“Human and environmental accidents and incidents in companies trigger a trauma that allows us to relive the past again, to increase corporate and human awareness. Failing to see it costs us €50 billion in Spain and puts our welfare state at risk.”
This statement, far from being a metaphor, is the result of more than two decades of experience investigating how unconscious family and collective dynamics are transferred to work environments, generating blockages, illnesses, accidents, and a profound disconnection between people and their common purpose. This represents more than €50 billion in costs due to absenteeism, accidents, and illnesses for public and private coffers each year.
We live held by the past
Trauma is activated, here and now, through an external stimulus that acts as a trigger. This stimulus opens the Pandora’s Box of the somatic marker, as Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Southern California and one of the fathers of neuroscience, calls it. At that precise moment, a neurophysiological reaction is triggered: hormones and neurotransmitters are released, the chain of neuronal synapses is ignited, and physiological reactions are activated that reach the cells of the organs responsible for executing an action. The entire system is set in motion like a telegram jumping from pole to pole.
When the triggered trauma is, for example, the forced departure from the family home during a war, and an ancestor’s oath that nothing would ever be taken from their hands again, today’s industrial engineer—their descendant—will insist on not stopping the production line in time. You won’t see that giving up on trying to get something done, “come hell or high water,” isn’t dying, as happened to your grandfather. On the contrary, giving up in time is saving your life.
The price of unconsciousness: the end of the Welfare State
Interpreting reality based on unconscious past traumas is one of the greatest impediments to ensuring safety, health, and sustainability in our businesses and society. It is, in essence, the root cause of the collapse of the healthcare system, absenteeism, and the deterioration of the Welfare State. We live with 80% unconsciousness, looking without seeing, trapped by an emotional programming that hijacks us if we are not aware and integrate it with curiosity, compassion, and without judgment. After 25 years of working on the corporate unconscious using the world’s first registered methodologies in this field—Motivation Management (2002) and Corporate Emotional Consciousness (2009)—we have compiled more than 30,000 somatic markers of the Corporate Unconscious that demonstrate that people who are grouped together in a social or productive system tend to get sick or have accidents due to an unconscious trauma that has not been integrated into their family and collective system. God creates us… and we come together, united by a common blindness that, paradoxically, yearns to see.
Letting go of the past and courageously opening ourselves to the new is what we must do
Only when we shed light on the unconscious trauma that caused the accident or illness, when we understand the symbolic meaning it represents and work to integrate it, do we realize that something new is possible.
This newness, within the framework of our methodologies, is called Conscious Effective Action: it is not an instinctive response, nor an unconscious automatism, nor a rational action limited by the 5, 10, or 20% of habitual consciousness, as traditional consulting refers to as benchmarking. It is an action that includes everyone, without judgment, with compassion: both the one who robbed the house and the one who lost it. It is an action born from the inspiration and intuition to systemically integrate everything and everyone, here and now, in each and every one of the 32.5 trillion cells of our body-mind. We thus free the descendant from having to compensate for that past trauma with unconscious actions such as not giving up or letting go, believing that this will fix a dead past that must be honored and let go, in order to live in fullness and prosperity.
Isabel Salsamendi, Director of Tarazaga, Emotional Business Management.
