TRANSCRIPT
Jenn Podcast Recording Forgiveness at Work
Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re gonna be talking about forgiveness.
My guest is Jennifer Griggs. She’s a renowned oncologist, researcher, leadership coach, and a narrative medicine practitioner. After a traumatic event at work, she had to learn to forgive, and in the process became a scholar of forgiveness and dignity. She leads a brilliant and passionate team that works to improve the quality of cancer care in Michigan USA by making good trouble.
She hosts the podcast. The Dignity Lab collaborates widely with creative people. Mothers, her two young adult daughters, supports her husband’s theater ventures and takes delight in the oak trees and bird songs in the woods where they live. Please join me in welcoming Jennifer.
Hi, [00:01:00] Jennifer.
Jenn: Hi. It’s great to see you.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Gissele: It’s great to see you too. I’m so excited to talk about forgiveness. I’d like to start, by asking you to tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work.
Jenn: Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me.
When I discovered dignity, everything fell into place for me. So I consider myself a scholar of both. I think without understanding dignity, it’s hard for us to know why something hurt. It’s hard for us to take accountability for our part when.
Applicable. And I think it’s hard to see a way out of that victim stance. when I learned to forgive, I actually looked back on my whole life and realized I’d been a person of grievance. I had grievances against people going back to early in my life and found that I was oppressed by my own stance towards what had happened.
So for me, forgiveness has meant freedom, [00:02:00] dignity has made it fall into place and it’s. Paved a path forward for me. So forgiveness to me is giving up all hope of a better past in search of a better future.
Gissele: Hmm. I love that. I love that. And it takes a level of courage to be able to look at yourself and your history and acknowledge that you are person full of grievances.
Right? It’s much, much easier it feels to blame other people for those grievances. So I applaud that courage. I wanted to ask you what dignity means to you.
Jenn: Dignity originally meant somebody of value and worth. What’s interesting is when the Human Rights Commission in the 1950s came out with their statement of human rights, dignity was reconceptualized as our inherent worth or value.
Unlike respect, it doesn’t have to be earned. We’re born with dignity. From the minute we’re born, we have worth and value. No one would argue that a little baby who I think has net [00:03:00] negative when they’re first born, before they smile, has value and worth.
Gissele: And and that’s certainly true. I mean, when I think of babies, you’re right,
they’re just naturally deserving of love, and I feel that way about every human being. Can you tell me a little bit about the work that you do in terms of forgiveness at work? In my experience. There hasn’t been a lot of forgiveness at work. workplaces tend to use a very punitive approach instead of more curiosity.
how have you found the forgiveness at work piece has been received by workplaces?
Jenn: Really, I work mostly with people who’ve been hurt at work, and the thing that is very clear is that systems can violate dignity, a whole system can, and then there’s no one to take accountability. Mm. So forgiveness is really an invitation to reclaim your dignity.
It’s a
mm-hmm.
An invitation, not a prescription. [00:04:00] Even though I’m a doctor, I never prescribe forgiveness. It has to be something to which you are led. And if we can forgive the people who hurt us at work, we can hold more lightly to those harms. We don’t wanna forget them. Hmm. But we can decide. We have agency to decide how we wanna move forward.
Do we wanna be tethered to the oppressor or do we want to be free? And that might mean we leave. If leaders can bring in a culture of forgiveness, I think the sky’s the limit. And that might be done through restorative justice, where the people who are hurt. Yeah, and the people who’ve done the harm can be together in a circle where they can understand what happened, why it hurt, where the whole community, which it’s never one person, right?
It’s everybody. It’s all the ripples around them. If they have a chance to be heard and [00:05:00] seen, then we can move from punishment to restoration. We can move from punishment and casting people out. To a more whole ecosystem, and I think it does in an organization. It has to start with leaders, and that means as leaders taking accountability for the things that we often attribute to a system, right?
Nobody says, what happened to you was wrong? This is how I’m going to fix it. This is how we are going to change. And that does need to start with leadership.
Gissele: Because people follow the leaders, right? Like they follow the example. And I do believe as a person who was before in the workplace and tried very hard to change systems I had to realize that individuals make up the system.
And individuals follow the protocols and choose to follow [00:06:00] suit and even when sometimes our values are violated. And so the change sort of begins with us in, in examining the systems we’re working with and examining the systems we’re creating as leaders and understanding that sometimes some of these systems.
Become really dehumanized. How have you found forgiveness in, the medical field in terms of the way that, like cancer care is provided, for example.
