Whatever you look for, you find. We see slights everywhere, perceived and actual.
Comedian Ruby Wax studied mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to understand her own depressive episodes. She writes that we become so trapped in our interpretation of the world that we are prepared to go to war with others who are trapped in their own world view: a war of warped realities. Who’s right, who’s wrong, and does it matter? To quote the late Queen Elizabeth II, ‘recollections may vary’.
The drama and stress we manufacture elevate our cortisol and dopamine so we become addicted to the destruction. That’s why some people constantly create chaos; they don’t feel alive otherwise. Their difficult situations are entirely a product of their own doing.
The legacy of our earlier lives can be devastating.
Some of us use work to fill emotional gaps left from childhood. We keep working for nasty bosses, projecting unresolved issues from our earlier lives onto a destructive work relationship. I’ve met perfectionists and workaholics desperate to satisfy unpleasable people from their past — most likely their parents — by subconsciously recreating that dynamic with authority figures at work. Desperate for validation, they work harder and more needily than everyone else, hoping in vain for the attention they’ve always craved. Their manager is too busy to give it to them.
Charles Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote a memoir about the physical abuse he suffered as a child at his exclusive boarding school. He believes many people at the peak of politics are likely to have been brutalised at similar schools, leaving them with mental scars which continue to feed into their decision-making. Earl Spencer suggests these dog-eat- dog systems inflict repetitive cruelty that leaves pupils cruel in their judgement of what’s right and wrong, something that shows up in the way they lead today.
I don’t believe people intend to cause conflict, it’s just a symptom of their lack of self awareness. The only exception are sociopaths and psychopaths, and thankfully there aren’t so many of those. Most studies estimate only one to three percent of the world justify the diagnosis. Tragically they have a disproportionate impact on the rest of us.
I’m taking the late Twin Peaks filmmaker David Lynch’s advice:
Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole.