What if None of It Is an Accident?

Opening to the possibility that there's more to your toxic workplace ordeal than meets the eye.

May 20, 2024

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I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy because toxic workplaces make me angry. I want to help as many people as possible do as I did: survive long enough to emerge with my mental health, dignity and career intact, on my own terms. A big thank-you to all those who’ve become paid subscribers.

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Live Event: I’m delighted to share that I’ll be making my first live appearance as Toxic Workplace Survival Guy this week, at Love and Grief in the Shadow of Psychedelic Narcissism, an online event hosted by Dr Rosalind Watts’ Acer Integration community on Thursday, 23 May 19:00-21:30 BST. Tickets here.

Survival Tool #21: Apply a Wider Lens

For the past few days, I’ve barely been able to put down Chris Bache Ph.D’s book about his 20-year quest to penetrate the secrets of reality with the help of 73 insanely high doses of LSD.

Anne Baring Ph.D, author of the Dream of the Cosmos, offered this endorsement:

“Once or twice in a century a book appears that has the explosive force of a supernova, breaking through the limitations of religion, science and culture. This is such a book — a gripping account of an utterly unique and extraordinary hero’s journey that opens our minds and hearts to a new vision of our universe and ourselves. A deeply moving template of our evolutionary journey.”

I’d understand if you might be wondering where Toxic Workplace Survival Guy is going with all this gushing over a book with a title like LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, written by an emeritus professor of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio.

After all, even if we accept that psychedelics have their place, that place probably isn’t your Monday morning team meeting.

But Bache’s book invites us to consider our toxic workplace ordeal from a radically new perspective by offering us an implicit challenge: What if the basic assumptions we hold about the struggles we’re facing in our toxic workplace are wrong?

Just as Bache’s heroic LSD sessions forced him to radically revise his understanding of consciousness, time, and the human future, we could invite a similarly fundamental inquiry into what’s really driving our toxic workplace ordeal.

We could play with the questions:

What if my toxic workplace ordeal isn’t a meaningless accident?
What if — on the contrary — the ordeal follows a pattern we can see mirrored at fractal scales in other domains of our experience, such as our intimate relationships, our family systems, and friendship groups?
What if there’s an even deeper process at work, where the residue of unresolved trauma passed down by our ancestors, and held frozen in our cultures, is playing out in our drama with our co-workers and bosses?

My copy of a book I will return to many times.

Revisiting the Drama Triangle

One way to approach this question is to explore the Victim-Perpetrator-Rescuer dynamics of the drama triangle — formulated by Steven Karpman — that we explored in Survival Tool Number #12: Escape Your Drama Triangle.

If in early life you adopted a survival strategy based on people-pleasing, then you may notice that the boundary violations by the Perpetrators in your toxic workplace echo the kinds of transgressions you experience from your intimate partners.

In both cases, we end up feeling exploited and abused — adopting the Victim role.

Or maybe our people-pleasing tendencies cause us to adopt a Rescuer posture, which will inevitably end up with us being cast as a Perpetrator, and then Victim — since once we adopt one position in the triangle, we inevitably cycle through all three.

Similar dynamics can play out at much larger scales: We can see the Victim-Perpetrator-Rescuer pattern at work in wars, political upheavals, and large-scale oppression and injustice of every description.

This is not to suggest that the injustice and oppression is not real, or blame the victims.

Rather, the invitation is to consider the possibility that the deepest roots of the particular conflict we’re embroiled in at our workplace may stretch back much further than we might imagine, and mirror collective experiences in ways that aren’t instantly obvious, but may become clear when we start to reflect.

‘Screwed-in-Tight’

My friend Lisa Schwarz, developer of the ground-breaking Comprehensive Resource Model of trauma therapy, says that if we find ourselves stuck in a persistent state of Victim consciousness, it’s a good clue that we may be working through unresolved inter-generational trauma.

Here’s what Lisa told me when we recorded a podcast last year:

“You can work on being victimised as a child in this timeline — of course that’s going to be helpful and necessary because the victimisation has an impact on our neurobiology, which is what creates all of our symptoms, and thoughts and behaviours and relationship issues, which people come to therapy to have healed.
“But the victim stance has been around in every lineage, in every human life, since the beginning of time — as well as the imprints and energies of perpetration, and the imprints and energies of the failed rescuer. Those unresolved experiences are all ancient. That’s human nature, that’s in the collective, as well as in every human being on the face of this earth since the beginning of time.
“It’s the red flag of being ‘screwed-in-tight’ to victim consciousness that lets me know there’s something back there, and we have to work generationally with this. But more often than not, there’s also unresolved perpetrator activity trauma in the lineage, that has then flipped into an expression of victimisation in this timeline — as a way to mitigate, avoid and try to work through the perpetration trauma.”1

This may all sound remote from the day-to-day struggle to survive in a toxic workplace.

But it can be surprising what we find when we widen our lens.

‘Threads Are Rewound’

In my own case, I was amazed to discover that my father had refused to sign his appraisal when working for a bullying boss. I also once refused to sign my appraisal — a turning point that ultimately led me to quit the company. I still wonder whether there was some element of inter-generational completion in my act of escape.

Likewise, my immersion in spaces focused on integrating collective and inter-generational trauma in recent years has shown me that there are unconscious patterns at work in our lives that transcend our personal biography. (Resonant World#79: Why I’m Training as a Collective Trauma Integration Facilitator).

Considering this reality can help us cast our toxic workplace ordeal in a new light.

And, depending on how far we want to travel down metaphysical pathways, this inquiry might enlarge our reality beyond our wildest imaginings, as the rocket fuel of LSD did for Chris Bache.

In his contemporaneous description of what he learned in his LSD session #38, Bache writes of his developing understanding of the mechanics of reincarnation and past lives:

“The fact that matter follows mind implies the ability to control one’s physical experience through the power of consciousness. This cannot be done at the level of the ego but requires conscious integration of all the lives one has lived. Beginning to access these former lives first brings forward their unresolved fragments, causing their unfinished karma to manifest in our life. Eventually, however, these fragments are healed and the threads are rewound. As this happens, we become more internally coherent, and our physical existence begins to become more transparent to choices originating in our Soul and the deeper fields that our Soul is part of.”2

We don’t necessarily have to buy in to the grand vision of the fabric of reality and the human future that Bache had arrived at by his final session (though I’ll confess that I find his exposition pretty persuasive).

But Toxic Workplace Survival Guy can confirm that there’s a universal lesson that every toxic workplace has to teach: It’s time to align your life more closely with your Soul.

Summary

We can bring a wider lens to our toxic workplace ordeal by asking whether it has echoes of patterns in other domains of our life, such as our intimate relationships, or unresolved trauma passed down through generations of our ancestors.

Toxic Workplace Survival Guy