Jenn: Such an important topic. There’s so many ways we could do better in medical care. It strikes me that a system designed to care with the intention to care can be one of the least caring environments in which to work. And our defend and deny culture is the opposite of restorative justice, right? We, I didn’t do it.
That didn’t happen. It wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome. we blame it on the litigious culture in the United States at least. It’s, I think, [00:07:00] independent of that, we see it with little children. It wasn’t my fault. We see this throughout our entire culture. Of course, it’s gonna be present in medical care.
For me, one of the most healing and meaningful things about work is to say to a patient, I am sorry that happened. That was wrong. That your call wasn’t answered all the way up to serious medical errors. And then to say, tell me more about the impact on you. I see you, I hear you. To validate that what was wrong, what happened was wrong, and then to say, how can I make this right?
And if not to the person who was harmed, how can we change the system to keep this from happening to other people we know? That’s a big motivator for people seeking compensation after medical errors is not so much their own pocketbook. They’re not seeking to be made rich. They’re seeking to be made whole, [00:08:00] and they’re seeking to prevent this from happening to our metaphorical children.
Those who come after us in a healthcare system that can practice. Restoration. We can see this being a learning healthcare system, a healing healthcare system, and I think we need to go all the way back in history and to present day harms that have been done to entire groups of people. So experimenting on black men with syphilis,
There needs to be restorative justice, and we need to see this at all levels, whether it’s between coworkers, the people we employ, that we underpay to the way our patients and their families and loved ones have been treated. So I think this goes back in time and space, regardless of somebody’s status.
And I just had a conversation with my team today that when somebody’s angry with us to say, tell me [00:09:00] more. Does take courage, but tell me more. Helps people feel heard and seen. And at the end of the day, that’s really, and the beginning of the day for that matter, that’s what people really, really want, is to be seen and heard and validated and not told that their story didn’t happen.
Doesn’t matter that they don’t matter. Does that
make sense?
Gissele: Absolutely. I just wanna go back and touch on something that you said, which I think is really fundamental. this is actually supported by the research that people are less likely to be litigious if medical teams, if they admit mistakes, even if it’s a big mistake.
I think that’s really important. But like you said, it takes courage. I think what comes up for. People is like the whole shame and guilt when you think about little kids. Why don’t little kids tell the truth? Sometimes it’s that shame and guilt and at least some kids have not been taught how to manage those difficult feelings.
And so imagine as an adult, managing shame and guilt how [00:10:00] difficult. What has been your experience in terms of helping people manage those difficult feelings in conversation?
Jenn: Such an important point. Shame, just for your listeners who probably already know that guilt is, I made a mistake, shame as I am a mistake and a culture of perfectionism, especially in medicine, especially at work, especially for high performers like people who got into leadership positions.
That sense of, there’s something inherently wrong with me that I think starts very, very early on. If you look at Ericson’s stages of development, when we. Look very early on in life. How are our bodies accepted? how are our bodies treated, I think sets up shame.
And if we don’t have a secure attachment figure, if we don’t know that we are safe despite the mistakes we make, and we all make mistakes, how can we feel safe? and [00:11:00] then our culture of punishment. Just heightens that sense that if you’ve made a mistake, you’re cast out, you are incarcerated, you are fired, you’re canceled.
Right? Yeah. There’s no room for accountability. The way I work with shame is through everything from Internal Family Systems to. To people talking to themselves in the second or third person to get a little distance from that shame. And then we know one of the most important things about shame is to talk about it.
Brene Brown says, shame thrives in darkness. So to become more comfortable with the vocabulary of shame and to take risks interpersonally, organizationally, personally. Then to have that positive feedback of, oh, that just led to healing.
Gissele: as you were talking, I remembered an interprofessional team.
And so for those of you that don’t know, [00:12:00] interprofessional is like multiple professions working together. So you have doctor, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, many hospitals now work very interprofessionally. But I remember hearing a doctor basically say at the end of the day, the responsibility of this care lies on me.
and so that feeling of solely responsible and therefore has to be the main decision maker, I think was a huge weight on certain. Individuals, like you said, leaders or doctors to feel like they have to know everything like that pressure. Whereas sharing the load may help kind of alleviate some of those real fears that you were talking about.
Right. And especially the shaming, guilt, if something goes awry,
I wanna go back to the concept of dignity because, There’s lots of different perspectives about end of life and how to allow people to have dignity.
at what point do you enable people to do [00:13:00] that? what’s your definition of dignity in terms of like applying care for end of life.
Jenn: I’d love to take one small step back and describe the elements of dignity according to the taxonomy of Donna Hicks.
Hmm.
