A blog about being on an educational journey in my own life

– an explorer on a voyage of discovery.

Not all who wander are lost.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Emotional development

Being sacked is the beginning of an emotional journey. Through a chaos of feelings, ways of personal behavior and reaction. From my own personal experience there seem to be a kind of a pattern. Starting out with a phase of being in shock, emptiness and a lot of why's going into despairing, frustration, anger and anxiety for the future. After a while a kind of acceptance related to the new situation builds up which moves into attempts to look forward, to do something forward-looking trying to establish a new setting. This development is challenged constantly and there are many relapses, some more serious than others.

Jay Capelle, Wisconsin USA very well describes this tour of emotions in this interview made by Associated Press.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

I have been quiet for a while

Being unemployed is a journey with mentally ups and downs. For me it is a positive and a forward-looking process to go Walkabout. But even the best course of events runs into trouble and gets defeated for a while.

My derailment happened about 3 weeks ago when my wife got sacked a Wednesday at 8 o'clock in the morning. She got a short "warning" on a text message and shortly after a cap driver knocked on our front door delivering the walking papers - and her mobile and email was closed minutes after. I have never seen a person collapse so quickly - and the following hours and days were a veritable nightmare in a state of shock. Many thoughts crossed my mind during those minutes and I still goes through the events of that day in my mind: What will happen now? Will we be able to come through this? Is this a final collapse and will everything fall apart?

But of course life continues and I'm not telling you this because you shall feel sorry but because I want to give you a picture of feelings and reactions during and following a sacking. To be sacked is like a bolt from the blue and the emotional pattern is hard to describe but is often compared to what happens emotionally when we are exposed to attacks, accidents, death or severe illness. The parallelism in how we feel it brings conscious and unconscious memories to our mind and reminds us of former episodes. So it is a mess of feelings of great complexity: Loss of identity, being discarded, unfairness, hopelessness, insufficiency, being up against a superior force, economic and existential uncertainty to mention some. Being part of situations like this reminds us of our own experiences and emotional feelings from our past comes to our minds and we react and gets involved.

So the walkabout is under attack - or is it? This sequence of unpleasant events reminds me of the importance of keep going with my Walkabout - both physically and mentally - using it to bring myself and us and our needs in focus. Sometimes chaos leads to creativity and new insight.