My massage therapist is a former professional hockey player. Well, almost professional. He played Junior hockey and had a try out with the Winnipeg Jets some 20 years ago. Recently, he told me some great Teemu Selanne stories from the training camp they attended together. This was before my guy got cut and Teemu went on to become…well, Teemu.
But the most interesting part of the visit came when he told me about his brief tenure playing in the “Church Hockey League of Winnipeg.”
“That was crazy, man!” he laughed. “Those guys wouldn’t swear or curse or fight or even get in the face of a guy but – holy cow – were they dirty!”
He went on to describe his theory that – because they wouldn’t fight or get into a shoving match or even allow themselves to express any strong, un-sanitized emotion – all the pent-up anger that one accumulates playing an intense sport (or just engaging in stressful modern life) got channeled instead into even more dangerous behaviours like spearing one another with hockey sticks in the gut but then pretending like you’d done nothing at all.
Painful and severely aggravating and toxin accumulating, all at the same time, it was.
“Yup, they prayed really nice before the game, right in the dressing room, do you believe that?”
Hey, I grew up Mennonite. I did believe it.
“But that was the dirtiest hockey I ever played anywhere, bar none!”
Hey, I played church-league sports in my youth. I believed that too.
All of this put me in mind of how we, as conflict resolution professionals and leaders in the workplace, respond to the many strong, un-sanitized emotions we inevitably encounter in the course of our daily lives, both at work and at home. But even more how I, as a human being – especially one who is brazen enough to ask others to let me accompany them into the dark corners of their emotions – relate to the darker strains of my own nature.
For as author Gary Friedman (Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding) puts it: “You can’t go there in them, if you can’t go there in you.”
The conversation with my massage therapist also put me in mind of a recent movie I saw, “Django Unchained.” When asked about the intensely violent nature of his film, Director Quentin Tarantino replied, simply: “It’s in all of us.”
Hmm…What do you think? Are Tarantino and my massage therapist on to something? Do the darker emotions we fail to recognize and work with in some active way have the potential to sneak up on us unawares and do more damage? And, even if that’s true, what does it mean for what we should do with these emotions when they surface?
Surely it’s not better for us to pull one another’s jerseys over heads and start pounding away? And just what purpose would a Tarantino-like revenge fantasy in the workplace serve?
I’m interested in your thoughts.
Dave