Emotional Suppression and Trauma in School Leadership with Dr Pete Stebbins

Jenny Cole: 1:02

Welcome back to Positively Leading the Podcast. This is our very special series with Dr Pete Stebbins on leadership and wellbeing, and if this is the first time you've heard me say this, go back to the previous episode where we do an introduction around the concepts we're going to be talking about. Today, we're going to dive deep into the first of the two questions that we raised at the end of the last episode. The two questions was what drives us, as leaders, to endure high levels of personal distress, and often at the expense of our own health? And the second question is why do we allow our time to be consumed by work instead of pursuing our own goals or our own personal health? Welcome back, Pete.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 1:50

Thanks, Jenny, great to be here.

Jenny Cole: 1:52

Talk to me about that first question. What drives us to endure high levels of personal distress at the expense of our own health?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:00

That's a really, really important question. And again, for those joining us or if they missed the last one, it's just a reminder that we're talking about particularly school leaders in this podcast and we already know they, by and large, do this. They have 60% incidence rate of depression, anxiety and stress disorders, compared to 10% in the general population. So there's some stressed out bunnies. So, on the proviso, we accept the fact that if it's not me, it might be my buddy in my principal network that I know, or it might well be me. On the basis of that, we can move into this question. If I carry a higher stress than the general population, why do I do that? What on earth is going on? And it's a really important question because school leaders are savvy people. You've got degrees.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 2:49

I love education itself because it's about lifelong learners. It's a tricky question, you know, if you ask someone who's not literate and has no skills in this way or no self-help, why do they tolerate the stress at the expense of their own health? Oh, I don't know. I didn't realize it was bad for me. Yeah, and none of that flies here, because we're dealing with ridiculously educated leaders often running wellbeing programs within their very schools, whilst their own physical and mental health is just corroding away, kind of almost like the hourglass with the sand just running out.

Jenny Cole: 3:21

You're right. These people could literally give you chapter and verse about what you're supposed to do for wellbeing. They've all done mindfulness courses, they all know about being present. They teach wellbeing to their kids. They understand it, they can describe it, but they are still tolerating extremely high levels of stress and distress. We talked last time about suppressing emotions. Is that where this fits in to this question? Yes, spot on, spot on, yeah.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 3:54

And so I guess that's yeah, if we start to go down the rabbit warren of that. You know we've got this really difficult problem for many of us listening and myself Sorry, I'm now just a guinea pig here a case study in my own right. Yeah, is it possible for someone to be suppressing their emotions and not even being aware that they're doing it and clearly?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 4:17

tell us about that, yeah, okay? Well, this is clearly. The answer is yes because, again, if you've got a staying with where we're at as we begin this journey into this whole idea of emotional suppression, if I'm a like, I have a PhD. I have clinical psychology research, master's doctorate in cognitive behavioral theory and resilience, and I'm a guy, to cut a long story short, that ends up splitting the internal lining, like I get the weirdest hernia rips and I end up with all sorts of physiological manifestations of stress and I end up with injuries that nobody can even work out how they happened, until I start thinking about how I was coping and how my body works under pressure. And so we're staying around this issue of is it possible to suppress emotions.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 5:05

Is it possible, then, that our body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk, the famous neurologist psychiatrist, says? Is it possible that I don't even be aware of my stress level? And if people listening can accept the fact that that could be possible and I'm just living here saying, hey, it is, it's me then it makes complete sense why people would endure high. Going back to question one, why people would endure high levels of distress at the expense of their personal health, the first answer is because they have no idea it's accruing on them like bad debt. It's building up penny by penny. And if I don't know it's happening to me, well then of course I'm going to do it Like it's just going to happen. And why don't we know it's happening to me? Well then, of course I'm going to do it Like it's just going to happen.

Jenny Cole: 5:48

And why don't we know it's accruing?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 5:51

Well, we keep digging deeper. Jenny, I love it. Sorry, no, no, it's a good question.

