Wounded Souls and Healing's Place in Brands

Cynthia left a comment on the branding as allies post referenced in the last post that I thought deserved a thoughtful response:

i don't have much to say about the branding stuff, but in terms of "positivity" i want to say that there must always be a space for grief in life, and grief is not "succumbing to victimhood." looking at pain in that way runs the risk of turning positivity into a tool of suppression and oppression.

I didn't intend to advocate for the denial and suppression of pain or grief or sorrow. This is a good question: How do you sustain an aspirational brand and yet accepts the grief, loss, and sorrow that enters into our lives from time to time and surrounds us in the world? Isn't the brand disingenuous or disconnected if it's too happy-happy-upbeat? And more importantly, in the realm of the interpersonal - one wounded soul to another - how do you address giving sorrow space?

First, I'm not talking about an "atta girl" "you can do it" "you'll be fine" sugar-coated positivity. Or rather positivity at all. I'm talking about being my ally in healing as well.

Person to person, we need to acknowledge the range of emotions and not brush them aside. Margaret Heffernan, author of Naked Truth, recounted a story about WebCT's acquision of a Canadian company. One company name, one brand, and one of their products was killed. The CEO knew there would be feelings of loss - real people put themselves into building this - and it was necessary to surface those feelings rather than suppress them. They held a mock funeral (CDs and disks of the software were laid to rest) and everyone spoke their eulogies. In an age where nearly all acquistions fail, or at best muddle along, this one worked although they were seemingly two cultures apart and a huge geographical distances separated them. Distance is not geographical.

In the example I used in the post from my own life we're talking about a three year period. I'd already gone through the stages of grief the first year and a half. After the final acceptance stage, the negative emotion I most often felt was fear. Fear because I didn't always have faith in myself. I wasn't sure what to expect of the future (and part of my problem was being focused on the future). But just because I'm wearing a blindfold doesn't mean the path itself is dark. It did not support me when others in spoken and unspoken ways indicated they expected the worst...perhaps even permanently.

I'm talking, ultimately, about one person's faith in another. This has got to be one of the better quotes on faith I've seen:

Faith is expectancy. You do not receive what you want; you do not receive what you pray for, not even what you say you have faith in. You will always receive what you actually expect. - Eric Butterworth

It may sound paradoxical but someone can acknowledge, emphathize, and have compassion during your time of pain and suffering and yet in the same breath have absolute expectancy that you'll eventually come out the other side. They know that the phoenix will rise from the ashes.

I'm still relatively new to California having lived less here less than two years. Many people don't know that much of my past life I suffered from a very mild but very numbing case of depression. I was raised to be a people-pleaser and learned to suppress most of my authentic feelings. So the last thing I would advocate is suppression...that most certainly leads to depression. "Cheering up" is not healing. When someone is down, I don't say: Just buck it up, get over it, or point out all the other people that have it worse. The shocking thing is that new friends don't expect me to ever feel down and it really throws many for a loop when I am. Yes, the external pressure to hurry and "lighten up" is intense but I only listen to my own heart's pace.

Everything ebbs and flows and I sometimes forget the transitory nature of things and thus hold on too tight. I went through a minor loss about three weeks ago (I'm only vague when it involves others). If I don't brush off sorrow and feelings of loss and I don't try to find something to cling to make the world stable and secure and knowable and rooted then the suffering passes more quickly. I mourned for a week which I could tell seemed 'too long' for some friends but only I would know when I was ready to move on. Very, very few people can stay with you through pain, suffering, and sorrow even when it lasts merely a day or two. It seems to bring up their own shadow.

Personally for me one of the reasons I don't blast through pain and sorrow is this: Krishnamurti urged his students, “Stay with the pain,” meaning that if they stayed with it, they would find it is ultimately a thought that defended against love.

In terms of the brand example I used, the Fast Company offshoring issue I spoke of didn't represent the ethos of the brand. (But it was the "last straw" and certainly not the first time I felt that they'd lost touch with their mission.) The cover story painted a bleak (and incomplete) landscape and was essentially a rehashing of the same story told in the rest of the business press. I agree it would have been disingenuous to brush the genuine loss and suffering under a rug. But it's not like Fast Company to EXPECT us to descend to hell...and then STAY there. I too lost a job, a company, and for a while the entire Internet industry looked perilous and more importantly I thought we'd lost an era where employees mattered when SmallBiz (fictional name) closed its doors in January 2001. If you would have interviewed me then all I could see was bitterness and pain because that's what I was immersed in. But that's not the complete picture. Purely the upside wouldn't have been complete either. And back in 2001-2002 I truly needed the whole perspective and a healing story. In the Outsouce-Proof Your Career webinar with Tom Peters and Daniel Pink, it's not that they paint a rosy picture - they don't - it's that they leave room for possibility.

The Chinese ideogram for 'crisis' is really composed of two symbols: danger and opportunity. This is a Taoist thing to say, but danger and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. Opportunity lies at times of great change like this if you have the capacity to engage with it and envision it and rise up to it.

For both a friend or a brand, I'd like them to hold steady with their faith of me - it's often unspoken - even as I may stumble in my own consistency. I was a serious runner (and I still run) during the height of Nike's "Just Do It" days. To me "Just Do It" went beyond the words and they never represented Buck Up or You Can Do It (as in the Little Engine That Could), it went deeper than that for me. At the bottom of my soul, I know I'm not a quitter and they knew it too.

Comments

[Anita Campbell]

Evelyn, This is a thoughtful, heartfelt and uplifting post. Thank you for this. Having been through a startup that I'd poured my heart and soul into -- only to realize it was mine but the investors -- I can relate at least in part. It took me over a year to come to grips with it. And I too believe that you have to be "your own ally in healing."

My best to you,
Anita