The Story You Buy Into – An Incident

There was an incident that took place recently which brought the power of story to sharp focus for me.

A friend shared how she had been in an email dialogue with a new member of the workplace. The correspondent thought she could get friendly and familiar and call my friend pet names. My friend politely corrected her and suggested it would be best at that stage of relations to keep things fairly formal. The correspondent took exception to this and it resulted in middle management getting involved and turning the issue into a noteworthy incident where my friend was instructed not to utilise office time to address matters in this way, where the correspondent was essentially treated as though she was a victim of a great offence.

Understandably my friend was not pleased with how this small exchange had been blown out of all proportion and was getting set to take matters further. I counselled her to hold on and see a bit further what stories the key players were buying into that made them behave that way. It would help her out to see if there was any merit in taking things further.

She did a little bit of digging into it looking at the story of the correspondent, as well as the story of how the company operated as well as reflecting on the story she brought into. In doing so, she saw how certain stories had led people to a stage where they were slaves to a certain mind-set that left them fragile, vulnerable and sensitive to anything close to criticism. In the light of this, she thought the wisest course of action was to note the episode for future reference and rather than seek retribution for clear institutional injustice, seek opportunities to extend grace to those subject to that crippling story-line they bought into.

That episode got me very intrigued again about the role the story can play in shaping our lives. For example …

To be continued

(Photo by Da Kraplak on Unsplash)

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden