OTHER CAUSES OF EMOTIONAL RESPONSES THAT CAN TURN INTO EMOTIONAL SPINS

Blame

Personal accountability is not a curse. People really like to blame others for their problems. Blaming someone else takes the heat off. Blaming provide temporary security in the presence of a threat. It is also a classic part of sibling interaction reminiscent of "the baby did it." Workplaces often replicate the dynamics in our families of origin and unresolved family drama is played out in work sites everywhere people are thrown together. Mental Health Professionals who do interventions often hear language that sounds like a power mad older brother, or a spoiled only child, or a whiny younger baby. Blame is about keeping Mom and Dad out of your face when you are child. Blame is about keeping the boss off your back at the workplace.

There is a dysfunctional set of behaviors from people who truly extol that the world "owes them" and that "someone or something else" is responsible for their emotional dilemmas. This immaturity is the source of much annoyance in the workplace. Typically, the majority of unhealthy workers will focus their grievances on being victims of someone else. The other percentages of unhealthy workers will focus their grievances on their own failures and lack of personal competencies. The answer of course, like many things, is somewhere in the middle. Usually blame is a reaction and not a healthy process.

The following list came from a consultation done in a mid- sized health care delivery system. The employees were asked to describe the problems they wanted solved . Their list, rather than a shopping list of positives, became known as the "Gripes and Blame" list and was the source of extreme spinning and time loss:

The Gripes and Blame List

• Too many Cliques and Subgroups

• Clinical vs. Non-Clinical Discrimination

• Lack of consistency, continuity, cooperation

• Fears of revenge

• Lack of courtesy and boundaries

• Sabotage and undermining

• Night staff don't do anything right

• Day staff doesn't do anything right

• Putting up roadblocks to success

• Lack of trust and lack of integrity

• Threats and intimidations

• Negative talking about co-workers

• Blaming and backbiting

• Territorialism

• Having personal agendas

• Maliciousness and verbal aggression

• People perceiving that their position is permanent and they are not " replaceable "

• Unequal accountability/no "full buy in"

• No respect for individuals or their jobs

• Poor Communications

• Paranoia

• Unilateralism in decision making by a few without communications

• Non-compliance

• People who feel they are too important to be bothered by policy and procedures or timeliness

• Wrong focus on either external or internal customer services

Internal and External Causes

If you consider all the multiple external situations that can happen in the known and unknown universe, there are expected and unexpected people, places, things and situations that are going to create emotional response. If you consider all the internal aspects of life including, but not limited to individual age, size , gender, ethnicity , experience, location, birth order, learning style, culture, religion, and hat sizes, there are countless stimuli that may create emotional responses. Present experiences and past experience blend to make strong internal cause from external sources, or external causes for internal emotional responses.

Mental Health

Studies in 1997 suggested that approximately 28% of the adult population is affected by a mental or addictive disorder (Thomas, 2002). Mental disorders are actually quite common. Such disorders tend to be hidden and kept secret due to perceived and real social stigma. Often the appearance of mental health is easy to maintain when medications and treatments are successful. However, during extreme experiences, such as high-stress events at the workplace, exacerbations may erupt and contribute to systemic chaos and confusion. A usually calm employee may lose their capacity to function at the time when that function is in a key role or need.

Some untreated mental disorders significantly increase the chances for a workplace spin. Mental disorders are not in themselves necessarily a cause of a spin, but may increase vulnerability. Employees with well-managed mental disorders can make an excellent contribution to their companies. In a perfect workplace world, there would be no stigma attached to mental illness and an employee with a diagnosed impairment would received the same standards of accommodation as someone with a physical impairment . The ADA (American Disabilities Act) is making headway on this, but still most people with diagnosed mental disorders keep their secret as long as they are able.

Physical Health

People get physically ill. In 1997 over $100 billion was lost in productivity due to cardiovascular disease. (Thomas, 2002) When people are sick their emotional responses are affordably not the same as their healthy day emotions. Work can be a source of valued and meaningful time or a source of anguish. People who are not happy are less well. People who not well are less happy. The 'Type A' personality, who has statistically been more at risk for cardiovascular disease, is the classic example of how perceptions about work and health are linked. Management needs to pay attention to physical health as a possible cause of emotional health.

A study of 200 executives at Illinois Bell Telephone Company, half who were sick a lot, and half who were rarely sick discovered that the sick half felt changes at work were a threat to their security. The other group felt that change is inevitable and as an opportunity to grow rather than a threat to security (Pizzorno, 1996). Another study reported by Pizzorno on Navy recruits in San Diego. They discovered that it was not the quality or quantity of stress that accounted for someone becoming sick, but rather the meaning that the person attached to the events.

Stress

A recent study found that many IT managers are resisting teleworking because they fear it will increase the amount of time they are working. (Wearden, 2001) Stress is the specific importance or significance attached to something. Stress is energy placed on a system. Stress is neither positive nor is it negative. Stress is what keeps the body, mind and emotions alive . Stress in the tensing of muscles against forces of blood and tissues keeps the heart beating. Without the stress in the system, the heart would not beat. Stress can be in too small or too large of an amount. Too much stress, and the heart is overwhelmed. Too little stress and the heart stops beating . Stress in healthy doses can lead people to greatness. Stress in the wrong proportions can kill the body, disturb and distort the mind and disrupt the spirit. Stress is experienced and defined internally. It is a very individual, personal, and subjective process. It may be spoken of in external terms, but it is registered individually from within.

