Beyond Threat (eBook)

Nelisha Wickremasinghe (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
248 Seiten
Triarchy Press (Verlag)
9781911193326 (ISBN)

Infos

Most workplace problems are caused by over-exposure to real/imagined threat. This activates the 'threat brain'. When combined with our 'drive brain', we fall into destructive loops of compulsive behaviour. This book explains the Trimotive Brain and shows how to identify these emotions and regulate them by being more aware of unconscious motivation.

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Foreword

Looking for answers

In the summer of my first year at university I enrolled, for reasons mysterious to me now, in an Artificial Intelligence class where we were supposed to teach machines to solve our problems. Our first task was based on the famous ELIZA therapist program that processed a patient’s symptoms using standardised language scripts and offered, in return, a ‘diagnosis’ or intervention. This was in the years before we became glued to screens or talked to our computers and before we became used to relating to each other in the abrupt text that mediates many of our relationships now. So back then I was dismayed. I did not understand or want to be part of a profession that ‘fixed’ human problems as if they were machines with technical faults.

In my program the problems were never fixed. When my patient typed in “I feel depressed” I was not inspired to create a list of multiple choice questions to diagnose the cause or determine the remedy. So I made my Eliza end all her consultations with, “I suggest you talk to someone about that”. I didn’t do very well in the assignment, although I did meet Colin, a long-haired computer scientist, who showed me how electronic mail worked and we whiled away the summer staring at bulky monitors and pinging each other messages. We didn’t know or imagine, as we chatted through our machines, just how much our lives were about to change as a result.

My second memorable experience that year was a lunchtime viewing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the film, Jack Nicholson plays a criminal seeking escape from a hard labour camp through transfer to a mental institution. Although he thinks life on the ward will be a soft option he is soon subject to the humiliating and, at times, inhumane social and medical regimes of the asylum. The most difficult part was watching the medical treatment of distressed patients which included the administration of electric shocks, large doses of mind-numbing drugs and, in the final scenes, a lobotomy.

These experiences did not put me off my hoped-for career; if anything, they propelled me further along the path. I wanted to be a psychologist to understand how to be understood. More than that: to find out whether it was possible to be known and accepted for who I am. That yearning was so strong in me that I imagined it must exist in other people too. The less we are understood and accepted, I observed, the more likely it is that we will have problems. My father used to say to me, “when you grow up and have lots of problems come and tell me”. He wrote this in the bottom of my birthday cards until I was six years old. It worried me that he believed problems were inevitable, and later it grieved me that he was not available to fulfil his advisory role.

These days it’s not so fashionable to talk about problems. Not since positive psychologists told us about the benefits of joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, love and awe. Yet problems keep appearing and, when they do, they are, at least for me, very distracting. It’s hard to be serene when anxiety unsettles my stomach or when anger and depression paint a grey wash over even the sweetest smile.

Problems thread their way through my family history, sometimes visible like broken veins, but mostly buried deep under the skin of our lives. There’s a hushed story about a Great Aunt who drowned herself in the warm waters of the Indian ocean. She was found washed up on the shore with her sari floating behind her, glinting like a golden fishing net. Then there was Uncle Chandra, Harvard scholar, talented doctor and photographer, who drank himself in to a poisonous oblivion, perhaps to escape the racism and hatred of 1960s’ America. And what happened to Uncle Fritz, who ate grass in a prisoner of war camp? Many years later he showed me his cellar in Stuttgart piled high with Ritter chocolate. He never wanted to go hungry again. Closer to home, nearer to the surface, my father meets the Ginger Lady who teaches him to rant and helps him soothe his passion and pain in her warm auburn glow.

Machines and drugs can standardise, obliterate or anaesthetise our problems but they don’t give us understanding, forgiveness, compassion and acceptance. And, in the stories I hear, this is what most people want.

