9/4/2024 0 Comments The Cost of ConformityRonald Gittins died in 2019 leaving behind a large collection of artworks. Five years on, his home where the work was displayed and stored has been Grade II listed. Mr Gittins lived in a rented flat in Birkenhead where, extraordinarily, the landlord and agents left him alone for 30 years. He let very few people into his home for obvious reasons, but enough of the right kind of people who were in the right place at the right time realised that something exceptional had been created, bought the flat, spoke to the right organisations and preserved his work. Who knows how Mr Gittins spent his youth and adulthood, how he paid the rent and so on, but there’s something very familiar about his story. He “was a complicated character who most people would have regarded as eccentric.” People like Ron aren’t easy to live with, many of them find it hard to live with themselves, they’re driven to produce, choice doesn't have much to do with it. Very, very few create work that the market wants but that’s not the issue for them, many artists are disinterested in selling their stuff. Art is one of the things that make Homo sapiens different from any other animal. The earliest art, accurate, beautiful representations of animals, prints and stencils of human hands, is deep inside caves, intimately linked to religion and organised culture. Nothing exists that doesn’t serve survival in some way so we have to suppose that art, which has been in existence for as long as we have, is necessary. I’ve no idea how Mr Gittins lived but he was old enough to have found some support from the State before the benefits system became a sadistic parody of itself. From the 60’s to the mid-90’s it served as a kind of universal basic income for many (mainly white) creatives and large numbers of now successful, then low income writers, artists and musicians were able to hone their skills because they had the freedom of time. A great many people are not allowed to develop their natural creativity for a multitude of reasons. Their family might need them to find ‘respectable’ work, either to pay bills or to maintain a particular appearance. They may be part of a culture that ridicules or reviles these drives - Banksy was a criminal until his art achieved high monetary value. We’re taught that anything we produce is worthless until it becomes not just saleable but profitable and that lesson has profound impact when you need to feed you children. The results of forcing people to behave in ways that are unnatural to them are evident all around us. Those who need to numb themselves in all kinds of ways, or who simply can’t adjust and find themselves coming into contact with the criminal justice or mental health systems are the tip of the iceberg. Disappointed, embittered, frustrated, resentful people leading lives they’re unsuited to, abusing any power they get, despising those who aren’t like them - all of us come into contact with them every single day. And there are parts of all of us that, in a context that we’re enduringly unsuited to, are irritable, petulant, punishing, much less functional. Projective Identification is the idea that we perceive in others the things we find unbearable in ourselves, and it contaminates everyone that comes into contact with it. You don’t have to be an artist or writer to feel this, if you’re in any life that you’re not suited to it's going to be harder than if you felt that your life belonged to you. That can be harder to discern than you may imagine. If the expectations of your family and school have been attached to a certain kind of life then doing anything different is going to be tougher than it should be. A natural maths genius unable to express themselves as, say, a doctor's receptionist, or a barrister who’s much more suited to care work can have long and successful careers but they may be less likely to feel fulfilled. That can have an impact on their relationships, including those with their children. There’s no easy answer to this. Mr Gittins was supremely lucky, many stars constellated to allow him a life that was productive and meaningful on his terms (Where ‘productivity’ means doing more with less, people like Mr Gittins are often highly generative while very privileged people whose connections allow them to do more than their talent endorses are often celebrated for very mediocre work.) Sometimes we have to conform, learn our trade, earn the money, pay the bills, gain the required security and then, having proved that it can be done and gained some space from economic or cultural pressures, we can pause. Having the time to wonder why we’re doing what we’re doing has become a luxury. 17,000 years on from Lascaux, you’ve got to wonder how that happened.
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We’re all being encouraged to process, and if we can’t do it on our own to go to therapy. But what does ‘processing’ actually mean?
