The most striking example for me was that about seven years ago I got a new boss. This priest (I work at a Catholic parish) was absolutely wonderful—listened well, empathetic, clear about expectations, supportive but not micromanaging. I really liked him immediately and I thought we’d hit it off very well from day one. He had a tendency to express annoyance when he was bothered unexpectedly with something he had to deal with or under stress. There were a few times early on that I was on the receiving end of this annoyance. Now, his response was well within what I would consider a normal range for professionalism. There was nothing extreme or abusive about it. But when I was on the receiving end I’d totally freeze up and feel this intense cowering fear. One time he was asking me impatiently for someone’s phone number which I had in my records, and I simply could not figure out how to access that phone number to give it to him (which of course brought on more annoyance). I feared that he must think I’m totally incompetent at my job! That happened a few times and it really confused me because as I said I really liked him and thought very highly of him and he thought well of me and that good rapport only increased the more we worked together. I really couldn’t chalk up my response of freezing up in panic to my boss being a jerk or anything like that. I eventually figured out that in those moments I was reverting back to that scared little girl about to get a beating from an angry parent and somehow projecting that onto my boss who was in reality nothing like that.
Fast forward to about three years ago when we had to deal with a pretty bad situation with a family we were working with. That family had little respect for boundaries and literally bulldozed their way through to get what they wanted and it was one of those deals where you either give in or create a scene. In the aftermath I figured that I had screwed up for not having better anticipated what happened (thought there really wasn’t much of a way to do that). So I wrote him an email in which I was very candid about what happened from my perspective and where I felt I’d screwed up and where I felt I’d gotten played. I was expecting my boss to reply asking for a meeting where we would address what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. Instead, he sent me a heartfelt email saying how sorry he was that I’d gotten hurt, which really moved me, almost to tears. I replied to that and in his reply he expressed that he was proud of me for something I’d done well. We did eventually have that follow up meeting where we discussed how to handle things moving forward and did make some changes in our procedures, but that wasn’t the first thing or even the most important thing in the immediate aftermath.
Not too long afterward, he and I were in a meeting and I did something he didn’t like and he expressed annoyance about that. I knew that something profound had shifted for me when my response was very calm—no sudden rush of adrenaline and no freezing up—and my first thought was (and I was thinking quite clearly), “He must be feeling stressed right now.” The meeting finished up with no interior drama for me, other than exhilaration over having what I considered a more normal response to what I recognized to be a very ordinary human interaction. I’ve not had that panic reaction to anything coming from him since then either, and our working relationship has only gotten better.