We May Have to Die a Little
What’s your language? I’m not talking about your speech patterns or grammar or syntax or pronunciation or or or. I’m asking how you operate in the world.
Behavior is a language. Conflict is a language. War is a language. The way you move your body. Your RBF. Your clothes. Your hair. The slight rolling of eyes and other micro aggressions. The deep smiles. Scatteredness. Dysfunction. Flight. Fight. Freeze. Fawn. The way you breathe or don’t.
How are you out in the world?
I was recently reading something that talked about how one of the first things a leader has to learn when they join a new organization is what the currency is — the common language of value. For a lot of places these days, that currency is grievance. As in: I have something to say about how things are going wrong. About how you have done me wrong. This happens a lot, I think, when there are legitimate injustices in organizations or relationships. Folks start feeling alienated and grievance becomes a common language — a way for people to bond.
I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with being grieved by something. I do wonder, however, about the value of us clinging to that currency too tightly for too long.
But then I think something like, “This is how these people were raised.”
This is how they’ve been taught to love. Through grievance. Through trauma bonding. Through the ritual airing of grievances. And it makes some sense to me. When you’re fighting for your proverbial (or actual) life, you’ll take what you can get. And so love looks different for these folks. When real love is in short supply, we adopt a scarcity mentality. And it’s all Hunger Games from that point on.
Right now, I’m involved in two organizations where grievance is the language being spoken. Some folks have a litany of complaints that range from thoughtful to petty. Other folks have actively dissociated from relationships. Yet others are licking the wounds left over from interpersonal control dramas. People are loving the way they’ve been taught. By their families, their past careers, and by the organization itself.
To learn a new language or adopt a new currency, we have to be open to some foreign exchange. We may have to move with intention. We may have to die a little.
When our identities and egos get wrapped up in the kinds of turmoil I describe, we may have to let things go. Including ourselves. Sometimes the way we were raised — even by the most well-meaning of folks — ain’t right. Sometimes we let legitimate responses to injustice convert us to permanent victimhood. Sometimes we’re translating everything the other party does into the language of grievance. Sometimes we’re just wrong.
We may have to die a little.
In what ways might we exchange our language of grievance for languages of love or hope or openheartedness? What might dying a little allow us to rebirth?