Connecting to what we want: Part 3 – Career

How we learned to fear work

Growing up, it always seemed to me that the world of work was a terrifying and oppressive place. There were a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I struggled with school and didn’t get consistent help from my parents. School was my first experience of what the world outside of my family was going to expect from me, and I learned from this experience that the world was going to assail me with endless, draining demands that I had no ability to say no to and that consistent help was unreasonable to ask for.

The second reason was that both of my parents struggled with the world of money and work in a way that I never saw either of them master. It seemed to oppress them emotionally and caused conflict in their relationship. The whole household spent long periods under the dark cloud of their despair and unmanageability around work and money.

The overlooked wound

What we believe about the world of work, the role of vocation in life, and what it means and takes to make a living play a huge role in our happiness as we go out into the world – but it often gets overlooked as a part of childhood trauma healing. The tragedy is that work, career, and vocation are a huge part of everybody’s life, and they are not separate from our emotional lives. Human beings feel deeply about what they do with their energy and labour, and how we relate to that can become the basis for how we relate to society.

When we feel trapped by work, stuck in cycles of poverty, or doomed to work we find slavish or pointless, it can be difficult for us to realise that there are other ways of relating to these things. The way we have learned to relate to them very often comes from the attitudes and experiences of our parents when we were growing up – how they might have failed to model a healthy relationship to work for us and/or failed to protect us from grown-up worries at an age we were unable to handle them.

Absorbing our parents' financial despair

If any of this resonates with you, perhaps you had parents who:

• Fought a lot about money or job-related demands and didn’t protect you from hearing all this conflict. They also probably didn’t resolve this conflict, or you didn’t get to see how it was resolved.

• Seemed really indifferent towards or unhappy with what they did for a living, or the world of work as a whole, but didn’t ever make a well-thought-through effort to change things.

• Struggled a lot to make things work out – whether career-related plans, financial goals, or pursuits they found meaningful.

• Experienced a lot of stress, which burst through the seams and onto the family.

• Carried and promulgated beliefs around the harshness of the world or adulthood and work: ‘It’s dog eat dog out there,’ ‘The world is going to chew you up and spit you out,’ or ‘Bosses are aholes, and companies just want to use you up and pay you as little as they can get away with. Nobody appreciates me in the end.’

Why survival blocked meaning

This speaks more to our parent's struggles with their emotional self-regulation and lack of connection to their sense of power than it does to the state of the world. That is not to say that the world is not sometimes challenging to make one’s way through, or that work or bosses can’t be hard, unfair, or even abusive – but to be ruled by that continually across one’s lifetime and to allow the hardship of it to fall onto one’s children is genuinely unfair. Kids don’t have the choices adults have, and there is little they can do to protect themselves from a parent’s despair around work.

Growing up around these kinds of adults means that we never got to see competence (we might have had a work-skilled parent, but did we see true, emotional competence around work boundaries?), and never got to experience the safety we needed to explore questions of what we wanted around vocation and meaning.

After all, meaning in life and work can never be explored when the emotional reality of home is dominated by feelings of desperation and survival. We might still be worrying about our parents’ work lives, even into adulthood – without ever having had the chance to work out what the concept of vocation means to us.

These things need to be explored explicitly with a grown-up who cares, who is interested in their child and will be with them through trying out lots of experiences so that they can get to know themselves. Importantly, this grown-up also needs to model good enough competence around work and money for their child.

Re-writing the rules: Prompts for self-exploration

Here are some prompts that might help to start an exploration:

• Your agency: Did you know that a person can have work that works for them? They do not have to simply serve the demands placed on them at all times. If a person finds themselves in a work situation that doesn’t work for them, they can build a plan for getting to a better place. This includes being in a workplace that ‘needs’ you. The truth is that (for better or worse) we are all replaceable in our jobs, and we do not owe a place of work our undying loyalty.

• Your vocation: Is it a career we’re looking for? Perhaps work is not that meaningful to you, and you would rather have a job you can do well enough that allows you to pursue your true vocation outside of working hours. Your vocation may have nothing to do with what is traditionally considered ‘work’. Perhaps you feel called to explore wild places, spend a lot of time with animals, or cultivate bonsai trees.

• Your permission: Do you have internal permission to have a calling and work out what that is? The truth is that working out who you are and what you want to do with your vocation in life can take a lot of time and experimentation. When childhood was focussed on survival, and when we had absolutely no encouragement in exploring our sense of meaningful engagement with the world, we may have opted rather to keep that in the realm of fantasy and to adopt a stance towards the world of occupation which doesn’t work for us but feels safe in one way or another. Perhaps it feels like the work is secure, or the money we can make doing it gives us a semblance of security.

Tending the garden

The subject of career and vocation is actually a broad one – it’s not necessarily about what you do for a living, it can also be about the activities that give your life meaning. Perhaps where you feel like your talents are truly valuable, make a meaningful contribution, or where you just feel like you’re in the right place. There is something about proper vocation that aligns our relationship with ourselves and with the world.

It’s important to remember that working out our career or vocational interests is a part of healing, and it’s a process that is best approached without urgency. We need to nourish the ground of our sense of self and heal first. We shouldn’t be rushed or forced to decide what we want (sometimes there is also a lot of trauma around feeling like we’re running out of time) – it’s perhaps better to think of it as preparing a garden.

We fertilise the soil with gentleness, patience, love, and healing, we plant the seeds of the dreams that attract us, and we consistently water them with our attention, encouragement, and time. Not everything that grows will come to fruition, and that’s okay – some things will take root, and with those that don’t, we can always try again later or change our approach.

Then what grows has a chance to make sense for where we’re at now in life and isn’t a demand or pressure to perform or impress; it can simply be what it always should have been – a natural outgrowth of who we really are. Something we might have really missed from a toxic upbringing is that what we do with our lives is not about proving or sacrificing ourselves; it is about being ourselves.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.

Further reading: Connecting to what we want: Part 4 – Community.