From the Gospel of Thomas:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”
With the above passage, and the rest of this article, I want to highlight the importance of being who you are. I want to bring to your attention the dire need for being true to yourself. Being authentic.
Western medicine is catching up with the fact that we cannot separate the body from the mind and the individual from the environment. Internally the mind or brain is connected to the body via the nervous, endocrine, and immune system. Your beliefs, thoughts and feelings affect your physiology and immune function. Externally these systems are linked to our emotional, psychological, and social environments. As we interact with these environments, we influence them, and they influence us. Our health, well-being, and performance cannot be viewed in isolation, independent of life factors like childhood experiences, beliefs, work environment, relationships, stressors, and self-care.
Individual Repression
In his book, “When the Body Says No” Gabor Maté, M.D. explains that being diagnosed with chronic disease is not accidental or random. There is clear evidence that unconscious patterns, traits, and behaviours lead to disease. These unhealthy patterns can fall on either side of a continuum.
On the one side we find the following traits:
- The compulsive drive for serving the needs of others.
- Prioritization and rigid identification with duty, role, and responsibility above satisfying your own needs.
- The need to keep others happy and please them at all times.
- Being responsible for how others feel.
- Never disappointing anybody.
And on the other extreme we see traits like:
- Self-interest: absolute drive to meet own needs and disregarding the needs of others.
- Being overly ambitious and the need to succeed at all costs.
- Showing signs of aggression and greed.
- Being overly judgmental and the inability to empathize.
- Having an extreme fear of failure.
- An overwhelming need to control situations and people.
These behaviours are not deliberate but due to experiences, nurture environment, programming, beliefs, biases, and memories stored in the body. He further explains how the suppression or uncontrolled expression of negative emotions is a clear risk factor for chronic disease of any form.
If we take anger as an example, there are three ways of dealing with this emotion:
- Repression: this is to always be nice, regardless of how you are feeling. If you fall in this group, you have an increased chance of developing cancer or autoimmune disease.
- Impulsively acting out: this is when you go into a rage, getting upset, causing your heart rate and blood pressure to increase. Fall in this group and your chances for developing heart disease and stroke are high.
- Healthy expression or processing: this is when you accept the anger. Accepting the state of anger and appreciating the fact that the emotion is just warning you. It’s doing its job and informing you of what is happening in your environment. And you need to act in an assertive way to protect your boundaries. Fall in this group and the acceptance and expression of your feelings will lead to health.
Emotions can be seen as a gauge. If you experience an emotion, it indicates the difference between what you expect and what you experience. The job of your emotions is to flag something (an event or experience) and formulate an appropriate response. You welcome in what’s healthy or positive or keep out what’s unhealthy or aggressive. Do I want more of this or less of this? It’s having boundaries; allowing in what’s nourishing and keeping out what’s not conducive.
Your immune system does the same thing as emotions. Its job is to keep out pathogens, viruses or attack intruders and let in what’s healthy and nourishing.
All systems work together, if you suppress the one, you suppress the other. That’s why if you suppress emotions, you diminish the effectiveness of your immune system. Or the immune system gets confused because your emotions are confused and it turns on itself, leading to autoimmune disease.
Besides our physiological needs for food, comfort, warmth, and safety, when we are born, we have a strong need for love and belonging. I want to emphasize two of these basic needs we are driven by if we want to reach higher stages of development and become whole, fully functioning human beings.
First is the need for attachment (acceptance). This is a connection with another human being for the purpose of being taken care of. This is an absolute need for and infant or small child. Without this they cannot survive. The more immature we are, the more important this need becomes.
Second is the need for authenticity. This is the development of your identity. Knowing who you are, how/what you feel, and being able to honour and express that in your behaviour.
It is well-documented that infants pick up on the stress of their mothers (caregivers). Infants quickly learn that if the mother is already in a stressed state, and if the infant adds more stress to her, that might threaten their relationship, and therefore, the infant’s survival. In this process the infant learns to suppress their own pain, frustration, or emotions, to maintain the relationship. This is where the unconscious programming sets in, and drives behaviour into adult years. This leads to the belief that to be more loveable, we need to work at suppressing our own needs and emotions.
