“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

(William Faulkner)

Deborah Ancona is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management who studies family ghosts.

The ghosts discussed here do not haunt houses, but boardrooms and Zoom calls. Professor Ancona investigates how we unconsciously bring to work the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that we formed while growing up.

Your childhood - happy or otherwise - determines who you are as a team member, colleague, leader, and mentor.

This makes perfect sense, neuroscientifically speaking. Our brain can’t possibly process all the data it is bombarded with and make careful decisions about our every word, gesture, or cognitive interpretation. Instead we use a lot of pre-saved templates, if you will. We start building - mostly in non-verbal, subconscious form - emotional and behavioral patterns from the moment we are born, based on what we witness in our caretakers and our own experiences in relationship to them. At that point in our lives, we have zero ability to look at this input critically. The imprints we receive then are well cemented by the time our rational brain comes online, and they will continue to operate from under the growing pile of our life experiences and (seemingly) logical models for the world and our place in it.

Sometimes all this works great. If you’ve had a carefree childhood, felt safe and seen as a child, chances are you go about your day expecting good things to happen, challenges to be surmountable and people to like you. Your Social Engagement System - to use the Polyvagal Theory language - is switched on, and you will bring that charismatic energy wherever you go, including work.

Chronic childhood stress produces less serene and popular members of the workforce and society at large. 

Developmental trauma survivors are more likely to build and unconsciously deploy inadequate attitudes, emotional reactions and behavioral patterns. If you haven’t felt safe growing up, it may take a lot for someone to get close and win your trust today. If hiding was your survival strategy as a child, maybe you’re really awkward in the spotlight now. Perhaps you felt that no one cared about you, and you get more upset than most when people don’t recognize your contribution to the team.

Of course there’s a huge space between the paradise and dungeon childhoods. But where you are on that spectrum matters when it comes to how you experience work and work relationships, your ability to achieve results, and your career long term.

It’s also true that, as adults, there’s a lot more that we bring to the table than inner molds from our childhoods. We have skills, motivations, experiences, resilience, and an ability to reflect and learn. But how we put all that in motion matters a lot, and that can be often traced back to patters of emotion and beliefs that we built growing up, and that are buried deep within us.

If you think this doesn’t apply to you or that you’re a completely different person at work, look deeper. We rarely get to pause enough to see clearly and question our ingrained schemas for feelings and behaviors. Try making a list of all the things, and people, that elicit negative emotions at work. Who and what do they remind you of? Which buttons do they push, and when have you experienced something similar? What is your reaction, and would you choose to behave differently? If yes, how and why is it so hard to do it?

As I argue in my previous post, recognizing what’s going on under the hood is a prerequisite for the ability to do things differently now. The typical development strategies available in the workplace (assessments, leadership training, coaching etc.) will fall flat if they don’t land on the fertile soil of self-awareness and willingness to work with our shadows. The corporate mantra of ‘employees own their development’ is particularly true for developmental trauma survivors, who must face their demons first.

There are no perfect childhoods or parents, and all of us have something to get over from our distant past. Childhood trauma survivors have more ghosts to put to rest than most. But ghosts stick around only while they have unfinished business, and dissipate once we start seeing and befriending them.

Thanks for tuning in,

Adina

P.S. Know anyone who’s had a tough time growing up? Please consider sharing this blog with them.