I went to university looking for answers to problems both general (what motivated Hamlet’s procrastination?) and specific (why is my father so unhappy?) and I found them, I thought, in the work of people like Ronnie (R.D.) Laing, the outspoken Scottish psychiatrist, who argued for a relational approach to human suffering. Laing maintained that even extreme mental distress was an attempt to cope with and heal the wounds inflicted by society and in particular, the family. What was needed, he said, were more people (and not necessarily ‘professionals’) who were prepared to listen deeply in order to truly understand one another.

As a young psychologist, Laing’s thinking appealed to me, whilst drugging, incarcerating and electrocuting people did not.

Experimenting

My first job was as a ‘dependency counsellor’ in Arlington House, London. This huge Victorian hostel for the homeless opened in 1905. By the early nineties it had become a ‘wet’ house allowing homeless people to live there despite their addiction to alcohol and other drugs. My brief was to apply a ‘harm minimisation’ approach to the more severely addicted to enable them to maintain their lifestyle of choice in relative dignity. I was not expected to persuade them to stop drinking, get work or change – unless they wanted to.

Here was a form of Laing’s method in motion. My colleagues and I in the ‘dependency team’ spent hours talking to the residents and forming empathic relationships. However, the residents mostly just wanted to be left alone to drink themselves to death. Once a week I was assigned the early morning ‘death round’ which involved touring this vast building to check whether anyone had died in the night. If no one responded to my loud knock I had to open their door with a master key and investigate. It was a dispiriting job and I didn’t last long.

Afterwards I joined the health service, where change, health improvement and recovery from addiction were on the agenda. I managed clinics and an in-patient unit for addicts with a multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses and social workers. I had become part of the medical profession that my earlier self had so mistrusted, and it wasn’t so bad. We worked with addicts using detoxification drugs and a wide range of therapies to try and provide holistic and relational care. Yet the harsh reality was that relapse rates amongst the acutely addicted were, and probably still are, appallingly high. Most of my clients only maintained their sobriety or drug-free status for short periods before returning to their old habits. This recurring, vicious cycle of addiction frustrated me, not least because at the time my father and others close to me were also caught in that loop. During those years I was passionately driven to solve the problem of addiction, not realising that the ‘answer’ was not to be found in one method or another. Of course, I did not succeed in achieving my unrealistic goals and after ten years of failing to significantly interrupt or even understand the reform-relapse cycle, I resigned from my work in mental health services.

I wanted to put the dark days of addiction behind me and so I started an organic food business and restaurant. Yet, along with the weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and christenings, I also witnessed and shared bottles of wine with those who were bereaved, divorcing, facing financial ruin, struggling with old age and family rifts. No-one and nowhere, it seemed, was immune from the challenges and disappointments of ordinary life and once more I found myself trying to ‘solve’ human problems and understand the messages of ordinary madness.

When I sold the restaurant I found work as a business psychologist and leadership development consultant. I imagined I would be working with the successful, relatively problem-free members of society who had money, status, optimism and exciting jobs. Yet here too problems appeared like damp patches in a freshly painted wall, indicative of deeper, hidden complications arising out of a compulsion to compete, achieve and accumulate.

Coaching and developing people in business and the corporate world is no less challenging than working with the mentally ill or drug addicted. When any of us becomes caught in the vicious loop of an unhelpful habit we encounter problems. It doesn’t matter whether that habit is alcohol, work, competitiveness, Facebook, our smart phone or long-distance running. In this book I will share some stories of ordinary people I have worked with who were caught in such loops and who were suffering as much as the people who came into my mental health clinics.

Hard-earned lessons

Working in the clinics, the restaurant and then in business has taught me two important lessons. First, that a singular approach to complex human problems is misguided and ineffective. As a young psychologist, I was attached to a narrow set of beliefs about how change ‘worked’ and it took me a long time to evolve that understanding. Medical intervention, mindfulness, psychoanalysis, family systems therapy, yoga, low sugar diets, cognitive behavioural coaching, attending the gym, running a marathon and,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.1.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Personalwesen
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Schlagworte: Business psychology • Leadership • Organizational change • Organization development
• ISBN-13: 9781911193326 / 9781911193326