Jenny Cole: 5:56

I tell people with hopping into the car at the end of the day and noticing that our shoulders are up around our ears, mindful enough to drop that, and we go and we think that that's it. We got rid of it for the day, but why?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 6:11

is it accruing and why are we not noticing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, such a great question. There's two answers. The immediate answer is we're not aware of it. Then the question is well, why are we not aware of it? Again, the superficial answer is, as you rightly just illustrated, we're not used to taking stock of our bodies, we're not used to being meta-aware and all of that.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 6:29

And so, as we breathe, I used to do all these mindfulness things ask my leaders to scrunch their toes on the carpet or rub them on the liner, you know whatever's in there, take their shoes off, do this for two minutes with the door shut or whatever. All of these things that sensate and allow us to feel and get better in tune. And so that's a really simple end stage trick for counting down five things I can see, feel and hear. Now four, now three. I love all of those things, but we're here today to talk at a deeper level about well, how did it begin? And then, how do I stop it from happening again? Because if I do those superficial mindfulness tools which I should, by the way they're brilliant, there's plenty of evidence for them. They will immediately help me regulate, but they're not necessarily going to stop the progressive deterioration over time of emotional suppression. And so this is a tricky one, because when I talk to principals about this again we talked about it in the last episode we've got to get people to a point where we don't have to get them there. We're trying to ask them or invite them to get to a place where they could put aside all the obvious wrongness that they experience and pain and impossible tasks and external things that are extremely obvious, and just get them to hold that off for a minute and think within themselves about their own response to things. And of course, viktor Frankl, between stimulus and response, is an opportunity for growth. They who have a why can endure anyhow, and all those my favorite logo therapy or existential therapy quotes.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 7:51

And so yeah, cutting straight back to where you're raising it at one level, we're just not somatically aware or emotionally aware in the moment. So your next question is obviously well, how did that happen and why are we like that? And that's where we go down the rabbit hole, because that's where emotional suppression happens. For safety, the whole reason we don't wig out in front of other people is because it has negative consequences. And then the question is if we've been doing that all our lives, and now we're so unconscious with this we don't even notice it.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 8:17

Where did it begin? And that's there where trauma becomes the part of the puzzle these big T traumas, big events early on in our lives or even later in our lives where we have all these reactions, but then, more importantly, what's known as the little T traumas, the little values, clashes, the little steps that we encounter, probably at least weekly, if not daily, where we have to make a choice. And so, early on in our development, things happen to us, big or small, and we start to say I can't behave like this, I can't do that, it'll cost. And then, as adults, my goodness, it will cost me, but not only that. I'm in a habit.

Jenny Cole: 8:52

Give me a real life example of that, because I'm imagining people sitting there going. I've not had any trauma in my life and yes, my life is difficult, but I don't see those interactions, those daily things that are happening. I don't see them as little t trauma, definitely not big t trauma. So give me an example of what that might look like in a school the little t trauma, but also what the accumulation of life experiences might end up looking like.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 9:18

Yeah, I think I follow, and, if I could also just acknowledge upfront, I as a clinician, it's trained as a clinical psychologist, and so trauma in my training in the late 1990s is about post-traumatic stress disorder, and so I was trained that you're not traumatized unless it's a life-threatening event according to this psychiatry thing. And so as I've been working in the education system now, I've always been somewhat perplexed and frustrated by everybody being triggered all the time and everyone having trauma and being trauma aware and trauma informed. And I really struggled with that because there aren't any catastrophic life-threatening events happening to everyone every day in every school, and so I, like snobby post-grad clinician, used to kind of ho, ho, ho, this is a bit silly, and I'm completely the opposite. I started working and listening and engaging in the work of Gabor Marte his latest book is called the Myth of Normals and Natalia Rachel, who is a trauma-informed practitioner as well. And so what I became aware of and way easier to accept is Gabor talks about big T trauma, which is what I was trained in. He's a doctor too, so he knows, and so they're stressful life events and so they're really obvious things in our childhoods abuse, neglect or both and they have deep, long-term, weird, wacky ways that they change us neurophysiologically and emotionally, and so by the time we're adults we probably don't remember it, let alone see it happen. It's a habit. Why am I short of slump? Why do I do this? Why do I do that? That's just how I am. Well, no, you didn't pop out of the womb that way. So it's not how you were, that's how you are. So there's still a question of how you got there.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 11:08

