Dear Chris:

I didn’t understand the last few lines of our post, the two conflicting worries:

1. Your life story has no meaning if you don’t stand up to this behavior (of the co worker) – what do you mean by your life story has no meaning…?

2. Your job could be jeopardized as a result of… making co workers aware of the co worker’s behavior?

Can you restate your conflict?

anita

Hi Chris,

Here are my responses to your questions:

1) Why should you love a person’s story?

Every human being has a wound, which is the source of all neurotic, unhealthy, unloving behaviour.  The wound is a result of trauma (i.e., the story).  The reason that, “there isn’t a person you wouldn’t love if you could read their story,” is because the story reveals the source of the wound and makes the person’s unacceptable behaviour understandable.  And to understand an individual is the beginning of loving them.  No one is asking us to love anyone’s story.  It is the individual we need to love and the story is a window into who they really are.

You describe your coworker as narcissistic and insecure.  That is not who she is in her essential nature.  Those traits are examples of her woundedness and evidence of trauma.  Because she is a coworker and not a friend, you may never have the opportunity to hear her story.  It doesn’t matter.  The story doesn’t matter.  The point is that she has a story and her story resulted in narcissism and insecurity, which means there is pain in her life.  Once you understand that, you can feel compassion for her (not for her behaviour, but for her).  When you can feel compassion for her, despite her behaviour, you will automatically treat her differently and thereby transform the relationship.

2) Coping with your feelings as they arise in the workplace

This is by far the more difficult of your two issues.  It will require that you stay centered in every moment, in a place of balance and peace, so that when the feelings come up, you can witness them from a neutral place, breathe through them and not act from them.  This is key!  Any unbalanced feeling, if acted upon, will create greater imbalance and ultimately, suffering.

Finally, elsewhere in your sharing you ask this question: “how can people with deep emotional trauma interact with people who bring that trauma out of them?”

This is a superb question and is, in a sense, at the root of all human interaction.  Someone I know refers to earth as “the hospital planet” because we are all so damaged here.  The perfection and beauty and magic and love of the universe is revealed in this phenomenon: that our most important relationships are exactly these – the people we are drawn to are the people most likely to trigger our essential wound.  This is how the ideal conditions for healing are created!

This is a very big topic – too big, in fact for here and now, but hopefully this was helpful.

Yours in healing,

Tiela G.