Chapter 8 - Skill 5: Skillful Opposition (The Wholehearted Journey)

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Ever wondered how childhood trauma shapes our adult lives, especially within our working environments? I take you through my personal journey, from a deeply abusive childhood to a manipulative workplace and how this led me on an incredible path to healing and self-discovery. Join me as I lay bare my struggles - from an abusive stepfather to the coping mechanisms that helped me survive, and how these same strategies haunted me into adulthood and manifested in a toxic work environment. As we journey together, you'll discover how I learned to identify my triggers, understand their origins, and work through them to reclaim my voice.

But the journey doesn’t end there. Ever had a colleague that was a master manipulator, always playing the game? We'll dissect their techniques and give you the tools to predict and counter such maneuvers in your own life - be it in a ministry, a corporation, or a small business. Identifying these patterns is the first step to changing the game. So, get ready to arm yourself with strategies to spot manipulators in your life and how to handle them effectively. Join us and let's shed some light on the darkness together.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Chapter 8. Skillful Opposition. And then it happened. In one of these impassioned meetings, my boss asked me a question pertaining to one of my areas of oversight and my chin trembled and my voice started to shake. My eyes began to fill with tears. Get it together, joel, I thought. I forced back the tears and gazed at Susan, who was now speaking to another team member. I was presenting an engaged exterior, yet inside I was grasping to regain control of my internal world. Answer confidently next time, I mentally demanded, but I couldn't. For the rest of the meeting I spoke only when necessary.

Speaker 1: 0:42

This trembling was the start of what would become a near-weekly occurrence. It was new, terrifying terrain for a trained communicator and I had no idea what was triggering it. All I knew was that I felt childish, embarrassed and out of control. I was falling apart inside and didn't know how to put the internal pieces back together again. I was losing my composure, my confidence and my voice. I went to my physician and got blood work done. Some of my levels were off. He recommended that I supplement it pharmaceutical for a time. While this helped, it didn't fix the problem. My chin still trembled. I felt young, childlike every time it occurred.

Speaker 1: 1:25

I contacted a counselor. Her name was Olivia. My first meeting with her was on FaceTime, for an hour and 40 minutes. I sat in my car in the middle of a Lowe's parking lot, sobbing as I recounted the years of abuse I'd endured living with my stepfather. This was the beginning of a long, dark wilderness season, but through it I would reclaim what I had lost and rediscover myself. I began to recognize just how abusive and toxic my stepfather had been, how my childhood haired was still affecting my life as an adult. Walking through all the trauma, trudging up all those memories being triggered to tremble like that little boy all those years ago, was messy. But I knew there had to be a message in all this, a purpose, and in fact there was. The quaking of my chin was a surface rumbling, speaking to the hidden fractures in my heart, like fault lines shifting under the surface. For a time, god allowed me to lose my voice and then sent me Olivia. Slowly, painfully, I began to remove the mask. God started to show me that I couldn't stay in an environment I'd outgrown. It was constricting and, more than that, was increasingly growing toxic and abusive. I knew my external environment needed to change and Olivia was helping me to see that there were things in my internal environment that needed to change too. In order to accomplish this, she brought me back to my beginnings so that I could ultimately move forward.

Speaker 1: 3:01

During one of our sessions, olivia asked when does your chin tremble, joel? I replied it happens mostly during our executive team meetings. Who attends those meetings"? Olivia inquired. I said Mark, susan and the rest of the executive team.

Speaker 1: 3:18

How would you describe Susan's tone in those meetings? Olivia asked Is it combative? I responded yes often. Would you describe her tone as abusive? Olivia asked. I paused because I had never labeled it as such before. I thought about it for a moment. I had to agree. I said yes, I would describe it that way. When Susan communicates in this manner, how do you respond? She asked, as of late I've gone internal Shut down. The meetings are so emotionally draining I just want to get out of there as soon as possible.

Speaker 1: 3:55

I said as a child, how did you respond to your stepfather when he was combative or abusive? She asked. Olivia had helped me connect the dots, leading me to the answer. After a momentary silence, I acknowledged I'm responding a lot like I did when I lived with my stepfather. She explained that my chin tremblings were a result of coping mechanisms I developed as a child. She taught me that while those coping strategies helped me survive the abuse I experienced then, they were no longer appropriate or effective as an adult.

Speaker 1: 4:31

As a child, I would put my head down, get out of dodge, not make waves, shut down my emotions until I could heal in private alone. The light bulb went off. Yes, that was it. I hadn't seen it. But all this fear, all the chin trembling, all the hiding, was coming from the way I learned to survive. As a boy living in a very abusive and toxic home environment. I had unknowingly carried childhood coping mechanisms into adulthood. Olivia had opened up my eyes to see that the current culture I was working in was quite toxic. Like many victims of abuse, I couldn't see it. While I was living in that environment, I had unknowingly switched into a mode of survival and it triggered the coping strategies I had developed to survive through those abusive circumstances so long ago.

Speaker 1: 5:20

She helped me pinpoint who the abuse was stemming from as a child. It is appropriate to run from an abusive herit, like Jesus did through the help of Mary and Joseph, or like I did. But ultimately God wants to mature us so we can do as Jesus did as an adult. He didn't run from his herits, he handled them. This was a rough season, for me for sure, but one of the things that I never will regret doing was continuing to meet with Olivia, because she helped me to understand something and to see something that I never saw before, and this thing called the pattern was a total game changer.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Here's the pattern. First, if you heavily disagreed or confronted Susan at a meeting or did something that potentially threatened the appearance of her control, she would target that individual and come for blood. This attack would be through face-to-face confrontation, passive, aggressive comments and meetings, talking negatively about you to other staff members, calling into question your work ethic, your loyalty or even, if need be, your character, whether it was true or not. Second, if you stood up to her, didn't get defensive during her reprisal and acutely and astutely proved the truth of your statement, garnering the agreement of the team, she would move from an attacking posture to playing the victim. She would say how tough it is to be in her position, or that people were threatening her, or that she was receiving anonymous death threats. If this second stage occurred, then it was usually followed by a third stage of wooing kindness. She could feel the relational distance and would work to woo you and the team back until she had re-established a sense of control.

Speaker 1: 7:36

Once I noticed this pattern, I could see how history with her was repeating itself over and over again. Number one loss of control she would attack. Number two she played the victim. Number three it was woo until she had restored a sense of control. Seeing this cycle helped me understand what tactic Susan would most likely deploy next. Her behavior became much more predictable. This was an invaluable tool to orient myself in this wild organizational culture. It will be helpful in identifying and handling the herds and herodiases in your life too. Whether you work in a ministry, corporation or small business, you will find them there. What I later discovered was that this cycle is often employed by high-level manipulators, narcissists and those with narcissistic tendencies. I'm not suggesting that Susan was a narcissist, but just being aware of some of her tendencies helped me to understand her actions and what tactic she most likely would deploy next. It helped me to better predict the wild rhythms of this herodias, and it will help you to do the same in the presence of yours.