But the other ones and the bit that allowed me to fully approaches in schools and really now be an advocate is the notion of little t trauma and little t traumas in our childhoods. They're low levels events that clash with our values and beliefs and sense of self. There's a definition in all of this, and so again in our childhoods and again we go through this in the book the little t traumas where you're not invited to the party and everyone else in the class. The little t traumas are where you're left out of things, and then that happens at home and other ways. The little t traumas can also be around where love is withdrawn from you as a punishment. And then the really interesting one, if I can be personal little t traumas can also be when you're told that you're special and the reason why kids don't like you is because you're smarter than them, or obviously I'm reflecting very much now on my own narratives that cause me trouble. And so they're the early ones.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 11:53

But then the work-related ones, which you asked about. Well, those same little t traumas turn up constantly at work. I go to a meeting and it doesn't start when it was supposed to and it's going to go late. I'm not going to be able to pick up my kid. I've got a values clash there. I've got an emotional consequence of leaving early and my colleagues thinking I'm not really being committed and then suffering the consequences If I stay there. My kids are then frustrated and my husband's like this job is taking over, where's your priorities? And I'm stuck.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 12:20

And so in a school we are constantly making decisions, cooking it as we go, having unclear or ambiguous situations, dealing with student behavior. That then isn't necessarily given the consequence the book said it was having to cut deals with parents all the time. All of those things are little t traumas and as a clinical psychologist, now this makes sense because I don't have to rebel against and go. That's not trauma. Trauma is this other thing. I go that's little T trauma, fair enough, that's what that is, because I ignite a difference between a big T trauma and a little one and I'm all for calling them traumas, going back to what you raised rather than going oh nothing traumatic happens, simply because I have the definition, so I can go yeah, if you decide trauma is your definition, I agree, nothing happens. But I'm going with the evidence now and saying here are the little ones, and they happen all the time.

Jenny Cole: 13:06

And I'm going to ask you in a moment what it is about the big and little t traumas that causes us to suppress emotions. I think I get it. I'm going to tell a little bit of my story because it might be helpful too. I said to my psychologist once I had the best childhood in the world and she looked at me like psychologists do. And long story short, when I was four my brother became very, very ill and I look back now and realize that caused me to be a good girl. Just be a good girl. Your brother's very sick. Just do the right thing, don't be a bother, et cetera, et cetera. What that looks like in my life now is that I go to ring someone and I think, well, they might be busy.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 13:48

I don't want to be a bother.

Jenny Cole: 13:49

I don't want to ask for help because they're probably busy doing something else. And I look back in my leadership and that would cause me to be stuck and bury that emotion that I need to put something that I don't understand. But I don't want to be a bother and so we just squash all of that. The outcome is I wouldn't ask for help, I'd pretend I could do it all myself. Little Miss Independent will just carry on, and I know that, God. I look back now and think I should have asked more questions. I should have reached out for help. I should have, should have, should have. But I can now see where it came from Little T trauma something really significant happened in my family and my response was I had to be just good. And I'm sure people, if they're reflective enough, they will see some of the patterns and values and things that they do influence the way in which they work and cause us to suppress emotions. Have I got that right? Is that what the big and little T trauma thing is? Is that the link?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 14:52

It is. Thank you for sharing that, except to say that, arguably, being a family member with a loved one with a life-threatening illness or whatever is probably more like the big T than the little T. But yeah, that's exactly right, and so I know that we need to focus in on schools, but it's so lovely that our listeners are going with us that we can start with the evolution of the problem. First, because, you're right, we've all had going back to this idea of little t trauma. We've got acres of it through childhood, like between nine-year-olds and 10-year-old. Every day right now is traumatic because they talk about my friend didn't do this, or they said this mean thing to me, or they took this thing and then I was value clash and then I felt it wasn't fair and no one would listen to me.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 15:36

That is exactly what Garbo Marte would define as a little T-trauma. And then what I love about what you've shared there is then you've articulated all of these little T traumas. They start shaping how we problem solve and how we engage and they set our norms for life, and so they then influence our behavior as we grow up. And so listeners might be going yeah, pete, you're just describing normal life development and I go, absolutely I am, and this is the point. Normal life development has a lot of little T traumas in it, and so maybe they're like I was a few years ago. They're wrestling with listening to this thing and going, oh, but now we're all trauma. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. If you take the little t trauma definition, we've all got that.