There are collective, current agreements on what constitute disaster, but stress is very subjective and determined by the individual experience. One person's minor annoyance can at the exact same time be another's complete, catastrophic undoing. The reason for this is that people have different perceptions, even about the same thing. A familiar children's story explains perception. The tale is of the blind men (or blind mice, depending on the version) describing their perceptions of an elephant. One describes it like a hose, having only experienced the trunk. Another describes the beast as a rope, having only confronted the tail. One describes the elephant as a great tree, hugging one of the large legs. The moral is that even similar experiences lead to very different and distinct perceptions. These perceptions are then translated into beliefs, truths, laws, moralities, and judgment as the entire issue gets quite complicated and sometimes extremely distorted . In simple terms, people are different and thus perceive life events differently, including stress.

Perceptions About Stress

• Lay people do not have a clinical understanding of the complications of stress in either its small or extreme forms and therefore tend to minimize its effect.

• Mental health professionals may overemphasize it and overreact.

• Managers try to avoid the topic at all costs, which unfortunately may lead to "all costs."

Coping with Stress

• Lay people tend to think in terms of everyday stress and have discussions around the water cooler about their accommodations or complaints.

• Mental health professionals tend to think in clinical terms like illnesses, physiological responses, fight-or-flight reactions , homeostasis-balance management, toxins, hormone and brain chemical responses, heart disease, organic responses, stimulus, cognitions, environment, genetics , and coping strategies.

• Managers distribute a pamphlet on stress reduction and cross their fingers.

Responding to Information About Stress

• Lay people doze off after the first few moments, and decide, as the joke suggests, "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger or funnier."

• The mental health professional would define that thinking immediately as resistance, or a coping strategy to ignore the dangers of stress.

• Managers hope to have some sort of training on this stuff because they know what is going on, but begin to fantasize about tropical islands and palm trees.

Stress causes change and stress reactions are responses to change. There is good stress and bad stress, regular stress and extreme stress. Changes at work can create both kinds. Stress can lead to an emotional response that starts internally and the may become externalized, demonstrated, and visible. That response can start a spin if the response causes stress. What an interesting and fun universe!

X Factors that We Call Stress

Bills, Dandruff, Fabric Softeners That Get Caught In Your Socks, Loneliness, Phobia, Grief, Money, Guilt, Fear, Flying, Telephones, Flying Telephones, Procrastination, Low Self Esteem, Doubt, Jealousy, Envy, Money, Family Problems, Work Deadlines, Decisions, Shopping, Budgets, Lack Of Budgets, The Press, Idiots In The Office, Threats, Rumors, Success, Money, Failure, Rejections, Divorce, World Hunger, Childcare, Parenting, The Flu, Money, Separation, Work, Computers, That Woman With The Short Skirt, The Boss, The Boss's Mood swings, Your In-laws, The Kids, Giving The Kids Money, Money, The Employee Who Just Never Gives 100%, The Employee Who Always Gives 198% While Singing A Chipper Little Song And Quoting Affirmations And Always Asks If They Can Help You Do Your Work Because They Like You So Much, Pets, No One At Home Understands You, Money, Everyone Feeling Like They Can Dump On You And Doesn't Anyone Care About What A Rotten Day You've Had And By The Way Is My Weight Going Up, And What Do You Mean There Is A New Budget Cut Coming, A Child Off To College, Chronic Illness In The Family, Recent Death, Impending Death Of A Loved One, Divorce, Marriage, Pregnancy, Your Family Moving, Your Family Moving Next Door, Custody Battles, Tests For Cancer, Car Dies, Deciding To Stay Or Leave A Spouse, A Promotion With New Tasks And New Friends And New Enemies, Relocations, Political Correctness, Lack of Political Correctness, Travel, Office Politics, Performance Evaluations, Keeping Up With The Jones', Being The Jones', Starting An Affair, Ending An Affair, Divorce Of Best Friends, Having Horrible Parents, Miscarriage, Aging, Someone You Love Is Sick Or Drinking Or Using Drugs Or Addicted To Food Or Sex Or Gambling, Taking Medications To Manage Work And Home, Downsizing, Outsourcing, Natural Disasters, Terrorism, The Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, Train Bombings in Spain, the Iraq War, The Afghanistan War, The War on Terrorism, Privacy Issues, Mad Cow Disease, Global Warming, Spotted Owls.

Burnout

Not all stress is bad. Some stress motivates and some stress causes difficulty. The amount of stress a human can deal with is absolutely individual and unpredictable. Burnout is a term that has become synonymous with the accumulation of too much stress leading to a maximum overload to the system. Common terms like running on empty, tapped, fried, dry, wasted are verbal clues that an employee may be reaching a stage of burnout, or is feeling a sense of personal threat which may lead to either a solo spinout, or group decay in productivity as determined by the position of the weary worker. Other signs of pending burnout can be feelings and demonstrations associated with:

• A sense of being held hostage, trapped

• Having nothing more to give

• Helplessness

• Emotionally impotent, worthless

• Depression

• Seeing everything in terms of failure

• Loss of power

• Increased aggression, disappointment

• Increased frustration over normal tasks

• Suspicions and hostilities that are new

• Memory losses

• Forgetting details

• Agitated or irritable, restless

• Fatigue

• Physical persistent illness symptoms

• Increased desire for stimulants (alcohol, coffee, medications)

• Increase desire for depressants (sleep, medications, television)

• Social withdrawal