Tigers, Tribes, and Trauma
Fear of public speaking, anxiety in meetings, imposter syndrome, inability to set limits and boundaries, authority avoidance; these and other fear-based thought constructs can blunt your effectiveness and consume your cognitive and emotional energies.
Your brain is hardwired to avoid rejection, scrutiny, exposure, and judgment. Not many generations ago, if you lost connection with your tribe you died. Fear of being dispossessed was and is a biological brain function promoted by natural selection. Subsequently, we’re hardwired to fear social estrangement. (In other words, you’re normal.)
But it’s not just an effloresced fear of being kicked out of the tribe or eaten by a tiger. Unhealed traumas magnify our intrinsic tendencies, creating a kind of “trampoline double bounce” that, when triggered, can leave us flat or send us off to the moon.
One of my executive clients, for instance, tracked her fear back to being ostracized and bullied by her middle-school peers. Another traced his fear of speaking up at meetings back to having been humiliated when he very publicly failed at a sporting event in college. And, sadly, too many of my physician clients point to residency as a pivotal trauma.
Your thalamus (processes what you see, hear, and touch) has a direct connection to your Amygdala (releases adrenaline, cortisol, etc.), which means your amygdala sometimes reacts to your environment without your input. Considering past wounds and the intrinsic human need to belong, no wonder we sometimes feel anxious.
The Bad News: You may have developed unconscious strategies to help navigate or circumnavigate past difficulties, and because those strategies served you well in the past, they became subliminally automatic. Then the context changed, however. (You’re not in middle school, college, or residency anymore.) And bolstered by that wonderful brain of yours that’s hardwired to fear rejection, what protected you back then is working against you now.
The Good News: You have more influence over your autonomic nervous system than you think you do. You can use that same wonderful brain to slow down, get conscious, and create new, more productive neural pathways. In my world, we call this “Adaptive Change,” the developmental work that is essential to functioning in complex environments but often neglected by physicians and executives. (“… the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day.”[1])
I’ll talk more about how to spot fear-based constructs in yourself and others in a subsequent post.
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Brad Fern is an adaptive-change developmental coach who specializes in working with physicians and healthcare executives.
[1] R. Kegan, L. Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture, Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.