Jenny Cole: 16:17

And all the big t traumas are somewhere else.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 16:19

They're not necessarily you. And if your childhood was great, what that probably means is you didn't have any big T trauma and again, none of this matters if life is fine. But we're discussing people coping with stress and linking now directly into your beautiful illustration about how it begins. It's not just that, as a leader, you then have this leadership behavior where you don't ask for help and you think twice about bothering people. To me, that's the outworking of it, problem solving.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 18:10

Question one that we're into says why do I suppress my emotions to the extent that I compromise my health? Yeah, so if you don't mind, me staying with you. The other aspect of your story that interests me in relation to question one is when you were even more recently or back then, when you're being a good girl and not making waves. Let's go back then, because you can see your parents stressed about your brother and all of this stuff. What's your emotion there? Are you feeling tense? Are you feeling worried? Are you tensing up and becoming smaller in a way, in a posture so as not to be invisible, to not be a problem, to just allow others to focus what's inside you in terms of your own emotions? How would you respond to that?

Jenny Cole: 18:59

That's always an interesting question because I say to people, I was 40-something before I realised emotions were called feelings because you felt them. And I think this is typical of a lot of educators, because they are really clever people. We exist from the head up and so it's taken me a long time to realise that those feelings are in me and I feel it in my gut. I get this squeeze in my gut.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 19:22

In your abdomen and I tense up my shoulder. It's your head. I'm the same as you, by the way, so what's going on in your head? Then you literally freeze. If you go, fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

Jenny Cole: 19:30

You know the stress response yeah, oh, I'm a four year old, you're just in freeze mode, like let's just no running around being good, right, so fawning yeah, people pleasing I'll tidy this up.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 19:42

Yeah, oh, look there's up. Oh look, there's a dirty cup. I'll take that to the kitchen.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 19:46

Yes, yes, wow, and so that's the value bit, because the emotion, the feeling and when we talk about emotional suppression we're all talking about physiology and cognition as well it's that thing that happened back then becomes habitual. It's true of me, sorry, and it might be true of you. And then you say I'm at 40 now and suddenly I realized there is a reason why my posture is the way it is. There is a reason why my abdominals do what they do. There is a reason why I get stress headaches and it's always been with me since I was four and then everything else over time has rewarded that.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 20:20

A lot of the stuff we do that's pro-social is from trauma. But we get a pay rise. You know what I mean. We can promote it. We get to get a better tick on our job interview because we're emotionally intelligent. You're not born emotionally intelligent. You're not born with a hypersensitivity to others. Again, the personality theories say by the time you're four or five you're either a little more social genetically than others or not. But back to our models. But if you're really good at that from a very early age, that ain't personality, that's trauma, Wow.

Jenny Cole: 20:53

You talk a lot about belonging and individuation. You talked about the tension between do I belong and do what's right for others, or do I do what's right for me? Do you want to talk more about that belonging piece and why that's important here at question one about suppressing your emotions or tolerating high levels of stress?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 21:12

Stress, yeah, that's it. And so belonging and individuation again, natalia Rachel's work in trauma. So we're staying with this idea that there were big T traumas and they're out there and that's why we struggle with it, because they're really obvious. But then there's all these little T traumas which are about value clashes and all of this, and they're everywhere, particularly in dysfunctional workplaces. We'll come to that soon, but they're part of some of the negative aspects of normal childhood development and it's really bad, but it's normal To where your point is.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 21:39

What we're saying is that there's an innate drive and all the theorists I get in read they're all on the same page about this one and that is we have two drives. One is to individuate, be our authentic selves Gabriel Marte uses authentic for individuate and the other is to belong, to be connected, and again, my training all those years ago. We are trying to avoid two dysfunctional core beliefs One is being helpless and the other is being hopeless. So all of these different theories all basically go down the end stage and the point is if, again, we accept some really basic things about being a human being. We're born into the world and we need to attach to others, belong with our mom and dad and feel safety in community, and we need to be curious about the world and explore it and work out who we are and get excited about birds flapping their wings or creaks or mud or sticks or whatever, and we can all relate to babies and tiny little kids doing that stuff. Well, there you go. When they're busy eating sand at the park, they're individuating, and when they're nuzzling in for a cuddle, they're belonging. And the point is that goes on till the end of our lives and those two things are super normal. But when they're disrupted, this is where it all starts to go wrong. And so linking belonging and individuation now to trauma and then all the way through to leaders.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 22:59

