Toward the end of my first year with Epic Movement, I was very sad to learn that not all of my teammates would be staying in Southern California for the following year. Some of them would move to Northern California, while others would leave Irvine for East Asia. As a result, I knew that there would be new people joining my team. To be honest, I was more anxious than excited. There is a certain type of personality that I have a very difficult time being around: strong, critical, and exacting. When I am around such people, I become defensive, irritated and cold, despite all my best intentions. There was one person like that on my team already, and I was afraid that more would join. Lo and behold, my fears came to fruition.
I attempted to handle the situation by being professional and maintaining good personal boundaries. I decided that I would view the difficult people on my team as co-workers and nothing more. I would not let them get close enough to me to hurt me. I thought that things would be okay if I carefully subscribed to this mindset, but that was, unfortunately, not the case. During meetings with my new coworkers, I would often find myself acting detached, cold, or plain pissed off. I still enjoyed the company of most of my coworkers, including my boss, but the presence of multiple strong, critical personalities soon became too much for me to bear.
Around late October 2014, Epic hosted a Fall retreat with a speaker who also worked as a counselor in our ministry. The speaker talked about the importance of developing emotional awareness and pointed out that Asian-American Christians often don’t get the space they need to feel and process their emotions. One thing that really stuck out to me from this speech was the speaker’s recommendation that everyone go through counseling in order to learn to better handle difficult emotions. He even suggested that counselors themselves go through a period of analysis. That got me thinking. If counselors are professionals at managing their emotions and they must occasionally go through counseling themselves, what made me think that I could not benefit from it?
Toward the beginning of 2015, my boss, who I will call Alfred, met up with me and with each of my teammates individually. Alfred gave me lots of positive, encouraging feedback, telling me that I had grown the most of all the interns on his team and praising the good relationships I had with my students. However, he also told me that the difficult dynamic developing between me and the rest of the team was becoming a serious issue. Something had to change.