David Whyte , The Heart Aroused:
The internal willingness to wrestle with our inner demons does not necessarily mean that anyone else…is brought into the drama. The real achievement is found when we acknowledge that these unresolved forces, our demons, affects our lives and those who work with us tremendously, simply because everything we do is determined by the fears and hopes we bring to a situation. Recognizing the presence of these forces in our own outlook, we can stop them from playing out unconsciously with our colleagues in the workplace. Nevertheless, a form of healing seems to take place when we find a truly sympathetic ear for our more difficult struggles. Just the opposite occurs when we confide in someone who is simply not interested or is secretly scared to death of what we have just revealed.
Goethe begins a famous German poem with the admonition “Tell a wise person or else keep silent.” Our deeper struggles are in effect our greatest spiritual and creative assets and the doors to whatever creativity we might possess. It seems to be a learned wisdom to share them with others only when they have the possibility of meeting them with some maturity. We learn to remain attentive to the mood and outlook of the listener even before we begin to speak about the darker side of our existence.
Are they really listening? Do they really want to know? Is this frightening them? Will they think I am so weak that it will affect our work relationship for the worse? This last worry is usually connected to something in ourselves. Do we have confidence in our struggles? Are they really our own, or are they another’s struggle that we have simply borrowed in order to postpone a personal inner confrontation?
A mature individual should be able to handle any struggle we have confided in him. But many times the telling of such stories may overwhelm the listener. He may be paying close attention to our tale of woe, but cannot tell his own fears from the fears he is hearing from another’s mouth. In a way, he is made uncomfortably aware of his own dark areas without having developed the skills to explore it himself. Our story, in effect, becomes a kind of persecution, as if the listeners are being pushed through a door they are not yet ready to enter. This feeling of persecution may lead to a kind of knee-jerk cutting comment or evasion on their part. Taking their comment as an attack rather than the desperate defense it is, we may feel devastated by their reaction. If we are paying enough attention at the beginning, we can stop our self-revelation before we scare them to death and elicit a fight-or-flight reaction. We could see this ability to really listen as a litmus test of those mythical creatures, the “empowered” and “unempowered” manager.
The empowered manager might be one who has some understanding of his or her own dark side and inner struggles. When she sees the possibilities for failure in those she manages, she does not mistake them as her own. She can give them some room and understanding, she can allow others to experiment and sometimes fail. There are also those who cannot come to terms with the cyclical up-and-down nature of human experience; they have an irrational need to be eternally competent and expect others to be the same. A period of disclosure to such a person during a particularly difficult time can lead to the confessor being seen as thoroughly and eternally weak, an image that may be difficult to shake.
Finally, is it possible to keep on working while we grapple with the worry? There is something real about this question, beyond the puritanical finger-wagging of the work ethic. The answer is often yes. Work itself can continue to serve as a reference point, a grounding anchor point, outside of the necessarily chaotic reformation which is occurring in the psyche. Psyche herself, personified in Greek myth as a quintessential representative of the awakening feminine, was set to work by Aphrodite in this fashion, counting and sorting seeds, this fine, detailed work serving as the greater metaphor of our lives, finding and recognizing what belongs together.
All in all, taking the above into account, we might wonder why we ever open our mouths at all! It may be in fact that there is no other listening ear in the workplace and the outer parts of the struggle are accomplished with family, friends, or the stranger who opens up a conversation on the flight to Cincinnati. In Europe there is a long tradition of telling, during long train journeys, one’s whole life story to complete strangers. It allows the heart to ruminate on matters we are fearful of broaching in the company of those it may concern.
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