Now, in order to belong, we have to be acceptable. Yeah, someone has to like us, and we're really lucky that our mums have all this extra tolerance of us when they're young and all the chemicals, et cetera, and so we learn how to be acceptable, and sometimes that is pretty straightforward stuff and what we're doing is what we wanted to do anyway. We call that a win-win, but sometimes early on in life, what we have to do to be acceptable is known as a win-lose. I actually have to not get the extra piece of cake and not yell and scream so I don't get put in my room. And so now, what do I do with my anger about not getting my piece of cake that I desperately, biologically, want? I'm there for the sugar. What do I do with all that anger? If I yell and throw my plate in the air like I did last time, I'll be sent to my room, the door will be shut and I'll be alone. Parents have to do the best they can, don't get me wrong.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 23:51

But in that moment we're discussing the problem of belonging and individuation. In that moment the child learns to either go to their room and stick it to the man and hit campaign and smash their plate and express their emotions in the fullness of their anger and rage. They learn to suppress their emotions of anger and rage about being denied the piece of cake and sit quietly. But when they sit quietly, something's going on in their body, isn't it? And if we were to imagine ourselves as that little kid, what are we doing In my imagine of me?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 24:19

I'd be hunched in. I'd be somehow. We call it bracing in the trauma literature. I'd be hunched in. I'd be somehow. We call it bracing in the trauma literature. I'd be bracing to the max because I'm so angry, so I'd be bottling it up and holding it as best I can so it doesn't escape me, and I'd somehow get through that everyone knows the neurophysiology of this general adaptation stress response to get over the curve of that, and then I'd be able to relax a bit because I'm over the spike of rage.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 24:42

So these, these are common things, aren't they? They're just normal things that we all go through. But the point is, if I chose belonging over individuation in that moment, I chose to suppress my emotion. That was the price I paid to stay. And the price you paid was to be busy and move into hyper, engaging and checking on your mom's facial expressions and your dad, or assuming in the absence of any other data. I'll be liked better if I help. And, by the way, I was exactly the same People pleasing when my dad was angry about whatever in his workplace that had nothing to do with me but was just incommunicative. I took that as thread and I then doubled down to find something nice to do to him for him, et cetera. So I get it, yeah.

Jenny Cole: 25:22

Yes, I think we understand that from children and again, this is the classic case of leaders in schools understand that teachers know that stuff about kids. But what does that look like for a leader who is choosing to belong rather than choosing to do what's right for themselves? What are some of those stresses? Give me an example of what that might look like 100%.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 25:48

So again, there's a lot of examples of it which we'll go straight to. But then the deeper question for those listening, going back to question one, is why do I tolerate elevated levels of personal distress at the expense of my own health and wellbeing?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 26:00

And so we want to, as we talk the examples through, consider the distress that goes on inside my body, the more obvious emotions if I'm aware I'm having them, and then the cognitive stuff. Let's get into it. So, again, some really obvious ones. If we go back to the research about principal wellbeing, remember those two we said in the first episode. We said that there were two dominant factors driving distress work overload and attending to the emotional needs of staff, distressed staff and students.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 26:30

Now I know we're going to talk about work overload in another episode and that's part of our second question about work overload and why it dominates them. So if we're talking about tolerating personal distress, let's go back to that first research factor, which is attending to the needs of others. And so, to take your question, the question could be phrased as well why or what happens in a school where a principal would need to attend to the emotional needs of the staff or students and I'm not a principal, but 20 years of working with principals, but I'm lucky because my special guest is you and you are so what sort of things happen where you have to attend to the needs of your staff and students?

Jenny Cole: 27:08

I remember really clearly a day when I had a very distressed parent so carer of a child with disabilities come and talk to me. So that's always hard empathetic. Then there was an angry bus driver. Then I had a very good an unreasonable bus driver and then a very good education assistant who'd just been diagnosed with cancer and she didn't want anyone to know and so I was going to be the only person she told. And then the next person I talked to had a grizzle about something low level, about not having enough paper in the photocopier, and I remember thinking the last three people in here have got problems I can't even tell you about. So they're the sorts of things that come across the leader's desk all day, every day. That is the behavior of kids and all of the day-to-day stuff. This is about caring for people so that they can do their job.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 28:06

Yeah, great, so for listeners. Then from you as a principal, there's parent distress and having to listen to it, calm it down. There's staff member distress about their own personal catastrophic diagnoses and minor health problems and all of that. There's staff distress about students and about procedures and photocopy are not working, trivial matters that aren't trivial to them in the moment. There and then, like the bus driver and would it be fair to say that on a bad day it feels pretty constant. It's just like a line of people, one after the other.

