Some time ago I worked with a professional gentleman in his mid-fifties named John. After I had been seeing him for some time, during which he had spoken mainly of troubles in his marriage, he revealed to me that he would awaken every night about 3AM and lie awake for an hour or two worrying about a particular piece of work or client. The issue was always about a piece of work that he had put off, files that sat unattended on his desk, or phone calls that he had neglected to return. As he lay awake he would go over scenes in which the client would call or come to see him and would be angry with him. Always he felt small and humiliated. In the morning his confidence would return and he would forget his fears. That night the process would repeat itself.
I always use as a rule of thumb when trying to decipher seemingly meaningless behaviour that it is important to look at the results of the behaviour. For a reason unknown to the actor those results are a part of the motivation for the behaviour itself. John would procrastinate about certain files. The result was a chronic experience, known only to himself, of being afraid, of being (in fantasy) reprimanded and humiliated. The repetition of this experience was important to him. To simply tackle and finish the work that he was delaying was entirely possible. There was nothing in any of it that he couldn't accomplish in a couple of days.
When John told me more about relationships in his family the origins of this inner conflict became clearer. He was the oldest of four kids and the only boy. His father was a pretty uptight guy and a strict Christian. John grew up longing for his father's approval but never feeling good enough, never feeling deeply liked or loved by him. He was closer with his mother but was always aware of his father's discomfort and disapproval when he looked to his mother for affection. Ultimately he withdrew from both of them and from his younger sisters and put all of his efforts into achievements at school and in his community. He was successful but inwardly felt isolated, insecure, and deeply, a fraud. He enjoyed the praise of others for his achievements but secretly believed that they would think less of him if they really knew him. He had internalized what he believed was his father's view of him as not very likeable and somehow lacking.
These different parts of John co-existed as he matured to manhood. He continued to achieve and to be successful. But he was not free within to enjoy his life fully. Part of himself still felt like a kid who was chronically on the outs with his dad. And, of course, he was always angry with his dad. Whenever anyone hurts us, whether we are aware of it or not, we are always angry about it. That's a healthy response without which we could be anyone's prey. Depending a lot on how anger is dealt with in our families or cultures, we may or may not be able to express it appropriately, but it is always there. John was not very conscious of his anger. He thought of himself as peaceful, someone who did not like conflict. It is true that he did not like it, indeed, he was afraid of it, but only in places where he could be hurt or humiliated. His expressions of annoyance, criticism or anger were limited to exchanges with his employees, and most particularly, with his wife. In these exchanges he considered himself provoked and justified. In most settings he worked to be seen as a nice guy. It was deeply important to his sense of security that people like him.
John's father continued to be alive to him in his daily life though he rarely saw him. He himself acted as the critical dad at work and at home but internally, especially in the night, the critical, angry dad turned against himself. He would feel like a little boy again -- afraid, humiliated, and filled with dread. The various clients whose work he was ignoring would appear before him, each condemming him, looking at him with disgust, each calling him stupid and a loser.
As children we all develop ways of dealing with our environments. These ways are rarely thought through or articulated. If the milieu in which we grow up is relatively calm, happy, loving and stimulating in interesting ways, we absorb this as the norm. We are able to develop ways of interacting with other people and circumstances with a fair amount of resilience. A small child who chronically feels thwarted or hurt in ways that he cannot understand or deal with begins to develop negative mental and emotional responses which also become his way of dealing with the world. As children we gneralize tremendously and these generalizations can help or hinder us in later life. John couldn't understand and was made unhappy by his father's dour and critical attitude toward him. His reactions were complex: hurt, anger, a desire to protect himself from further hurt, and, a desire for revenge. His revenge took many forms. One was to be cool and unresponsive towards his mother which pained her greatly. He also acted out his anger by various ways of torturing his younger siblings. Daddy was too remote and too scary for either of these tactics to be possible but they gave him the satisfaction of some agency in a difficult situation.
Coming to understand these dynamics was a painful process for John, one that he resisted for some time. It was important to him to see himself and to be seen as a kind and decent person. Confronting these darker, actually nasty elements in himself was really hard. But for any deep change to take place in the arena where he experienced pain -- his nightly encounters with the punishing father, it was essential. Gradually he was able to acknowledge and take responsibilty for the ways that he took his irritabilty out on his employees and his wife. The rationalized excuses began to fade as his conscience developed and he worked to change his behaviour. At the same time we worked through hypnotherapy to help to connect him with the lost and hurt little boy within himself who felt at the mercy of his father's moods. He learned how to listen to and have compassion for these scared and pained parts of himself. Becoming kinder to himself and to others had to work together.
A third component of his therapy was to deal very practically with the objects of his procrastination, his files and clients. We worked out a scheme by which he would list the issues to which he most dreaded attending. His job then was to be very firm with himself. Every morning before doing anything else he would tackle the most difficult. Often it was a simple matter of making a phone call or of moving a file along to the next stage. Each time he accomplished this action he felt better about himself and more solidly adult. It was the equivalent of being a kindly but firm parent saying, "Yes, I know that you don't want to go to the dentist but it's something that must be done. I'll be with you and it will be alright." The kid is scared but goes and then is proud when he or she passes through the trial and is OK. This is character-building behaviour.
Another aspect of John's situation that I have not mentioned is the addictive power of stimulating hormones in this type of compulsive behaviour. When we are angry or fearful our adrenals release cortisone and adrenaline to get us ready to fight or to run away. It's a rush even though it might be experienced as scary or uncomfortable. Weaning oneself from the kind of daily stress-producing behaviours that John was enacting meant letting go of the physical/emotional highs that they gave him. Living on a more steady keel can seem boring to someone addicted to the swings of highs and lows that these behaviours afford them. But as he moved forward on all three fronts of his therapy: confronting his nasty behaviour with employees and his wife, learning to understand and have compassion for his own hurt inner self, and learning to be firm with himself about doing the work that he had agreed to do, John found a greater sense of peace and a deeper happiness in all of the circumstances of his life.
