Healing Organisation Principle #2 | Embrace pain

“Pain plus reflection equals progress.” — Ray Dalio, American investor

One of the great taboos of human cultures is that of accepting our pain. In both the Eastern and Western traditions, we have developed sophisticated strategies to avoid our pain. I’m advocating for organisations in which leader-managers encourage people to embrace their pain. Pain is the fuel of healing.

Writer and therapist Ingeborg Bosch lists the five principle strategies, or ‘defenses’ that we employ to avoid our pain. They are the following:

• The Primary Defense
• Fear
• False Hope
• False Power
• Denial of Needs

Our defenses protect us from our “old pain”. This is important to distinguish. Most of the pain that we experience in life is in fact not as a result of our present-moment experience. Rather it is compound effect. The pain comes from our contemporary experience compounded by earlier pain. The pain in the present resonates with the pain from our past to give us our current experience.

This “old pain” from our past is that which we could not resolve at the time. It lies just below the surface as we move through our adult lives. This pain rises up from what Bosch calls our Child Consciousness.

Our defenses protect us from this compounded pain. Let’s take a look at each of our personal defenses in turn and how they can play in organisational life.

Defense #1: The Primary Defense

This is the “I’m no good” defense.

Let’s say Ben, an analyst at an investment bank, sends a market report to his boss and the boss is routinely disparaging of his work. Let’s also say Ben experienced a very disapproving father as a child. Now, when Ben hears his boss’ harsh words he feels disappointed in the present, compounded by the subconscious deep despair he felt at the hands of his unloving father in his past. This resonance between the feeling of disappointment in the present and despair from his childhood creates a feeling too strong for Ben to process in the moment. He unknowingly relies on his Primary Defense to prevent him from feeling this larger pain.

Ben tells himself “oh, I’m just not good enough”. He focussing on himself and the lesser injury of the present, not his father from his past. This sad story in Ben’s mind is of course unpleasant. However, it is a much easier ride than his old, father-related despair that he would experience were he to fully embrace his pain at all levels.

Ultimately, by employing the Primary Defense and not feeling the full underlying pain, Ben has missed opportunity to grow.

Defense #2: Fear

This is the “I’m scared” defense.

Let’s say a Product Owner, Magritte, sees a drop in the number of customers saying that they’d recommend her product to a friend. Magritte knows that her best course of action is to get on the phone and ask some customers what’s going on. However, whenever she puts the phone in her hand, she freezes. She just can’t make the call.

Perhaps we’re seeing some organic personality traits, but maybe it’s the markers of underlying pain. Let’s say that when Magritte was a child, she would sometimes approach her mother when she was concentrating. In response, her mother would viciously shout at her. This former situation of being terrified of her overbearing mother lies just beneath the surface in her adult consciousness. The mild fear she fears at picking up the phone resonates with the earlier terror of approaching her mother.

Now, in the present, instead of allowing herself to first admit to herself that she’s scared of making the call, she blocks that feeling. She rationalises her behaviour in dozens of ways. ‘What if the sales people get annoyed if I call their customers without asking them first? What if they’re too busy? What if I can’t explain myself right?’ She stays in her head with these stories and excuses. In doing so, she blocks her fear of making the call. She’s also blocking her older, deeper fear. This deeper fear is the ultimate source of her present hesitation — her deeper terror of approaching her mother.

Defense #3: False Hope

False Hope is the “everything will be ok when…” defense.

To illustrate with another example, let’s say a salesman Andy’s job is on the line. His clients are cancelling their subscriptions. Nothing seems to be working. However he’s convinced that when a rumoured new sales director gets appointed, he’ll know how to resolve things. Everything will be OK when their current “crappy” manager gets fired and they get a new guy in. Andy won’t allow himself to engage with his feelings — the anger he feels at his manager and fear he has of losing his job. Instead, Andy engages his False Hope defense — the false hope represented by the prospect of the new boss.

The reason that Andy doesn’t want to feel the full extent of the anger he feels at his boss is that this would set off older repressed feelings he had towards his lay-about, abusive stepfather. He stays out of his current anger towards his boss — and his former rage towards his stepfather — by engaging in the False Hope pinned on the new director. His False Hope keeps a lid on it all. To heal, Andy must drop his false hope of a better manager, and feel his anger at his present manager and perhaps himself. Only then will Andy have an opportunity to get into and resolve the older pain from his childhood.

Defense #4: False Power

This is the “I’m great and you’re not” defense. It’s best characterised by the Angry Boss.

Mike, the CEO, is furious that a new competitor is undercutting them. He screams that this competitor is a “fucking piece of shit company. We should be creaming them”. He yells to his sales team: “man, I could sell more than all of you pricks put together”.

Let’s say, that in this case, Mike grew up with a disabled brother who got all the attention as a child. No matter what he tried, he never gained the same level of attention as his brother. He always felt powerless. Rather than feel that sense of powerlessness, he told himself take he was better than his weaker brother. The False Power strategy has remained with him into adulthood. Now, when he encounters a threat that risks his losing some power, again, he turns to False Power. He gives himself an inflated sense of importance over his competitor and over his sales team. Instead of allowing himself to feel the despair he has over his competitors gaining traction and his sales team having a dip, he enters the rage of False Power. Dropping this defense would allow him to feel the discomfort of his commercial predicament. And with persistent work, he could progress to feeling the deeper, old pain of his powerless position in the shadow of disabled brother.

If he were to embrace this pain, and allow himself to heal, he would be freed up to think much more creatively about how to respond to new competitive threats.

Defense #5: Denial of Needs

This is the “I’m fine” or “head in the sand” defense. Or the mystic variant: “I don’t exist, life is an illusion.” When using this defense, we check our pain by putting our energy into maintaining a calm facade.

Let’s say Tony is a customer service representative who notices that by using his programming skills he can improve things. He spots an opportunity to build a spreadsheet system. The whole call centre where he works could use it to serve customers in a more efficient way.

Tony spends a month of evenings and weekends to build it. He then starts distributing it to his teammates. When his boss hears about it, she says nothing — doesn’t bring it up in team meetings, never thanks him. Tony is distraught. When a close colleague asks Tony how feels about this, he replies “I’m fine”. Tony avoids feeling the disappointment that he feels in the present by sticking to this story in his mind. However, this unexpressed disappointment is also resonating with something in his history. He’s also avoiding dredging up older pain that he feels about not having his accomplishments acknowledged by his father.

This is the ‘Denial of Needs’ defense at play. In this case, the need for acknowledgement and validation in the present and in the past.

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In summary, individuals avoid pain in multiple ways. Any healing process must start with dropping our defenses and embracing our pain, including that from the past. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations would become skilled in intuiting when people have triggered into historic pain and would create space and time for employees to embrace this pain as a path to healing.

For the entire series on the Healing Organisation, start here.