Jenny Cole: 28:39

Yeah, the feeling in your head would be next as you open your door and the next person comes in, like the deli queue where you took a ticket and you just waited for your number, or whatever.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 28:47

And so I want to stay with your brilliant questions, which is so I would agree with you. It's to say that, be it in the principal's mind, trivial or significant, they're all significant in the eyes of whoever it is, be it a student, a staff member, a parent, carer. If they're bringing it to you and complaining about it, it's significant to them. And so you've answered that question. If I understand it right, what types of things might be examples of principals needing to attend to the emotional needs of staff and students? But the tricky bit in this, going back to emotional suppression, is what's going on inside the person, and two things here. One is in order to listen effectively to the other person and have them feel like they've been heard.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 29:30

We talk about in high performance teams work we talk about are you in a helper mindset? Are you focused entirely on the other person and really connecting with them, or are you in a growth mindset, Because a fixed mindset is just bad. And so when a principal is doing that wonderful job like that and most principals I meet are like dandy, like Mother Teresa, you know, they're just amazing If they're completely focused on the other person, which is what they need to be doing to be effective. Who are they not focused on? In that moment?

Jenny Cole: 29:58

They're not focused on themselves, right, they're not focused on themselves?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 30:00

Yeah, absolutely, but they would have no way of knowing what their shoulders are doing as mine go up on the screen. They would have no way of knowing whether they're frowning or whether their eyes are squinting. They would have no way of knowing any of that. And they're not supposed to know that because they're doubling down being effective leaders tuning entirely into the needs of the other person.

Jenny Cole: 30:19

So you've just explained why being present and all of yeah and all of those things, those learnt behaviours where we have to attend to the other person and nod and smile and do that and, if we're honest, If they need to calm down. That's the job but that very same thing you're emotionally suppressing right. Whatever's going on for you, you're not paying attention to it. No, and?

Dr Pete Stebbins: 30:42

at the very least, we're feeling resentful that we're not getting that's later. Usually, yeah, as in within 10 to 20 seconds later, yeah, but in the moment, the one person you're not focused on and that's because you're professionally not supposed to, and we would train you not to if you're in our leadership programs is to step away from yourself and just be with the other person.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 30:57

So the very good thing you do has a dark side, and that dark side is therefore, if you don't know what your emotions are in that moment, you're suppressing them. Is that fair? You're obviously not attending to them. And if you're emoting, if you're a normal human being, you've got some. So if you're in a phenomenon where you're dealing with someone but you're actually not in touch with how you're going through that because you're doing all this fantastic tuning into them, then you're suppressing.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 31:20

And again, here we go, people go. I never suppress my emotion or I don't have that problem. And there's this need to back away from. That's not trauma and that's okay because I was there and I get that. And if people are listening and they're feeling that right now, I say, hey, keep listening if you can take it all in, but yeah, you don't have to change for a moment. It takes a while to listen and rethink your own concepts in your head. It takes a while, you said when I turned 40, I realised that there were feelings and emotions I'm so glad you're sharing, but those things help us all understand why this stuff's not accessible to ourselves.

Jenny Cole: 31:52

Yeah, yeah, we don't have the language for it, or we've been taught that, as I said right at the very beginning of the first episode, that we don't do emotions at work, and so I'm sure there might be people listening probably not in the people, the lovely people that tune into this but who think, when you said in that moment, when I'm talking to those staff members and those distressed people, what emotions am I suppressing? Well, there might be some people who say, well, your emotions don't matter, you're not supposed to be emotional, you're supposed to fix it. And that's denying that. Those emotions just occur, whether you've got a name for them, whether you want them to or not, if that hypothetical person is here.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 32:29

Firstly, I get it totally, and we're about to touch in on the other part of question, one which is driven, and when you're driven, so I get it.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 32:38

But what they need to consider and it must have been interesting for you at 42, at some point you have this revelation, or people who are listening haven't had it yet. But you either have to decide that you're not normal and you don't have emotions in those moments, and when you don't remember feeling anything, it's because you weren't feeling anything and you can live in denial like that and that's fine, or you have to say, oh, okay, I probably am normal as far as I know, and therefore I obviously am continuously emoting, even though I find all of this a bit theoretical and hard to grasp right now. So therefore, theoretically, when that parent was yelling in my face or whatever else and I'm in hindsight, didn't feel phased by it but couldn't tell you what I was feeling. Well, I hang on. Now I've got to accept the fact that I was probably feeling something and that's all I have to accept. I can just sit with that.