Donna Hicks is at the Weatherby International Senator for conflict resolution. I. Affiliated with Harvard and Donna and her student did interviews with people all around the world to ask about times people’s dignity had been honored. Boy is that hard to think of that. It’s so much easier to think about times dignity was violated.
Mm-hmm. And in that work, they identified 10 elements. And those are acceptance of identity, inclusion, safety, both physical and psychological. Acknowledgement, which I read is validation, understanding recognition, being given the benefit of the doubt, autonomy, accountability, and [00:14:00] fairness. So if we think about.
Times in our life that our dignity was honored. We felt seen and heard, acknowledgement, understanding, and recognition. A time we were included, we felt we belonged. That’s acceptance of identity and safety and inclusion. And then at times when things are fair, we were given the benefit of the doubt. People assumed positive intention.
We were given autonomy. We had some control over our future. People were accountable. And things were fair, we can take and look at end of life through all of those elements. People need to be seen and heard. They need to have a chance to have their story told and have their suffering recognized. They especially need autonomy.
They especially need to feel they have control over at least some part of their life. They may not have control over whether the cancer is progressing or not, or the disease is [00:15:00] progressing. But can they have control over where they spend their day in bed, a chair outside? Can they be given the chance to do for themselves what they want to so they’re not babied?
There’s no paternalistic. I know better than you mentality. Mm-hmm. That they feel safe to express their fears, that things are fair, that they have access to everything they need to be comfortable. So I think it’s a wonderful lens to look at actually, both extremes in life. Children need autonomy. People, disabled people need autonomy.
People at work need autonomy, and people at the end of life need autonomy.
Gissele: Thank you for sharing that. I think that was very powerful. I’m struggling with someone in our lives that has like a bit of dementia, we don’t know when the person is there or not there.
How to ensure that they still have autonomy when there is so much fear and there may be a perceived lack of [00:16:00] capacity.
Jenn: Hmm. I think what’s happening in the here and now is the only way to work through that. What is happening in this moment? What choices can they make in this moment?
Gissele: Mm mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
And the challenge is sometimes when they’re like maybe away from home. They wanna go home, but the drive might be like two hours and it might be a little bit difficult. It’s how do you navigate those waters? but maybe you could do this.
Mm-hmm. Right. Like you would do with children, right? Yes. Like, okay, you can’t have dessert for dinner, but what can you have? Like can you, do you wanna choose between A or B?
Jenn: And what do we
mean by home, right? What do we mean? Yeah. By home? Home is our people as much as it is the things. So to get curious about that too.
Mm-hmm.
Gissele: Yeah. Very true.
Jenn: Very
Gissele: true.
I wanted to touch base about because this is a topic I feel [00:17:00] strongly about the whole concept of. Punitive approaches in the workplace. I always think even about the whole correctional system. when you think about the systems we’ve created, they’re based on separation and isolation and basically based on fear.
we punish people in the hopes that somehow that punishment is going to. Turn a light on that is they’re gonna be much more loving and compassionate after the fact. But it’s usually the reverse, like people are more loving and compassionate when somebody extends more loving and compassion towards them.
It’s like you’re modeling the behavior and yet we still, we’ve created sort of these systems that are so fear based. and to me, those punitive approaches don’t really work for example, I have experiences in overseeing some bullying and harassment issues.
And so usually when you speak to either party, even the party that was accused of bullying, saw [00:18:00] themselves as a victim. So punishing that individual. Is only gonna further reinforce that perspective they have about being a victim. It doesn’t help them address it. It’s not from a place of curiosity.
In your work regarding forgiveness, for the people that have experienced hurt at work. What helped them shift towards having greater forgiveness and curiosity for the other perspective?
Jenn: There are a few things that need to happen to me.
I think they need to tell that nearly every scholar of forgiveness. It talks about changing the way we tell the story. So if we can tell it more objectively without judgment, where it’s almost like we’re writing a script, and sometimes people have to do that in the second person or the third person using their own name.
This happened, then this happened, and to tell it without these interpretive words like betrayal. Mm-hmm. [00:19:00] To tell the story, just the facts, it can help collapse the story. Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mofo, wrote a book, the Book of Forgiving, and what we wanna do is take the heat out of the story and that allows a little light to come in and see, oh, this was bound to happen, this was going to happen because of what?
Preceded it or this is how they felt. It’s no wonder that this is how they reacted toward me. So I think we can become it. As you were describing punishment, it feels like people get hardened, right? If people are told that they made a racist remark, they’re not gonna become less racist. If they’re canceled.
