Consider Kurt N. After 10 years of administrative service to a large university, his position was eliminated, victim of declining enrollments, shrinking federal funding, and decreasing contributions from alums problems many colleges and universities face these days. Kurt believed, however, that his demise resulted primarily from his new boss, a former corporate executive who was appointed dean six months before Kurt received his walking papers. "I don't doubt that the school needed to cut costs God knows, it wasted enough money! but that bastard cut me because I wouldn't suck up to him like his ass licking subordinates in the corporate world."
One night, Kurt even dreamed about "the bastard." His dream featured a single scenario repeated in several offices. In each office, Kurt was having an interview that he thought was going quite well. But time and time again, his interviewer turned into his former boss and began to attack him. After a bloody physical battle, Kurt escaped each time to find himself facing the same plight in a new setting. As he recounted this dream, Kurt seemed to work himself into a rage. He reported that while dreaming he had tried to wake himself up several times and that when he finally did awake, he found himself sweating and shaking. His dream was clearly suffused with anxiety, even though angry feelings were just as clearly dominant during the retelling.
As Kurt talked about his dream and the thoughts it brought to mind, his anxieties began to emerge more articulately. For several months prior to discharge, he had been considering a career change: he wanted to try his hand at management in the business world. His formal schooling, however, was in "higher education administration," a field in which he held a master's degree. His difficulties with his former boss the executive turned dean deprived him not only of his old job but also of his plans for the future. Kurt feared that no one in the business world would hire him because everyone would turn out to be like his boss, the former corporate executive.
By exploring the feelings expressed in his dream, Kurt began to see more clearly his anxieties about his competence and credentials. He feared that "corporate types" would have contempt for his background and would consider him unfit for the business world. He also feared that he sounded "too academic" and couldn't "speak business lingo" convincingly. Besides, who would hire someone "who couldn't cut it even in academia, where performance standards are notoriously low?"
As long as he saw his problem as a lousy boss who was probably representative of all bosses in the business world, Kurt was stuck with a problem he could do nothing to solve. Through examination of his anger and the anxiety underlying it in his dream, he was able to redefine his problem in a way that allowed him to see possible solutions. He enrolled for business courses conducted by local business people at his community's high school. Through them he learned more about finance, accounting, and business jargon, which increased his confidence as well as his knowledge. Meanwhile, he began revising his resume to focus less on the academic nature of his background and more on accomplishments and skills useful in any organizational setting. Finally, he got to know some of his instructors socially and discovered that not all business people were as terrible as his former boss or as his fears. One of the instructors, in fact, referred him to a colleague who offered him a job.
The silver lining of Kurt's cloud demonstrates the value of taking emotions seriously and using them as sources of information. It also demonstrates how elusive emotions can be, even (perhaps especially) when they seem to be speaking quite loudly and clearly. The information our feelings can supply must be sought after and fought for with diligence and courage. We need to seek it from dreams and fantasies, as well as from the thoughts and feelings more immediately available and acceptable to our conscious minds. Finally, Kurt's experience demonstrates that thinking and feeling are intertwined, which means that changing one's patterns of thinking can help in dealing with painful and self defeating emotions.
The tendency to mistake blaming for problem solving is one of the most common forms of confused thinking that can cause painful feelings to escalate while preventing us from taking helpful action. When something goes wrong, we often direct our cognitive efforts toward figuring out who is to blame. Then, we confuse punishing someone with solving the problem that caused things to go wrong or with finding a way to make things go right.
