Tommaso is thirty years old, is an engineer and works for the company. One day, however, he resigned. The job failed to give him the rewards he felt caring for an elderly person. He built bridges, but faced with the prospect of building a family, he couldn’t resist. Tommaso, who was abandoned at birth and grew up in various institutions, drops everything to try to be what he had never been before: a son. It is the plot of The recidivist son (and/or) by Fabio Bartolomei, a loose-knit comedy where deep thoughts make their way clearly.
The emotional legacy always comes back
Like this: it is only after 70, often following an illness, that people fully understand the drama of lonelinessof not having a family. And drama, for Tommaso, is an emotional legacy that comes back to the surface. By beating everything, career in primis. Thus confirming the marvelous intuitions that Galit Atlas, a psychoanalyst based in New York for over twenty years, has collected in “The emotional legacy” (Cortina).
«I started writing the book shortly before the man of my life died and shortly before the pandemic began. I suffered a lot, I wanted to do a research path focusing on my traumas and my losses. I investigated the pain of men and the intergenerational process of trauma, in the end I collected the stories of my patients» specifies the author of an essay that reads like a novel.
The job you choose and how you live it also depends on the choices and experiences lived in the family
Exchange the office for the family
«Every inherited trauma impacts all parts of our lives because it shaped who we are. It affects our mental well-being, relationships, anxieties, ability to love, and certainly our careers. Reflecting on this is the basis for coming out better. The exact minute we begin to see the link between our emotional legacies and our current inner struggles it’s the same where we’re starting to turn things around. Which are sometimes just mistakes. Maybe the ones that are always repeated in the office» Galit Atlas points out.
«The first is to respond to leaders, unconsciously, as if they were our parents, or rather the original figures with whom we identify authority. The second is to internalize the history of our previous generations and it is evident when, for example, we are in emotional conflict with the possibility of being successful precisely because the parent with whom we identify was unable to work. In the end, it is a mistake not to realize that certain unresolved stories will find a way to repeat themselves. Indefinitely, or even if I change office, colleagues, city. In this case we need to understand which model we are following. Everything that always comes back in the same way belongs to a past unknown to us that needs to be investigated »he concludes.
The Wright Brothers Quarrels
We are what we don’t know we are, so. And that doesn’t always go wrong: family inheritances can also be the key to our success. «I think of the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, who in the late 1800s, in Dayton, Ohio, used to argue furiously in their bike shop on West Third Street. But thanks to those quarrels they solved one of the greatest engineering puzzles in history, the invention of the airplane. It was their father who had trained them since they were boys. It seems that at dinner he proposed an argument to them: one had to defend it, the other to demolish it. To then swap roles» explains Annalisa Monfreda, co-author of Voices and Coppertwo platforms that talk about companies and money.
«Another interesting reference concerns the Indian culture. Pay attention: there are more and more Indians at the helm of important companies, from Twitter to Microsoft, from Alphabet to Ibm, from Adobe to Vimeo. The BBC did an investigation and brought out the traits of a “non-abrasive leadership that arises from the gladiatorial education of these kids”».
Money education affects your career
In his Copper podcast every week a guest, following the thread of his family history, confides childhood memories, ideas, fears, personal ambitions or those imposed by others, choices made out of courage or instinct for self-preservation. All specifically related to money. It turns out, for example, that the way we are educated about the relationship with money, or family events such as bankruptcies, layoffs, separations, will greatly influence our career. Typically this inheritance operates in the form of a repetition of behaviors until the key is found to break out of that repetition of patterns.
“A new businesswoman of Romanian origin has managed to break the chain of poverty inherited in the family, or that mechanism by which it was normal to continue to make debts and barely make ends meet, thanks to conversations with other women” continues Monfreda, a veteran of a nice personal change of course. Magazine director, she resigns and reinvents herself.
Time to change
«My father had emancipated himself from his peasant origins through an engineering degree and a good career within a company like the State Railways. Security and success, in my family history, were therefore linked to study and a permanent job. I myself didn’t feel fulfilled until I had a permanent contract in my hands. Even if this meant giving up writing and freedom, the two most cherished aspects of my journalism work, I was able to move beyond my family history thanks to three factors. On the one hand, I felt that I had reached the end of the road indicated by my parents and no longer being able to grow by insisting on the road as an employee. Added to this in recent years is the malaise caused by impotence in the face of the inevitable crisis of the business in which I was immersed. Finally there was the meeting with what would later become my partner, Montserrat Fernandez Blanco. I found the strength to close a path to open a much riskier one that brings out the most authentic “me” Monfreda confesses.
The weight of the emotional legacy and the ghosts of the past
The point is that the weight of the emotional legacy is especially evident in the choices made by young people, when in the search for our authentic desire the conditioning of the environment in which we grew up affects more. When we find a job, he shows up again. «He guides us in the exercise of leadership. Today the most effective is the situational one, that is, which adapts to every event, but for some it is difficult to assume it because the external inputs to which they should respond are less influential than the internal ones with which they have to deal. The same is true when it comes to managing a conflict. The ghosts of the past re-emerge and the real end of that conflict cannot be seen, or the success of a project, but only the need to assert oneself within a dynamic that rekindles painful memories» concludes Monfreda. In Feel and know (Adelphi), Antonio Damasio, professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, headlines a chapter “The substrate is important and puts a truth on paper: our mental experiences can be described as «the experience of “being” while other mental contents flow”. And as they flow, they dialogue: non-stop.
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