Yeah, they’re going to, if they can. Open their own heart, and if the people who’ve been hurt can say, this is why that hurt me the way it did, there can be some shared understanding and that telling the story in a different way is the first step [00:20:00] towards doing that. I. Then they also need to be validated because a lot of times because of the defendant and I system, they’ve been gaslit, they’ve been told that didn’t really happen.
They need to understand why it hurt, what elements of dignity were violated, and then tap into their feelings. A lot of times rage is what I see when we start out, but it’s often grief. It’s often grief for a lost friendship or a lost identity, or a lost job, or. A lost relationship, something’s been broken.
Similarly, if they’ve been feeling grief, if they haven’t been allowed to feel rage, mm-hmm. If shame hasn’t been mentioned, they have to deal with that emotional baggage. And then very quickly we can move to empathy for self, empathy for the other people. But the most important step is to rewrite the story.
In a way where they [00:21:00] have agency and choice, because every day we’re making choices. We can choose to live in our grievance story, or we can choose to become the subject of the sentence, not the object. This was done to me, okay, this really hurt. What happened was wrong. I can see why you’re hurt. That must have been so hard because you needed X and you didn’t get your need met.
what can you pledge to moving forward? What can you commit to? How do you wanna show up? And that again, might mean changing the work environment, changing the role, leaving the organization, but eventually we get tired of being a victim. It can be very self-reinforcing. And actually one of the hardest things about forgiving is giving up that victim identity.
’cause who would we be without that?
Gissele: yeah. People don’t understand that in order for you to have a perpetrator, you have to have a [00:22:00] victim. So if you focus primarily on the perpetrator, then you have to be the victim. You can’t be like an empowered being and then also have a perpetrator.
Jenn: Yes. So true. So I think that’s very, very important. Yeah. Yeah.
Gissele: I love what you said about the creating space. I love that to add more light into it. ’cause it also gives you a different perspective, maybe a broader one or something you might not have seen.
So I think it’s really, really great to do that, to enable people to take a step back. It’s also provides them a level of safety too. Like you were mentioning before, safety is important. Them taking a step back and not being, in the thick of it can help them feel a little bit safe about recounting what happened to them.
So I think that’s, that’s really great.
Jenn: I’d love to share my own story. I, of course, yes. I had a boss. Against whom I had against innumerable grievances, and I spent years talking about this [00:23:00] person with my friends and colleagues. Mm-hmm. I must have been so tiresome and I think I did not have any sense of the impact I had on other people, what it must have been like to be around me.
The energy I brought in the room with this person, with this boss, this victim energy, and now that I look back on it, and it’s been a very long time, I just have this longing to go back to my younger self and say. Look what you’re doing. You’ve, it made this person, this person is filling up your entire house.
Do you really wanna give up this entire house to this person? You come home from work and that’s all you can talk about. With my marriage, you know, my kids grew up under this shadow of this person, and my longing is for other people not to go through that, and you have to be creative enough to see another [00:24:00] possibility.
I eventually left that job and it’s now years later that I can see. Wow. I must have been a real drip to be around and people had no. Nothing they could do to help me. They could listen, but only I could make the choice to move forward. Nobody else was coming. Nobody else was coming to fix me or rescue me.
Gissele: Mm mm But you just said it’s so, so powerful. And. You know, as challenging as that must have been for you and at the same time you are now doing like such important work, it led you here So it’s hard to sometimes. Be able to say, well, I wish I had maybe been different. ’cause there are many people right now that are full of grievances.
Mm-hmm. And not realizing how they are negatively affecting their own life. Right. It’s like a poison. They’re drinking, hoping somebody else dies.
Exactly. They are [00:25:00] negatively
impacting their life. And I think the work that you’re doing is so important in helping them shift out of that, out of that perspective.
And understand that they have more power. I was thinking about what you said about validation and what you are offering them is to find that validation within themselves because. A person who acts in a perpetrator way may not choose to validate their existence or their experience. And as a person who had spent many times, you know, hoping for validation and saying, well, if only person apologized, or they acknowledged what was experienced it.
and it’s not gonna get better. Some people just are not in that stage where they can face shame or guilt. they can’t sit with that experience and regulate enough to be able to hear your side doesn’t mean that you are wrong or should be having validated. Once I validated my own experiences [00:26:00] you know, my experience.
It was real. It was my experience and this person can’t take that away from me. They can’t negate that from me, and I can see that it’s difficult for them to experience. I think that made a big change in terms of how I interacted with that story.
Jenn: I think I had to, regarding the work thing that happened.
Somebody very wise said to me, they’re not going to come and apologize. And even, you know, if we think about times we’ve gotten apologies, even when people apologize it’s not enough because they don’t really see our pain and hurt, they’re not wallowing enough in their own shame, they’re not suffering enough.
