A performance, a divorce, and a bad back
When I was 25 years old, I went to bed one night feeling totally normal and woke up the next morning with excruciating back-pain that made it nearly impossible to get out of bed. At the time, I was bewildered. How could something like this come out of nowhere? I hoped that something that came on so quickly might leave just as quickly, but it was only the beginning of a decade-plus of various chiropractors getting me back into alignment, and many months (more than someone in their 20s/30s would care to admit) of wearing a back brace under my clothing.
Now, it all makes sense. The Body Keeps the Score, as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk shows conclusively in his bestselling book. Our emotions have dramatic and specific impacts on our body. Repressed emotion even more so. We may deny a certain feeling but our bodies don’t have that luxury. And instead of passing through us the way emotional responses are designed to do, the unexpressed or repressed emotion infiltrates our bodies until there is a physical reality we can no longer ignore.
The morning I woke up with a back in agony was in the midst of my first marriage falling apart. I just didn’t know it yet. I was in a state of serious denial. I had only been married a year and wasn’t even close to recognizing the (at that time, humiliating) possibility that it was already failing. At age 25, I probably had about 20 years of practice of immediately positively reframing any seemingly negative event. It was a big part of my “performance.” I could reframe a negative emotion into a positive take-away before I even felt it. I was a highly skilled repressor - I just didn’t know it. But my back did.
Our bodies don’t need to avoid negative experiences or emotions. We’re built to handle those as well as the “positive” ones. But our bodies and hearts need to feel and express the things we’re experiencing so that we’re aligned – we’re behaving in a way that reflects what we’re truly feeling – and we can move through our feelings as we’re designed to do. I wish the 25 year old me had forgone the chiropractor in favor of a therapist. I think I could have ditched the back brace a lot sooner.
It’s an irony and a profound gift that I now get the opportunity to work with an incredible group of actors and facilitators to provide spaces of “alignment” for leaders who may have their own ways of performing and find themselves out of alignment. We’ve found that people benefit dramatically from a safe space where they can focus on exploring what it feels like to truly know what they are feeling and to act in a way that is profoundly honest. And to see what that feels like even in a fictional work setting.
It’s inspiring what happens when people spend a few days NOT nodding when they don’t actually agree. Not throwing out superlatives or accolades that they don’t actually believe. Not feigning confidence when they feel unsure. To their shock, people usually feel more effective in their leadership, not less. But what means more to us, is that they feel like healthier human beings.
