“I think you’ll find almost all our teams are functioning at a high level. Their output is excellent and their capacity to creatively collaborate is exceptional. There is one team however that does really good work but I’m sorry to say has some challenging dynamics.” With this background I joined the team to see if I could get some perspective about this team’s functioning.
My initial impression was that this was a group of very competent, committed individuals. Yet the real presenting issue became quickly clear. The team lead, without obvious provocation, would become significantly aggressive in their response to other teammate’s ideas. It was not debate, it was dismiss and diminish.
Following up individually with everyone on the team the consistent input was that individuals enjoyed working with everyone on the team, including the team lead, until they randomly moved into attack mode.
With this information in hand I sat down with the team lead. Bright, articulate, passionate and…easily agitated. I was not spared. When they finished berating me I simply responded, “Seems like a lot of energy…wondering where that’s coming from.”
After some fairly significant defensiveness, it was only when I asked the team lead about those who had supervised them that the picture became crystal clear. This was someone who had not only a string of bosses but also parents who had brought them no shortage of trauma. And so the cycle continues: hurt people hurt people hurt people. As theologian Richard Rohr wisely observes, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”
And the cycle will continue unless certain actions take place. It begins with becoming aware and acknowledging you are caught in an incredibly unhealthy pattern. Second, you have to find a way to forgive those who caused trauma in your life…especially since it is highly likely that others have caused them harm. As Martin Luther King reminds us, “We must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that they are. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy.” Our capacity to forgive is the key to not only becoming healthy it also breaks the cycle of hurt people hurt people.
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who endured the deep oppression of apartheid and later led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, often said, “Without forgiveness, there is no future.”
Awareness, acknowledgment of our own pain and how we are using that to hurt others – and – compassion and forgiveness for those who hurt us knowing that they have been hurt by others is the only way forward both for our own healing and to break the cycle of hurt people hurt people.
“A good person brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil person brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Luke 6:45
“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” Mother Theresa
BP