I do think self validation, and I think that’s why naming the elements of dignity and feeling our own feelings and looking at our own needs that were unmet. Or the needs we were trying to meet when we put ourself in that situation. I think those pieces, and then finding one or two trusted people who really [00:27:00] can validate, whether that’s a coach or a therapist or a dear, dear friend who can say, not they didn’t mean it.
Let’s look at it from their point of view. Wasn’t that bad. Look at where you are now. You know, they don’t, people wanna explain away our pain ’cause they don’t wanna sit with us in our pain. But if. One or two people can do that and see us in our pain without wishing it or willing it away, or minimizing it or making excuses or telling us it’s not that bad or, you know, looking on the bright side, it doesn’t take much.
And then we can learn how to do that for ourselves.
I
Gissele: think it’s a skill to be able to sit with people’s pains, especially if people haven’t been taught how to regulate their own emotions, to sit with difficult feelings. I think we have been taught to avoid difficult feelings, been taught to avoid difficult feelings at work,
I think what you’re saying is can we learn to do that so that we can then sit with people [00:28:00] and that has such an enormous impact beyond what people think. To be able to sit with somebody in pain, not needing to fix it, but just holding space, holding that love can be transformative, right?
It, it really, really can be transformative.
Jenn: I agree and will always come out the other side. All crying stops.
Gissele: Yeah. Yeah, that’s very true. tell me a little bit more aboutthis sense of empowerment you found once you realized that nobody was gonna save you, what helped you kind of take your power back from the situation where you felt so disempowered?
Jenn: Oh it. even thinking back to that time and how much I longed for an apology, a few things helped. One was I had to recognize the need I was trying to meet, however unskillfully I met that need, the need the other person was trying to meet. Frankly, the need of everybody, all the players, you know, this is a huge systemic thing, so I can actually see myself, oh, I can see [00:29:00] why they did that.
That was the need they were trying to meet. An institution will do everything it can to protect itself and its reputation, and including harming their own people, unfortunately. The other thing that really helped is I had this idea of writing a letter from one of the people who hurt me, and I picked a really low level person, and I wrote a letter from her.
To me, and in it I explained the how bad it must have felt. So the person writing this letter said, that must have been so hard for you. I can’t imagine how you did this. I’m really sorry for this and this is why it was wrong. And if there’s ever, it was a long letter, if there’s ever anything I can do, let me know.
Reach out anytime you are valued. And I had somebody read it to me. Hmm. And they read it to me in such a way that it was so heartfelt and reread a couple sentences, you know, one after the other and something in me [00:30:00] shifted. It was a longing that was soothed, and I think that gets back to the validation.
It doesn’t take much. At the same time, I realized she was never going to write that letter. The wish to have it said to me was actually met, and we know this can happen with nonviolent communication practitioners who can say what’s alive in you now, and then meet a need that wasn’t met 20 years ago.
Through one sentence or one moment. And that’s what happened for me. And then I finally decided I needed to call back my dignity. The word reclaim comes from the old French word to call back your hawk. And I love, I love my dignity is a hawk. Mm-hmm. And she was gone. She was over the ocean and over the mountains.
But when I decided what can I do? And I’m tired of being a victim. I can call my hawk back, I can call my dignity [00:31:00] back. And this metaphor has been so helpful for the people with whom I work. They take their hawk with them into a meeting with their boss. They they’ll purposefully sit and call back their hawk before.
Facing a difficult conversation. So, you know, for me, metaphor and agency, what can I take control of? Helped me shift out of that victim mentality as well as being told nobody’s coming to fix this for you.
Gissele: Yeah, yeah. You are gonna have to put the cape on for yourself. Because you were talking, it made me think of Paul Gilbert’s work and he does a lot of research on compassion.
And he was talking about a client that he helped, who’s actually a doctor. And I guess something happened, to him when he was younger at night, I think he had shared a room with his little brother and the, his sibling died in the middle of the night, and Yeah.
And the parent was so shocked. like the parent couldn’t [00:32:00] come in, they couldn’t come into the room and so all of this. Person wanted was somebody to turn on the light and to soothe them because they were sharing the same room. And so, Dr. Gilbert actually helped them do a meditation where.
He reimagined like a loving being. Being in that moment and turning on the light and soothing them and it was such a transformative thing. So this is something we can still do even years later. We can have those practices where we can go back to those experiences, like you said, and soothe that inner heart that we all have to some extent.
