“Leaders create culture,” I keep reading and hearing. Personally I believe that is too simplistic a statement. Rather, I contend, leadership is a manifestation of what can be termed – with many ifs and buts and solely as a matter of speak – culture. By observing the conduct of our political leaders, for example, we may deduce that something is amiss beyond politics, represented – but not caused – by that thingified, shorthand notion of a ‘toxic culture.’ Physician Gabor Maté, in his latest book, provides anecdotal evidence of what characterizes the personalities of [some of] our political leaders: childhood trauma. His observation makes sense to me. Even in present-day democracies leaders find it difficult to relinquish the power they have been granted. Power can have an addictive quality; like an opioid the experience of power temporarily soothes the embodied and embedded pain of unmet childhood needs. Power games are played in the political arena, but the essential needs of constituents (‘We the People’) remain, yet again, unmet. Politicians’ blind-spots and constituents’ delusional projections in a tangle. Akin to transgenerational trauma in families, now grown-up constituents are bound up with their political leaders; first infantilized, next retraumatized and then made addicts to the phantom carrots dangled in front of them. So they (or we?) keep voting in the same leaders, despite the many scandals on their resumes.
Is there a way out of this predicament? To end on a positive note, the answer is yes. Anyone, regardless of position power, can break the spell by courageously going deep, by looking trauma in the eye and by embodying the love you’ll find underneath. It’s both healing and contagious.