{"id":41140,"date":"2025-03-13T15:27:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T22:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=41140"},"modified":"2025-03-13T15:28:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T22:28:56","slug":"scars-or-wounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/scars-or-wounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Scars or wounds?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1992 I read the book \u2018Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living\u2019 and it changed my life and motivation. The author Swindoll says that to have a decent heart we need to have \u201ca non-defensive spirit when confronted\u201d and his phrase that has accompanied me as a life motto is, \u201cgenuine humility operates on a rather simple philosophy; Nothing to prove\u2028Nothing to lose.\u201d[1]<\/a> It\u2019s from that foundation that I started healing and changing my inner drives, motivations and lens with which to view the world, aiming for Jesus to become my audience of one.<\/p>\n

In his book The Undefended Leader, Walker explores attachment schemas and the impact of them on an adult and their way of perceiving the world, leading and their need to defend themselves. He proposes four different leadership styles and the roots that have caused them to be formed in those early childhood attachment experiences. He cites Bowlby but sadly misses Ainsworth who is very much perceived as the joint founder of attachment theory due to her experiment in 1969 called \u2018the strange situation,\u2019 which monitored babies\u2019 reaction to their primary caregiver being present and emotionally available and then them being suddenly ignored.[2]<\/a> This research has become foundational to all understanding of human relationships, defence mechanisms, trauma symptoms and other behavioural and emotional symptoms of distress, both conscious and subconscious. I have described attachment as \u2018the specific element of parenting that goes beyond the physical needs of the child being met and speaks of the emotional availability of the child\u2019s primary caregiver to be an emotional safety regulator for the child.\u2019[3]<\/a> It is widely recognised that our leadership styles and relational templates are formed in early childhood experiences that shape our perception of the world. Within the psychotherapy world, it is recognised that the relationship with the therapist is the vehicle for transformation of these subconscious models, due to the re-wiring of past relational templates through the consistency, empathy, emotional availability of the therapist. The younger this can occur, due to the changing nature of neuro-plasticity, the easier and shorter time it can take to update the attachment template which would of course lead to a different leadership model being used. Trauma recovery really does change leadership styles in miraculous ways!<\/p>\n

Essentially, Bowly and Walkers description of internal working models of relationship offer alignment, with a slight change of language and emphasis. A secure attachment internal working model enables the leader to influence but not control, adapt without losing their core identity, be self-aware and be able to be a \u2018shaping leader\u2019 in Walkers model.[4]<\/a> Sadly, this would be a natural leadership style only if the childhood environment was in the words of Winnicott, \u2018good enough\u2019, or there had been trauma recovery.\u2019[5]<\/a> The insecure attachment schemas relevant to this book would be insecure anxious and insecure avoidant templates. The insecure avoidant schema is described by Walker as \u2018defining leadership\u2019[6]<\/a> which would occur due to the separation between the front stage and backstage or conscious and subconscious processes. This causes a powerful drive to succeed and simultaneously colludes with denial, dissociation or the mess of the past which leads to an avoidance of others observing this incongruence. This is a common model used by high achieving leaders that believe that to reflect on past experiences would cause them to appear weak and less powerful. \u00a0The other insecure attachment schema explored here is named insecure anxious, where there is subconscious anxiety about their own skills and capability that leads them to depend on others to enable them to feel emotionally safe enough to ignore their backstage and focus on rescuing others to improve their sense of worth and value. Walker would describe that as \u2018adapting leadership.\u2019[7]<\/a> They are relationally connected but they take on the role of hero or rescuer and this subconscious self-perception is to avoid the feelings of unresolved shame of past experiences that are outside of conscious memory.<\/p>\n

My specialism is to work with attachment trauma and those who have survived early experiences of volatility, abuse and terror that caused these survival mechanism and templates to be formed to help the child survive what is otherwise un-survivable. Walker describes the \u2018defending\u2019 model of leadership as those who essentially have had that unprocessed, unfair and traumatic start in life and now need to fight to survive.[8]<\/a> They are those adults who as a child were not helped to express their emotions but were left terrified by their internal processes and so needed to use subconscious mechanisms to live a daily life avoidant of the level of terror that they were feeling. Gerhardt explains that \u201cit may be paradoxical that the most destructive children are those who try and suppress their feelings\u2026Their anger simmers beneath the surface, probably outside their awareness. It also probably arose from very early experiences of neglect or chronic hostility, which has affected their stress response.\u201d[9]<\/a> Helping people of all ages courageously face and then acknowledge and process their early life experiences and how that has shaped their current leadership and relational expectations is my passion. Ultimately, I would agree with Walker that \u2018the only proper goal of leadership is this; to enable people to take responsibility\u2019 and that includes responsibility to embrace the tough process of facing our unhealed wounds, accepting them, feeling the pain and letting them teach us rather than drive us so that we can model integrity and not just teach it.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Charles. R. Swindoll. Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living<\/em>. Thomas Nelson, 2010.356.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Betsy de Thierry, The Simple Guide to Attachment Difficulties in Children: What They Are and How to Help<\/em> London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 2019. 53.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>Ibid. 45.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Simon Walker. The Undefended Leader. Discovering The Secret of Undefended Leadership<\/em>. Piquant Editions. 2007. 61.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Donald Winnicott. Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst<\/em> (compiled and Ed. By C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, M. Davis). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.1990. 119.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Simon Walker. 69.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Ibid. 79.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid. 89.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Sue Gerhardt. Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s<\/em> Brain. Routledge. 2004. 81<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Walker. 153.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1992 I read the book \u2018Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living\u2019 and it changed my life and motivation. The author Swindoll says that to have a decent heart we need to have \u201ca non-defensive spirit when confronted\u201d and his phrase that has accompanied me as a life motto is, \u201cgenuine humility operates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3451],"class_list":["post-41140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-walker-undefendedleader","cohort-dlgp04"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41140"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41503,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140\/revisions\/41503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}