A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you

The psychiatrist and paediatrician, Donald Woods Winnicott

 

A client, Zac, an actor and comedian, found it very hard to deal with criticism. He said that he would always try to ‘get in first’ to protect himself from adverse comments. If someone started talking about one of his performances, he would critique it himself, before they could do so, which somehow seemed to take the sting out of anything negative they were going to say. Telling himself ‘it’s OK that they didn’t think I was any good because I knew that anyway’ protected him against hearing and confronting the full force of the criticism and the bad feelings it would engender.

If he got a bad notice in the press, he would find it difficult to work for several days. And a series of such setbacks might precipitate a depression and stop him working for weeks.

I asked Zac where he thought these powerful reactions came from. He said immediately that he’d had a very difficult relationship with his father who was ambitious and highly critical of his children. He had wanted Zac to become a lawyer, and was very angry and disappointed when he chose a different career path. It was his father’s voice he heard when he got a bad review.

In my last article I looked at how, like Zac, we can acquire distorted models of ourselves in our childhood from parents whose love and care is not unconditional but contingent on our behaving in certain ways. We grow up with the conviction that we are lacking  – what the psychotherapist and neuroscientist Louis Cozolino calls ‘core shame’ and others insecurity or poor self-esteem - and that to be worthy of love and respect we must fulfil our parents’ blueprint for the perfect child.

In this article I will consider some of the most common ways in which the legacy of these early experiences may manifest in our working lives as adults and interfere with our performance, relationships and happiness. In the next article I will consider what we can do to loosen their grip on ourselves, and negotiate them more intelligently when we recognise them in our colleagues.

 

Many of us have these vulnerabilities

On the far left of the bell curve for psychological health are those lucky people who have the psychological solidity that good genes and very good parenting provide. On the far right are those whose genetic inheritance and/or disordered childhoods have left them with lifelong psychological damage that may take the form of clinical depression, impulsive anger, or a personality disorder, such as psychopathy. But most of us occupy the middle. We are functioning – indeed we may be very successful indeed - but we also suffer from varying degrees of insecurity.

If you have these emotional vulnerabilities, adverse events at work can trigger your childhood emotions of fear and shame. Your unconscious mind tells you, for example, that when someone critiques your work, it’s the same as when your parent criticised you as a child, and that the appropriate reaction is to feel deeply ashamed and afraid that the parent may reject or even abandon you. In the language of psychotherapy, you are ‘transferring’ an emotional reaction you had to someone crucial to your very survival in your childhood to a relationship which is completely different.

Zac is experiencing an extreme form of this transference. He tries at first to rationalise by telling himself he already knew his performance was flawed.  Rationalisation – seeking to convince ourselves that things are other than they are - is often our first form of defence against the emotionally unpalatable. But when the bad notices arrive, they evoke his flight reaction - he abandons the struggle - and eventually he withdraws into depression.

These deep emotional models of ourselves are very powerful: remember how much stronger Haidt’s elephant (your unconscious mind) is than the tiny mahout (your rational mind) perched on top (see Article 1). You’re largely unaware of them: you can’t really imagine any other way of understanding yourself or your world. But, like Picasso’s girl in the painting above, you’re seeing things in a distorting mirror. Your negative self-image has nothing to do with your professional competence – as we’ve seen, many of the most creative and high-achieving among us suffer from these deep insecurities. But it gets in the way: it’s a barrier that stops you applying your talents to your job. It makes you doubt your abilities, warps your relationships, and diverts your energy to self-protection.

 

 Fear of making mistakes, sensitivity to criticism and perfectionism

 Negative parental blueprints come in many forms. If you have one, it will be unique, the product of your particular nature and nurture. So this account is bound to be a generalisation. I hope, nevertheless, that it may alert you to the possibility that things may not be as they seem and that something malign may be going on under the surface - in you or a colleague – and that you should reflect further and proceed with caution.

I want to focus in particular on the adverse consequences, for the individual and the team, of some of the most common emotional imperatives among the high achievers I’ve worked with: the deep conviction that they must do everything perfectly, work as hard as is humanly possible, that it is vital that they succeed or ‘win’. Of course they find that, however well they do, the deep emotional void inside them is still there.

This cluster of issues stems from the unconscious fear that if your work is less than immaculate you will be exposed in your full unworthiness, and you will have to confront the pain of recognising it.

We met it in the last article in my insomniac client Louise, who was perpetually convinced that she had made a catastrophic error and that the sky would fall in if she didn’t correct it. Neither was true: her ‘errors’ turned out to be imaginary or trivial and easily corrected. And even if they had been more serious, it would have been possible to put things right. After all, people make mistakes all the time in their working lives.  But for Louise, a mistake would have unleashed unbearable negative feelings about herself.

Perfectionists are trying to eliminate the risk that they may make a mistake or be criticised. Like all anxious people they are trying to exert control over events. They believe that everything they do must be completely faultless, not just fit for purpose. They take enormous pains to ensure it is perfect, and suffer great mental anguish if something goes awry. They’re also prone to assuming responsibility for everything and believe at some level that they are to blame for anything that goes wrong. They are often micro-managers (‘control freaks’, if you like): they can’t trust their perfectly competent team members to do the job to their unnecessarily high specification, and take away their subordinates’ autonomy and motivation as a result.

Zac’s sensitivity to criticism is part of the same family of vulnerabilities. If you have this makeup, you may perceive any negative feedback, setback or rejection – even when it’s out of your control - as an indicator of your personal inadequacy. Like him, you may resort to denial as a first defence. You will tell yourself that the remit wasn’t clear, the interview panel biased, you didn’t have the resources to do a good job. Or you may adopt elaborate protective mechanisms, avoiding new challenges or even self-sabotaging: temporising about a piece of work until you have too little time to do it properly and using this as an excuse.