You know, like not feeling worthy, not feeling valuable, not feeling seen or heard. And so that, I just wanted to share that ’cause I was thinking about that as you were talking about. that letter And the other thing is I just wanna be grateful for the stories you’re sharing because people think it has to be a huge thing.
I have to go for therapy for like 50 years and you [00:33:00] know, I have to do all these huge things. like how long did it take you to write the letter and
Jenn: just like, right. Probably an hour. And then I now have a template that I share with other people so they can, they can take this template and personalize it.
And the more detailed you make it, the better. And uh, yeah, it was, it was actually sort of miraculous for me.
Gissele: And I think those small moments and. Really focusing on what needs to be soothed, like what needs to be soothed for me in this moment, I think is very, powerful. And it’s never too late.
No, no, it’s never too late. I was curious as to, you know. There’s, there’s so much going on in medical care right now. What do you think the future of healthcare is in how it involves maybe like more forgiveness and more compassion?
Jenn: Oh,
what a wonderful invitation to think about that. I think we’ve gotten away from. The most meaningful [00:34:00] encounters we have, which are at the bedside. And the more technology and the more treatment options and the more testing we have, the less skilled we are at meeting needs. I think when patients ask for tests or scans or blood work and there’s sort of talked out of it or it’s done without.
Justification for it. It’s one more barrier between us as clinicians, and I include anybody who takes care of patients in that anybody. It just adds more layers of complexity, and I would love us to get back to that sacred dyad, whether it’s a nurse, a pharmacist, a social worker with that person asking, what do you need in this moment?
That really fundamental need. I think we’re often. Covering up the needs with another test. And that drives up the cost of healthcare. And that [00:35:00] means to pay the bills and keep the lights on. We have to see more patients. And it’s this in virtuous cycle of not attending to what people need. And that word is the same as tending to, it’s really caring for Right.
What people really need.
Gissele: Hmm. Hmm. if I hear you correctly, we need to go back to more relationships. Mm-hmm. And I don’t know if that’s the way it’s going, in terms of more AI diagnostics. I hear more and more about companies wanting to adopt more AI and how do you adopt AI in healthcare and in education and, in all of these other environments, but.
Does that mean it’s gonna take away from relationship? I don’t know. I hope not. I hope maybe it can provide more of a space for us to have more relationship, like you said, because I feel like we’ve lost that relationship. I feel like it’s become very mechanical and very profit driven. It has, in that.
Kind of has led to this [00:36:00] dehumanization of these systems. The other thing I found, I don’t know if, if you relate to this, is the whole concept of professionalism, right? How did it impact your ability to be able to be more humane or relate to people when, when you are asked to be professional?
Jenn: Oh gosh. I grew up in a professional family being told that, you know, even at a young age, biting my nails was not professional. I’ve really had to stretch out against that. I think professionalism has a white supremacy frame of this is what a professional looks like. This is how a professional keeps their hair, what they wear, how they talk, what emotions they show, and so there’s no space for,
Different ways of being authentic. There’s a mold so that people are asked to code switch between one setting and another, and it becomes a performance. And I think professionalism actually is a performance of fitting in. [00:37:00]
Gissele: Oh, I’ve never heard that. I love that you said that. I’ve never heard anybody say that, and I think that’s very, very fitting.
at least from my perspective, if I couldn’t feel my emotions at work, if I couldn’t feel all those difficult feelings, including being upset. It was hard for me to allow myself to recognize it in others, and so I think that sort of contributed to that dehumanization.
The other thing I cannot tell you, the number of times when people, ’cause I used to be a director of HR when it was one of the departments I managed. How many people would apologize to me for crying? When it was perfectly reasonable, right?
They might’ve been getting laid off. They might’ve been having performance issues. They might’ve just been struggling mentally and emotionally, but the number of people that apologized to me for crying over an HR issue, I’m like, why are you apologizing? Crying is a perfectly natural thing. That’s why we have tear ducts.
Have you found that experience in terms of people’s [00:38:00] ability to want to be okay with it, crying.
Jenn: Absolutely. I actually had a boss who criticized behind his back, a colleague of mine who became teary-eyed during a presentation about a patient he’d lost. He was getting an endowed lectureship, and he was talking about the patient that drew him into the field and he got choked up.
And I later had a meeting with my boss and his boss who said, no crying. No crying. And we are cancer doctors.
Hmm. And
so it’s so interesting to me that we can. Let our patients cry and be scared, but we can’t do it for ourself. And it’s really interesting what you said we don’t have to, you know, become dysregulated.
Right. The but the thing is Yeah, well, you don’t have to be a
basket case. Yes. Right?
