"Loneliness in a crowd": patterns and learning

It is interesting how unhappy experiences repeat themselves. Patterns repeat......and there are a number of repeating patterns in my history.

• Repeated attempts to make impossible projects work, and then being blamed when it all goes wrong.

• Repeated patterns of overworking leading to a crash, followed by either underwork (boredom) or no work (unemployment). The "underwork" phase becomes longer each time the overwork phase is repeated.

• Repeated examples of blindness to underhand, manipulative, devious and deceptive behaviour by others. Put another way - I am vulnerable to exploitation. In Slow Burnout II, this will be a major theme. 

• Repeated episodes of psychological distress manifesting itself as disrupted relationships. I don't have physical symptoms (or I didn't then, at any rate - though when I write Slow Burnout II, about my singing teaching "career", then we will be talking about physical symptoms). I unload my distress on to others, who may themselves exhibit physical symptoms of stress - as my husband did in response to my postnatal depression. He was not the only one. There have always been disrupted relationships around me - I am something of a storm - but my time at SBC Warburg was particularly bad. These days I am not so sure that it was all my fault as they claimed: the whole environment was unhealthy. But I now know that I act as a focal point, catalyst and amplifier for emotions, particularly when I am occupying a central role such as a project office - a lens, if you like. When I am collecting and concentrating unpleasant emotions, it is not just others who suffer: I get badly hurt myself.  SBC Warburg was a poisonous environment with a lot of negative emotions, and I occupied a central role. A central role where I can all too easily become the "lens" is a very dangerous place for me to be.

• Repeatedly attracted to places or circumstances of work that reflect or reinforce difficulties in my personal life. We do not know enough about why people are selected for particular jobs - what attracts them to the job, and what attracts the employer to them. But looking back over my life, I am struck by how often misery at home is reinforced by misery at work, and vice versa, even when the causes are apparently unrelated. It is almost as if the circumstances of my personal life, and my emotional response to them, uniquely fit me for certain roles within organisational games. "Scapegoat" turns up rather too often for comfort.

• Disrupted core relationships and neglect of friends and family. This is usually worse in the "overwork" phase than the "underwork". When I am working too hard, I "disappear". But when it all goes wrong, my neglect of friends and family leaves me terribly alone. Hence the loneliness theme that runs throughout this story. I think the theme of my life is "loneliness in a crowd".