These are flight/freeze reactions. But some people carry with them a lot of buried anger about their childhood treatment, and criticism may trigger fight rather than flight reactions. You may become defensive and angry; refusing to acknowledge that there is anything wrong with what you’ve done, or blaming others. Anger is of course the most damaging response, since it destroys your relationships with your colleagues. But all these reactions are ‘maladaptive’; they’re not appropriate to this current reality. Apart from making you unhappy, they limit your capacity for growth and fulfilment, and that of your team. They mean that you’re unwilling to try new things which may be risky; you don’t learn from adverse feedback where it’s justified; and you don’t acquire the resilience which comes with understanding that chance plays a part in life and some things are beyond your control.

 

The need to achieve, workaholism and ‘winning’

Many people are dedicated to their jobs and we rely utterly on that dedication. I want my surgeon to have trained for years and to work very hard to the highest possible standard.  But if you feel that you must prove yourself by achievement you may be in thrall to a blueprint from your childhood.  It is of course also possible, and probably quite common, to be both dedicated to what you do and in thrall to a parental blueprint.

The compulsion to work hard may be directly traceable back to parental pressure, but it’s also a common response among able children whose emotional background was lacking in other ways. If we achieve a lot, others admire and respect us, soothing our worries about acceptance. And work  is intrinsically very absorbing; it stills our worrying and ruminating.

People who work compulsively may become addicted to the good feelings – the dopamine spike – which hard work gives them. But because the emotional insecurities are still there, they’re able to take very limited pleasure in any achievement before they feel impelled to take on the next challenge and prove themselves again.  So, they work more and more, rationalising this by convincing themselves that they are very important, as is the job, and have no choice but to fill every hour with work.  They risk burnout and their relationships suffer. As the saying goes, no-one ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’. And, if they are a leader, they’re almost bound to pass on the bad effects to their team, who will have to work equally hard to keep up with them and sacrifice their health and private lives

The compulsion to ‘win’ is an altogether more damaging manifestation of emotional insecurity than those we’ve considered so far. Sufferers from it are fiercely competitive because they can't safely countenance the thought that they may be out-competed.  They may brood obsessively about their status, how they compare with their peers in ability and performance, or how they are rated by their seniors or powerful outsiders. They may routinely denigrate others to reassure themselves about their own position and they may adopt devious means to maintain it. When someone they see as a competitor wins out against them, they may find this so painful that they have to rationalise and persuade themselves that it was unfair or indeed didn’t really happen.  They then focus their negative energies on ‘getting even’.

This of course is the profile of Donald Trump, whose father’s regard was explicitly contingent on his being a ‘winner’, not a ‘loser’, as we saw in Article 2. Trump’s parental blueprint has engulfed him completely. He is widely believed to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): to have buried his negative image of himself deep in his unconscious by inventing the myth that he is uniquely talented and entitled. People with NPD devote enormous psychological energy to maintaining this myth because it defends them against emotions they can’t bear – the sense of their imperfection and fragility – and we see this in Trump’s grandiosity (apparently he is a ‘very stable genius’), continual lying and refusal to accept that he lost the last US Election.

Trump has created what the psychotherapist and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, working in the 1950s and 60s, describes as a ‘false’ or ‘adapted’ self. This false self is always in the way, preventing you from engaging fully with life, which only your true self can do – which brings me to some final reflections on how serious emotional vulnerabilities can interfere with the capacity to lead effectively.

 

False selves and leadership

 In his study of the best performing companies of the late twentieth century, the management theorist, Jim Collins, observes that the exceptional CEOs running them were known not for their charisma but for their personal humility combined with their exceptional determination. They are ambitious but their ambition is for the enterprise they lead, not for themselves. In other words, the defining characteristic of such leaders is their passion for what they do. They know what’s important to them and are highly motivated to pursue it. Collins calls this, ‘professional will’.

The former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been described by his biographer, Anthony Seldon, as ‘the worst Prime Minister Britain ever had’. He fell spectacularly from grace after his mismanagement of the Covid epidemic and lies to Parliament came to light. He was exposed as leading a chaotic organisation at No 10, and described as a ‘shopping trolley’ by one of his closest advisers because of his lack of direction and inability to make consistent decisions.  Indeed, he is arguably largely responsible for the virtual wipeout of the Conservative party in the recent General Election.

Johnson had a very disordered childhood, with a largely absent father who was a serial adulterer, and a mother who admitted herself to a mental hospital for a prolonged stay when he was 10. His childhood fantasy, no doubt springing from the need to try and exert some control over his life, and which drove him to succeed in politics, was to be ‘world king’. People who know him well are clear that the extravert, jovial, even buffoonish, personality he presents to the world is a defensive shield. He desperately wants to be liked and respected.  His interest was in soothing his insecurities by holding the office of Prime Minister, rather than what he could achieve as PM. He lacked professional will.

In this piece I have considered how the anxiety and shame we bring from our childhood can manifest in dysfunctional behaviours in our working lives many years later. In the next one, I will look at what we can do to soothe our insecurities and escape from the imprint of our early life, and how we can best handle these issues when we encounter them in our colleagues.

 

Sources

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror

PG Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally 1922

Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works, WW Norton and Company Inc, 2016

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, William Heinemann, 2006

Jim Collins, Good to Great, Random House Business Books, 2001

Donald Winnicott, ‘Ego distortion in terms of true and false self’, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, International Universities Press, 1960