May 4th was Asthma Day and I was reminded of the very high and increasing level of asthma in Ireland. Presently, over 440,000 individuals suffer from this condition. The condition of bronchial asthma refers to the type of suffocation-spasm typified by wheezing during expiration. It is preceded by a constriction of the small bronchi and bronchioles, which can be caused by a cramping (a prolonged holding) of the smooth musculature, an inflammatory itching of the airways and an allergic swelling and secretion of the mucous membranes. Individuals – children and adults alike – experience asthma as a life-threatening suffocation: sufferers claw for air and breathe in gasps with the out breath especially throttled.
Read moreThe Story Behind What We Do
Everybody has a story and each person’s story is a unique autobiography and only that person fully knows their story.
However, some aspects of a person’s story may be known only at an unconscious level and this hidden world will only become available to consciousness when the person finds adequate emotional and social safety, initially with another and, subsequently, within self.
The story of a person’s life is not the events he or she encounters – for example, difficult birth, loving mother, emotionless home, conditional loving, violent father, possessive mother, kind grandparent, affirming teacher. The story consists in the person’s inner responses to these events. What is amazing in a family or classroom or workplace is that each person responds in a unique way to situations that arise. This means that each child has a different mother and a different father, each student a different teacher, each employee a different manager and each voter a different politician. This makes total sense because when two individuals interact, inevitably, their interaction will be of a unique nature. Parents are powerful witnesses to how each child is completely different from the other and this happens whether children are reared in benign or difficult circumstances.
Read moreIs Compassion Possible in the Workplace?
Compassion is an emotion that arises in response to understanding that the difficult behaviours of either employees or managers are not consciously deliberate in their neglect of others but are unconsciously designed to bring attention to the individual’s inner turmoil. Is it a bridge too far to ask an employee who has been relentlessly bullied by a manager to have a compassionate understanding of the manager’s unconscious plight? Such a situation is only possible when individuals who have been bullied first of all develop a compassionate understanding of their own emotional pain and the passivity that has unconsciously prevented the emergence of an assertiveness that would have challenged the bullying behaviour when it first presented. There are two very separate issues that require consideration here – one, the plight of those who are at the receiving end of bullying and, two, the plight of those who owing to their inner securities resort to bullying to reduce perceived threats to their wellbeing. There is a further consideration – that compassionate understanding is suggesting that individuals who bully or who are passive are responsible to their defensive responses but they are not responsible for their actions. The ‘to’ and ‘for’ distinction is important because when others insist you are ‘responsible for’ your actions, they are judging that you are deliberately being neglectful, whereas when others assert the need for you to take ‘responsibility to’ your actions, I know that your bullying arises from a place of hurt within yourself; in this way they are compassionate, non-judgemental but still assert the need for you to take responsibility to the neglect perpetrated.
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