Because the first need of attachment is superior and vital for survival, we often suppress our need for authenticity when there is rivalry between the two needs. Many parents couldn’t handle who we were as two-year-old tyrants, our anger, and the expression of our needs. And besides, they were already so stressed. So, many of us suppressed who we were, our feelings, and with that our authenticity. We did this to avoid conflict with our caregivers that would threaten our attachment and survival.
Today the problem is that as adults we experience a lot of our behaviours still being driven by our need for attachment. We still behave like little kids who need to be liked, accepted, and approved of at the expense of our authenticity. And this makes us sick.
If you can’t say no (when you need to), your body will say no in the form of chronic illness.
Learn to assert who you are, be authentic and true to yourself and say no.
Everybody will not like you saying no. But if you want to make the omelet of an authentic, healthy life, then you will have to break some eggs. This conflict will trigger your fears about attachment. Make the decision that your need to actualize your potential and be authentic is more important than your need for attachment. This was not true when you were a kid, but it is true for you as an adult.
Collective Repression
In these findings by Maté and others, we see that where there is repression or rage, the organism turns on itself, becomes dysfunctional, sick, and eventually dies.
Your organization is a group or collection of people. In the same way that an organism is made up of organs systems, made up of organs, which is made up of cells. The optimal health and performance of the group or organism will depend on the optimal health and performance of the individual or cell.
In organizations unresolved conflict leads to systemic problems and poor performance.
Patrick Lencioni identified that for teams to be cohesive and perform optimally, mastering conflict is essential and only comes second after building trust. Without trust you cannot have high quality conversations and master conflict.
The kind of trust that underlines teamwork is vulnerability-based trust. This requires that team members are completely comfortable being open, transparent, honest, and naked with one another. Never hiding weaknesses or covering up mistakes. Where there is trust a team speaks freely and fearlessly with one another and don’t waste time pretending they are perfect or someone they are not. This requires a willingness and ability for people to abandon their pride, fear, and ego for the collective good of the team.
If the team leader is reluctant to acknowledge his or her mistakes or fails to admit to weaknesses that are evident to everyone else, there is little hope that other members of the team are going to take that step themselves.
Conflict is not bad. The fear of conflict and the subsequent repression will lead to problems, resentment, and dysfunction. Healthy expression of conflict happens if there is a willingness to disagree, even passionately, when necessary, around important issues and decisions that must be made.
This can only happen when there is trust. Then team members can admit when they don’t know the answer or are willing to acknowledge when someone’s idea is better than theirs.
Leaders must resist the temptation to suppress and avoid the discomfort that comes from airing what may appear as negative emotions. Team members should never avoid disagreements or hold back their opinions on important issues. When there is no honesty and transparency on disagreements, these issues fester and ferment and resentment and animosity develops amongst the team. Dysfunction sets in.
A good practice to raise healthy levels of conflict is to mine for conflict during meetings.
Never avoid difficult conversations. When conflict gets ignored, conflict gets multiplied. Delaying conflict only leads to its escalation and complexity. It becomes a spider’s web that ensnares. The truth is hard conversations are the prerequisite to progress and cohesive teamwork. And the longer you wait, the harder it becomes. Rather risk the potential offense for the sake of reaching resolution.
If you value being accepted more than being authentic, it will come at a cost to the individual and the team.
It’s true that we also have a high need for connectedness and belonging to the group, that is why leadership should set the tone by fostering inclusivity through encouraging trust, authenticity, and diversity.
By remaining stuck (under-developed and immature) and prioritizing the need for attachment, you will not reach the level of development and growth that comes from satisfying your higher needs for authenticity and self-actualization. You, your organization, and the world will be better off if you “bring forth what is within you”.
Don’t live small.
Sources:
“Gospel of Thomas”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Dec. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gospel-of-Thomas.
Gabor Maté ; “When the Body Says No” Edition: 1st ed View all formats and editions ; Publisher: A.A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2003.
About the author: Reinhard Korb is a Meta-coach and integrates neuroscience, neurosemantics, psychology, and lifestyle for optimal health, performance, engagement and productivity. As the founder of Keep Thriving, he has facilitated and helped organisations and individuals actualize their potential.