Learner therapist (28)…… Unemployment close-up

Learner therapist (28)……Unemployment close-up
Torrey Orton
Dec 5, 2012

This is our world, and our patients'…

I was talking about job prospects with one of my long-term unemployed patients. It's been a couple of years at least since he had a regular job. He has persistently over-fulfilled the Centrelink job seeking performance measures, gotten a reasonable bunch of interviews, including final round levels. A number of these opportunities have been by direct approach from the employers to him.
Apart from the now old normal experience of having applications unacknowledged, phone calls let run off into the tele ether and promised follow-ups to interviews languishing for weeks without notice…apart from these indignities there's one worse: after being told explicitly, and without soliciting it himself, that the employer would respond certainly "tomorrow", no response occurred on that day, or since.
Nor was there any acknowledgement of the fact that there was not going to be a fulfilment of the unsolicited promise of contact, now 'today'!! I was seeing him 'today' at 9am, the second day after the promised "tomorrow" and while quite excited about having had a good interview which seemed almost to be a sign-and-start tomorrow at the end, he was beginning to slide. In his own words, he was "running downhill" with each passing hour of hearing nothing.
He was running like a stream down a slope and running like a marathoner off the peak of a hill – both pulled and propelled by the weight of the decline. The forces emerged and increased with each passing moment of expected response unfulfilled – a process he has borne repeatedly over the years of his search. This will not be a bearing which yields much new, anything which is generative, creative, soul supporting. He's sliding towards depression again.
The "sunrise of anticipation" and hope was running downhill towards a "sunset of (his) expectations"…again. This is the dynamic of depression from the start of which rises the glimmer of a drink, or the thrill of a bet, or the taste of a fast food bite…the compulsions which become their own free-standing injuries with their own self-sustaining internal dynamics of running downhill. Almost irresistible forces for him and so many others.
All he needs to know is human closure of a simple human interaction so he can stop expending himself in hopeless, draining expectation. Not even that labour is honoured with recognition. Rage cannot be far away when so disregarded by others. How many are there in the army of seekers having this experience every day??
I'm reminded by writing this that simple civility, acknowledgement of humanness, is the engine of connectedness and engagement in our public lives. Its lack – attested by so many letters to editors – is also an engine. But now it's an engine of anger fuelled by the denial of self which the unacknowledged suffer in their vulnerability. Fire it often enough and anger becomes implacable and its expression most likely to be self-destructive.
Two months ago I went to a public meeting in my neighbourhood which drew almost everyone affected by a major planning shemozzle our council (Yarra) had committed. Officials of many stripes were present. A Council officer chaired, and not badly at all. But he and his colleagues drew flack for 30-40 minutes for the pain their failure had caused us. Not until almost everyone had had a go did they do the obvious thing: say they were sorry. That is civility.
The flack fell to nil from there on, though real issues of substance remained to be negotiated and for the most were done so successfully, for the moment. I wish I could hope for my patient the same civility but neither he nor I expect it.