Jenny Cole: 33:21

But we all have to start coming to the first point of accepting that we're always feeling and that feeling, as it says, manifests itself in cognition, in physiology or in joyous sadness, anger and anxiety, fear, yeah, I love the emotional piece because I'm not going to go down the numbing, but I think that that's a pretty standard response for a stressed leader is to drink too much, scroll too much, do all of those emotional suppressing things? Their coping strategies are not coping, they're numbing, trying to avoid that those emotions are even existing they're numbing, trying to avoid that those emotions are even existing.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 33:58

But just that point alone. So numbing and bracing, that's the physiology of suppressing emotions. And if I drink too much and we all can answer that question in our own heads, I've already fessed up to too many whiskeys If I numb, if I disassociate and detach. So I have no idea what I'm feeling. I'm just smiling while they're yelling. I'm telling myself to'm feeling. I'm just smiling while they're yelling. I'm telling myself to stay calm and just a wizard at being a professional principal. I just know it. If I'm doing any of those behaviors to the point I can't access my emotions, then I'm suppressing them. That's it. And if I'm suppressing my emotions, that's because just bringing some of this together, that's because belonging and individuation, because I'm choosing to.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 34:41

Just way back before I realized I was doing it like in microseconds, I chose to let that parent yell and carry on and not think about how I don't like this behavior and anything else. I chose what I thought was the professional response. I chose to progress my career. I chose to do all these good things and I'm rewarded by society for doing that choice. I chose to belong, not individuate. I chose to do that instead of saying you know what? No human being really should be treated like this. That's really not okay. And I'm a human being, so I shouldn't be treated like this. And I didn't choose to sit boundaries in or I didn't choose to walk away from them while they were yelling at me. I just chose to stay and be professional, and we want people to stay and be professional. Hence the point of the book.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 35:26

But we first got to understand the question, and the question is why do I suppress my emotions? And so far we've talked about just a normal day at the office right For a school leader, and every single one of these has been evidence about why I would suppress my emotion. So anyone who numbs, anyone who detaches, anyone who goes a bit foggy I love numbing and detachment because sometimes I work with leaders and they go. I don't do that, pete. You know I'm serious. Yeah, I know I'm open with you and I don't do that and I say, oh, my 30s, I'll have to come back to you on that, but I definitely remember this thing. Whenever you can't remember chunks of your life, that was the time where you either you disassociated or you spent a lot of time numbing.

Jenny Cole: 36:06

We're doing it all. Or that could just be your teenage years, where you spent far too much time drinking and doing illegal things.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 36:11

But anyway, I'm joking. Why do you drink and do illegal things?

Jenny Cole: 36:14

Because you don't belong as a teenager. You just want to belong Until you do, yes, until you do.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 36:19

It's a double-headed thing. When I drink, I belong, if that's what my peers do, and I numb, so I get the best of both worlds.

Jenny Cole: 36:26

Talk to me quickly because we're going to finish this, because we came beautifully back to what drives us to endure high levels of stress, but talk to me about motivation versus being driven that little section that you put in there but we haven't talked about yet.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 36:40

Yeah, well, that's probably one of the most important points of the whole question once. So we go back a step and say one of the great things about school leaders is their altruistic values or their deeper belief in the spiritual universe, or all these wonderful things about why they care. And so then we go back and say, well, look, caring as it's, you're born to care, to belong and stay in your tribe and all of this. But again, if you're getting unwell and drinking too much and all these other things, you're overdoing it. And so why would you overdo this stuff? Because it's not related to your genetics. And so we come back to this idea of understanding three things.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 37:12

Being motivated to do something. Okay, and that's when you're a child. You're motivated to do whatever to get the cake Pavlov's dog right. But as an adult, you're motivated to do whatever you're doing for your paycheck or because you get to work with someone you like. There's an immediate reward. Then there's being disciplined about something, and so you still do it and you're not enjoying the task and there's no immediate payoff. But then you don't take work home at night, so you have this discipline in how you run your day to get a reward later.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 37:36