Right. If you’re, if you’re giving a lecture, you don’t wanna become dysregulated. But the problem is, if we don’t name and feel our emotions, we’re more prone. To become dysregulated in the worst [00:39:00] settings and to take grief and turn it into rage and throwing things around, and then that’s disruptive behavior that scares people and creates an unsafe and hostile work environment.
Right? So it’s just this, yep. It’s just being able to have emotional fluency as my kids do. Yes, yes. That’s like this
best step. Yes.
Gissele: Because that is so, so true. If we don’t allow those difficult feelings, and again, you can do it behind closed doors, just allow yourself to feel the difficult feelings.
Mm-hmm. And allow yourself to just help yourself regulate it. But if you don’t take that time because you don’t think it’s right to feel those feelings, it does come out in the most inappropriate of ways and in the most inappropriate of times. I was thinking as you were talking about your former boss, is that, I wonder if
they were raised that way. Mm-hmm. Because I find usually how people act towards other people is what’s on the inside. Like that’s the inner voice of like, don’t cry, don’t show emotions, don’t feel, and how [00:40:00] challenging is it to live in the world?
Not trying to feel, we’re nothing but feelings. We’re human beings, right?
Jenn: I part dunno if I wanna be with people who can’t feel.
Gissele: No. No, because then how could they sympathize and relate and how could you possibly understand, to have people on the care system, that aren’t able to allow themselves to feel their feelings, I think is the potential for dehumanization and potentially for, Experimentation. Remember earlier we were talking about experimentation? Yeah. So I remember there was a certain researcher that did a lot of experimentations on, I believe it was prisoners.
And this person was quoted saying, as I saw all of the people, all I saw was acres and acres of skin. They didn’t see people, they saw skin they could experiment on and they did some pretty brutal things. And so I think that’s where we are not allowed to really connect human to human. Mm-hmm. I think we’re more [00:41:00] likely to then be humanize each other and then pretty much rationalize anything.
Jenn: Right. Well, my boss was, yes, this is definitely how she was raised, and she told me early on when I met her, I don’t wanna be like my father. My father would say cut five, meaning. Fire five people so we can stay within budget and didn’t want to be that way, and then yet was reproducing in our own life and our own inner experience and then externalizing it and deciding that some people were in or out of the club because they could.
Basically depersonalize their own experience. I, you know, it’s funny to think about how a few words, well, I’ll tell you a couple things are coming to mind. One is that mm-hmm. I think physicians are the least in touch with their body of any sort of profession that I’ve worked with. Wow. Okay. Okay.
Yep. So
people can’t feel emotions or stories in their body.
Takes a very long time to [00:42:00] get them there. So embodiment, I think is part of what needs to be healed so that we can feel things in our body. The other thing that comes to mind is how limited our vocabulary is in terms of emotions. You know, we can’t use nuanced words. so women will say, I’m not angry, I’m disappointed.
Which I think is a woman’s way, maybe our mother’s way of saying, I’m absolutely full of rage, but it’s so, what kind of person am I? If I get angry, if I even feel anger? So I think just becoming more comfortable that there are really no negative emotions. They’re all information. They might be difficult.
Mm-hmm. Emotions, but they’re not negative. They’re symbols and signals that something is going on. And if we could listen to that earlier, I think you’re right. We would be more human.
Gissele: And I think we really have done a [00:43:00] disservice to our boys and girls.
For boys, we’ve told them that rage is pretty much the only accept or violence is the only acceptable emotion, like anger, but not sadness or, what they call more feminine emotions of like compassion and, and empathy and softness and love, and especially like just expressing non-romantic love.
Romantic love is acceptable. Sex is acceptable. Mm-hmm. You know, rage and anger is acceptable, but all the other ones know, and it’s the same for women. Rage is not acceptable. Like that anger is not acceptable women, but the softer emotions because, and it’s ridiculous. We’re all full spectrum beings.
We feel all of those things. so I believe we really have done a disservice. To our children and to ourselves in limiting the amount of emotions. So I love that you said that all of our emotions are welcome. Envy is welcome.
Jealousy is welcome. Mm-hmm. Like everything is welcome. Like you said, everything is information. Now what you do with that information is something different, [00:44:00] right? But the fact that it is all valuable information about where you are, it’s all mirrors of where we are. And so I think that is, that is really, really.
Important. Yeah, and I think working on forgiveness, especially forgiving ourselves is really a great starting point. what has been your journey towards forgiving yourself?
Jenn: Yeah, it’s ongoing Forgiveness is a cycle. It’s not like an on off switch. To me, it’s more like a dimmer switch. We can go on and off. Yeah. so forgiving other people to me is a continuous process. If I tell my story, I feel in my body what happened. I feel it with that boss 30 years ago.