In some sense it involves ‘understanding’ which is what a decent investigation strives to do. That’s perfect when policies have not been followed or materials fail, but less so when you’re feeling confused, upset or just strange about something. Organising information so that it makes better sense is important, it’s why people who’ve been impacted by failures so often get involved in working to reduce the likelihood of a recurrence. Neuroscience offers clues. The following is simplistic but since we’re not attempting brain surgery it’s a useful metaphor. Routine events become memories that are efficiently stored and retrieved, it’s how we learn. You don’t want to access information about how to eat when you’re driving, and a smell might spontaneously remind you of a holiday. But events that are less routine create memories that don’t get stored as efficiently. Imagine a warehouse carousel and storage system. Regular boxes - ordinary memories - are simple to stack, less likely to fall and easy to retrieve without disturbing the entire system. Irregular or fragile boxes need more attention but one or two don’t cause too many problems. An increase in strange shapes or boxes held together with sticky tape and hope increases the likelihood of disruption to the whole system. Irregular boxes can be left to go round and round, or they can cause instability to the stack, get crushed or spill their contents. They require more attention and work to store or retrieve which means they may be less likely to be stored at all or may cause problems to the stack when they are. The irregular boxes are not solely related to trauma. If there aren’t enough staff the boxes pile up, bash into each other and lose some of their form. You can imagine what happens if the fuel for the carousel runs out but the boxes keep coming, or if storage space gets crammed. We know that people who are bereaved need time to come to terms, we expect them to be upset and fragile, to not be their usual selves. We understand that they are processing shock, loss, sadness, disorientation and so on and if they return to their usual selves within a week, we anticipate and are sympathetic towards the idea that they may suddenly begin crying or zone out. Their entire storage system has just been in an earthquake, they’ve got a great deal to manage and few resources. Even so, there’s an expectation that they’ll have the entire warehouse, equipment, staff, supply lines and ops up and running to full capacity within a few months. That’s one thing when we’re working with actual material items and processes, quite another with the intangibles of existence. Every single human, and many other animals’ cultures have created rituals. While we can’t point to an X ray and say, ‘This structure is the unconscious,’ rituals are pretty good proof of concept, we are compelled to create and perform non-productive acts that have no purpose, indeed would be bizarre, in any other context. We have lost almost all of our most important ones. Responding to bereavement, birth, coming of age, accidents, all kinds of events, once meant sets of actions involving the whole community, there was no “I don’t know what to say or do,” because we knew what we were required to say and do and even when performing these things became difficult, moving through them was a mark of the passing of time and an acknowledgement that we had experienced something. We knew what to do and how to behave at the moment of death or birth or coming of age on the day and in the days, weeks, months, years afterwards, and while a great many rituals or parts of them were or became dubious, in effect they created boxes and the warehouses in which to store events. Very few of us have access to anything like this now. I really want to reiterate that processing is not limited to huge or traumatic events. I use the example of bereavement because we all feel sympathetic towards it, many of us have experienced it, but it’s an extreme example. In therapy and outside of it, processing can be understood as taking the time to think, feel, wonder about and express something in the service of adapting ourselves to take events into account. We take a memory out and remember it, become curious about how it may relate to other events and circumstances, widen our knowledge and appreciation of the environment in which it occurred. We might talk about it, finding more accurate language to describe it and the impact it has had. We might write, paint, whatever to better understand it; in some sense when we process something we are symbolising it, allowing less cognitive parts of ourselves the opportunity to communicate how they experience it. In it's own way, processing has a lot in common with ritual. An inquiry gets all the evidence in one place and examines it. It’s vital. But it does not - it is not intended to - also attend to the visceral impact of events. Therapy aims to do both. It takes as long as it takes and this can be frustrating, but knowing that processing is very much more than a logical inquiry can help patience. When we process, we are allowing ourselves to re-view, re-experience events, so that we can create a box in which it may fit more comfortably and be stored with greater ease. The aim is not to stuff things away forever and return to our pristine, unchanged selves. That's not possible and also not desirable, we need to learn from experience, and the trick is to learn the lessons that can offer a more satisfying life. We don’t get over anything, we learn to make deeper sense of events, make room for them, to live with them. They can inform us about the need for different boundaries, different ways of being, the possibility of different choices, altered opinions. When they're not endlessly going around a carousel or rattling about and destabilising the whole storage system, when they're not kept separate from us but attended to and accepted, there’s a chance that they can teach us something like wisdom. Burnout has become ordinary.