And then there's being driven, and being driven to do something is where you're compelled to do it because you feel that you should do it or that others expect you to do it, and so all bad things in question one. So the bad health consequences of suppressing your emotions are caused by driven that it's the right thing to do or they want me to do that They'll be angry at me if I don't do it. So I have to do it and I trade off being calm, being aware of my physiology, not letting my health get put up with distress because I'm a professional, but not to the extent it compromises my health and wellbeing. I don't do any of that, I just barrel in because I'm really driven to make this school the best school it can be. I'm really driven to bring out the best leader in all the leaders I work with. I'm driven because every child deserves a champion and all of this compulsion I've seen this in many tragic ways leads to school leaders dying.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 38:32

An early death, leads to some pretty significant catastrophic events. But it's a slow burn and that's the problem with drivenness. When we're being driven, it's because that template from when we were younger, like you shared, about not being a bother about adding value, has so many benefits to you all through your life. But the physiology and the emotion of getting into that state is so habitual and sits below your awareness that over time, like me, your back and shoulders, your abdominals, things stay in these ways that aren't relaxed, that aren't healthy, for prolonged periods of time and then they just wear out and break. Well, that's my story anyway.

Jenny Cole: 39:13

They're just yeah, and I think a lot of educators are guilted into being driven because we must do it for the children. Remember your why you're not.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 39:24

Yeah, I love that, yeah, yeah, that's it very, very popular yeah, and then if you're a woman as well, going back to gender, a lot of the maternal stuff drives that harder than it does for us blokes. I mean, again, everyone can have this experience, but it's a hundred times worse. There, the mother guilt is almost the same manifestation in a school where we have this leader guilt. It's the same thing about nurturing, about emotional, all of these constructs. What do they do? They basically tell us we have to shovel shit, that we have to set aside our boundaries for the greater good of others and again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Don't listen to this podcast.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 40:03

We're talking about burnout. We're talking about people that are unhappy with their lives, don't believe how their functioning is optimal, and they're the people who need to sit with these ideas and so, yeah, to wrap this through, what we've tried to answer in this episode was question one of the two great questions of burnout, and question one was why do people, particularly school leaders, endure high levels of personal distress at the expense of their own health, and the evidence behind that was the research that says they are six times more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety or stress disorder than the general population. Gone into what it is to suppress our emotions and talked about big T trauma and little t trauma and focusing on the little t, and we've talked about that in childhood, like yourself, not being a bother when your brother had an illness. And then we've explored all the different things we do as leaders, as adults now attending to other people's needs, and when we're attending to them and using all our great professional listening skills, we're accidentally not attending to ourselves. People's needs, and when we're attending to them and using all our great professional listening skills, we're accidentally not attending to ourselves. So we've made this, unfortunately, or fortunately, an incredibly normal experience for us to embrace. And if we can embrace that, it sets us up nicely to think about why we do it and whether we're prepared to set some boundaries.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 41:14

Are we just being driven? Am I doing it because I have to, because I'm not prepared to tolerate unbelonging? I'm not prepared to be cut out of the fold or be marked down at my next principal evaluation because some people don't find you available. There will always be a penalty when you choose not to belong but choose to individuate. When you say you know what I need to stop this meeting. No, I can't do this till next week? No, that day doesn't suit me, even if there's a window I could. There will be a penalty.

Dr Pete Stebbins: 41:41

This, perhaps, is the final bit of this session. If you're going to prioritize your emotions, you're going to spend more time attending to, and you're going to spend more time valuing yourself, and valuing yourself unconditionally. And remember, most of us have never valued ourselves unconditionally because we didn't get a piece of cake, remember when we were kids, and so at no point in time have we sat in the sun and just loved ourselves completely, regardless of anything. And we're dealing with very tired and stressed school leaders that might well be just normal people like us. So it becomes entirely realistic why you're in personal distress and suppress their emotions more than they should.

Jenny Cole: 42:20

Wow. Thank you, Pete. For those of you who have been fascinated by this conversation, stick around, because next week we are going to be looking at question two, which is why do we allow our time to be consumed by work overload instead of pursuing our own goals and personal health? We'll see you next week.

 

Click on the link above to collapse this text.