I can get myself all riled up, self-forgiveness in my work. I found that most people go through the forgiveness. Program that I have and then wanna do it again so they can work on forgiving themselves. And I think once people can see their own role in things, now there are people who are true, 100% victims children.
There are [00:45:00] people who are absolutely innocent victims. So I wanna be really careful not to imply that we all are accountable for certain things happening. Not just children, but especially children and people with limited capacity. Are truly, truly innocent and the system that oppresses us makes people truly innocent of harm.
So I do wanna be really careful, but I think for me, going through and taking accountability for my part, going a little back in time and say, oh, that’s what I need. I was trying to meet, this is how unskillful it was. Mm-hmm. Did bring up some shame and I still struggle with that because. Part of me wishes I could turn back time and start over again.
And then just this Sunday, I realized I’m actually not sure I would do that ’cause of where I am now. I’m so fulfilled and changed and frankly transformed. And I do have to revisit the self-forgiveness [00:46:00] process, which is a little different from forgiving others. It actually requires, we look at what value did we violate, you know, what is my core value I violated, which I don’t see as much with forgiving others, but I do think, I think like most things, it’s a process.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And frankly, I don’t know. If I would ever, believe a hundred percent forgiveness. I want to be shaped by my story. I wanna be transformed. I think of it as a character in a book and something bad happens to the character in the book. If you read the book and after this event happened, there wasn’t a change.
It would be a really weird book. It would be bad editing. You’d be like checking the page numbers, like what happened in this book too, right? You’d be like, oh, I’m missing a huge chunk. I’ll return the book. We need to see some change. And so I guess part of me, my. Self-forgiveness piece is also, okay, now what good am I putting into the world and how am I [00:47:00] going to learn about myself so I don’t end up doing that again?
I found when I get really happy, I get dysregulated and tend to blurt things out.
And it’s happened again since. Mm-hmm. Since that time, seven years ago, it’s happened again. I’ve put my foot in my mouth, I’ve made a misstep, but just, oh, that deep knowledge of when I’m euphoric, I can screw up. Put yourself on mute, Jen.
Gissele: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think the more that you get to know yourself, the more that you, able to forgive yourself. And I think the more you are also gonna be surrounded by people that are, pretty forgiving too. I think going back to what you had said earlier, we are so punitive around mistakes for ourselves, right?
Like mm-hmm. We’re constantly dealing with conflicts. in relationships you’re gonna make mistakes. You sometimes you’re gonna say things you don’t mean, or sometimes, if you have children, I. I have teenagers, sometimes they say things they don’t mean. I’m not the worst mom in the world, right?
sometimes they’re just angry and then it comes out and it’s okay. And that forgiveness and coming back [00:48:00] closer together, I actually think helps us create more closeness and more relationship than if we did everything perfect, then there were, there was never any conflict in the relationship.
I think part of that. Forgiveness and healing and conversation is all part of that coming closer together. So I think, what you said is very powerful.
Jenn: It’s recognizing our common humanity, right? That none of
us is perfect.
Gissele: Yes, That common humanity, for sure. couple more questions. what is your definition of love?
Jenn: Love to me is an act. It’s not a feeling. I know what that feels like in my body, but to me it’s an act of considering the other as equally valuable as everybody else. To not hold some people above others and to think about the common good. Not just us in the moment, but us seven generations from now.
You know, I think we [00:49:00] sometimes think, I don’t want this for my children. What about seven generations from now? And an act of love is to say, I’m not gonna get what I want right now because I want seven generations from now to have what they need.
Gissele: I love that because your thinking about your children’s children and so on, and sometimes when we’re in that survival mode and think of just our own needs in the moment, sometimes it’s hard for us to understand the impact of our behavior, so that’s great.
Last question. Where can people find you? Where can people work with you? What do you wanna share with the audience?
Jenn: I have a website. It’s jennifer griggs.com. Easy to remember. On there I have a blog and resources, including meditations. I also have a podcast, the Dignity Lab, and our website is the dignity lab.com.
We have meditations there, and I also have an episode. I’d love to invite people to listen to. Called start here, dignity from definition to reclamation. I love working with [00:50:00] people in groups. I love working with people individually. So there’s a contact me form on my website. People can just drop me a note or you can email me at jennifer@jennifergriggs.com.
Gissele: Thank you, Jennifer, for your wonderful insights. It was just a beautiful and very powerful conversation. join us again for another episode of The Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. See you soon. Bye-bye.