Stop The Suffering Cycle

I’ve worked in the firehouse and in corporate America. The reality is that some groups of people are healthier than others no matter what industry you’re in. There are oftentimes groups of people who want to keep suffering and they enjoy watching the suffering of other people in the form of gossip. Gossip is toxic. Gossip is not healthy and gossip is something that needs to go in every organization as well as be talked about in a way where people can become more conscious of their negative pattern. To understand the negative pattern, there’s a great book called “Why we suffer” from Peter Michaelson.

Peter Michaelson talks about this suffering cycle where people are on this loop and they don’t know that they’re on the loop until they realize they’re on the loop and then from there they have to figure out how to get off of that and to not continue suffering – and what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to relive something that is familiar to them even if its very negative, even if its very traumatic, even if it is just nasty, nasty stuff.

Sometimes people go back to it because the default pattern is the familiar. People are too afraid to go out into the unknown and to try something new and once they do try something new, hey, there can be a great world out there. So as adults, once people are aware of this its something that you can actually coach people on. You can say: Hey, I’ve noticed based on these similar situations this is the way you tend to react and you know I hope that you can be a little more conscious of this and respond in a better manner. You might take some time journal on it and think a little bit about why you’re reacting this way in these certain situations at work because we really want to have a better environment and healthy culture for everyone.

It’s okay as a manager if you’re noticing these patterns in people to stop the suffering cycle because you want to have a healthy workplace and you don’t want to have dysfunctional gossip, negativity. This is really true and it’s some deep stuff but its times that when people get that aha that light bulb goes off, they go: Oh, wow I actually realized. Yes, I am recreating this pattern because this was familiar for me in this situation a long time ago in my life and yes, I don’t want to do this anymore so how can I create a better version of me and a better way to respond