What used to be a pretty niche diagnosis, perhaps exemplified by the cliché of a male executive rearing out of his office chair, punching a wall and having to be led from the office, is now being seen in large numbers of people. It’s worth making a few distinctions. The World Health Organization defines burnout as "a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." It is “an occupational phenomenon.” “Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.” This is important. Burnout is linked to poor management in the workplace. Not to an individual failing to manage their own stress. Forbes says: We often think of burnout as an individual problem, solvable with simple-fix techniques like “learning to say no”, more yoga, better breathing, practicing resilience. Yet, evidence is mounting that personal, band-aid solutions are not enough to combat an epic and rapidly evolving workplace phenomenon. In fact, they might be harming, not helping the battle. With “burnout” now officially recognized by the World Health Organization, the responsibility for managing it has shifted away from employees and toward employers. The top 5 causes of burnout are
WHO emphasises the need for organisations to address systemic issues related to workplace stress, support employees in managing their workload and maintaining their mental health. By contrast, workplace stress:
There are periods when everyone’s employment becomes or at least feels dull and purposeless and it is absolutely fine to accept that. It might be the impetus to go for promotion, it might be the realisation that things are not as they should be: listen to those feelings, they exist for a reason. Take early responsibility to act on them. If a project is dull or even pretty brutal but you know it’ll end, put things in place that will support you. Tell friends that you love them but won’t have the time to be as social as you’d like to be for a while. Ask them and others who might want to, for help. It’s logical to realise that when a workplace requires a 50+ hour week and so many people are living alone, support is necessary, it’s something we can offer each other and request in return. It’s bizarre that I find myself writing ‘Try to get enough sleep’ but there we are. Balancing sleep, rest, decent food, water, daylight, physical movement, human contact and work (all this before thinking about anyone else in your household) has become difficult for huge numbers of people. Please recognise that this is outlandish and that you’re not alone. If your feelings aren’t attached to a particular project but have become routine, visit your GP, describe how you're feeling and ask about taking routine blood tests of red blood cell count, white blood cell count, thyroid function and blood sugar. When very basic physical things are not as they should be they can manifest as anxiety, depression, tiredness or becoming unproductive, and all the therapy in the world will not change that anywhere near as effectively as addressing them will. Ask for support. Pay careful attention to how you feel when you imagine negotiating a change in workload. And think about what you need to do in order to move on from this situation. I’m biased of course, but I believe that therapy can help in both cases, not least because I meet with people experiencing both. Why we do what we do, why we endure things that others might not, how to rectify things that have gone out of balance, are worthy questions at any time. Management There are multiple, global causes of the increase in workplace stress and burnout. Poor management and poor leadership are two of them. The UK has a reputation for both. No one in their school careers interview says, “When I grow up I’d really like to make people’s lives a misery.” Few 5 year plans include taking no responsibility for maliciously harming people. Yet if you’ve watched even the smallest part of any public inquiry or read any report about any scandal, its clear that this is routine behaviour. Policies and procedures serve to remove accountability out which is why the phrase, “Lessons will be learned” sounds so hollow. There’s no easy answer to this one. The UK simply does not invest in management training, if we remain in a profession long enough we're very likely to end up being a manager whether we want to or not. Meaningful structural, professional, strategic and cultural changes require time, expertise and enthusiasm, but there’s little motivation to invest in any of them. Accepting that, since so many people are poor managers and leaders, there might just be a chance that we too could be mildly suboptimal is a start. Therapy - and I mean more than 6 sessions of goal focused CBT - offers the space and time to build an environment of trust so that you can safely consider what might be going on. Jerks, not all of whom are talented, seldom come to therapy. Take workplace stress seriously, take burnout very seriously. By definition, a lot of it is out of your control, but some of it is in your hands, even - perhaps especially - when it can feel as if it really is not. |
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