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THE SOUL’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING LAYOFF

By

EDITH ROBB

Integrated Studies Project

submitted to Dr. George Tombs

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Athabasca, Alberta

November, 2010

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Who am I if not for work? – 3

Chapter 2 – Build from this: it wasn’t your fault – 20

Chapter 3 – What our work means to us – 37

Chapter 4 – Riding the roller coaster of emotions – 50

Chapter 5 – You don’t just lose a job; all aspects of your life are affected – 61

Chapter 6 – Why writing your way to renewal works – 72

Chapter 7 – Strategies to get started – 85

Chapter 8 – Do you need your money to be safe – 85

Chapter 9 – Silent tears and words not spoken – 109

Chapter 10 – And this is my story...at least for today – 123

Chapter 11 – Vanquishing the dragons, changing our worlds – 138

Chapter 12 – Epilogue: Ready to rejoin the labour force? Look closely; it’s story has changed too – 145

Works Cited - 157 3

Abstract:

Millions of North Americans lost their jobs in the last two years, the most since the dark days of the Great Depression. The loss of a job not only impacts current and future income potential, but it shatters identities and severs people's sense of self-worth from previously healthy egos. Moreover, it forces the unemployed person to confront the question: "who am I if not for work?" This book looks at these laid off workers in a way that adds a new perspective on the current body of knowledge currently circulating in bookstores and on the Internet about the human effects of the changing economy. It is in the self- help genre, but instead of offering resume-writing and job-searching techniques, it focuses on a new approach to helping people recover emotionally and spiritually from job loss. That approach is "writing to heal" and it is based on a solid foundation of scientific research from such disciples in the fields as Dr. Rita Charon, Dr. James Pennebaker, Byron Katie, Dr. Linda Trichter Metcalf and Dr. Tobin Simon, among others. Topics covered include common responses to life-altering change, the relationship between work and identity, the nature of work in our society, the research behind the concept of writing to heal, techniques of writing creative non-fiction, poetry and journals as part of the healing process, and an overview of why massive layoffs are harmful to our society and an outlook for future worlds of work.

Chapter One

Who am I if not for work?

“A road gives two choices. That’s not enough.” 4

– Kim Stafford, The Muses Among Us

The work took 38 years. The woman remembers her first hesitant steps into the grey-walled newsroom, the endless clickety-clack rhythm of the old Olivetti’s, the sea of head and shoulders visible over the paper-strewn desks. They were mostly old; they were mostly male. She remembers within a few years her confident strides as an award-winning columnist, her sense of belonging in a world she loved, her conviction of purpose that she was doing work that really mattered, and her feeling of wholeness at mentoring those new to its charms. She remembers her bulging book of contacts and how it made her the go-to person for everything from stories about high-ranking politics to floods and forest fires. She remembers going from writer to editor, from editor to management, from one newspaper to an entire chain of daily and weekly publications.

She remembers the day she was made redundant.

The layoff took about 38 seconds. There was the thrusting of paper into her shaking hands, the numbness that muted the words, the stripping away of keys 5

and security cards, and the unceremonious release into the frigid December nothingness.

No work. No connection. No life as it had been lived for so long.

I am that woman and that was my walk.

I do not walk alone. The United States Bureau of Labour Statistics reports each year that 20 million people, many of them middle-aged, find their jobs lost or completely restructured. Nearly half of the 14.6 million currently unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, a level not seen since the Great

Depression. The number of jobless worldwide reached nearly 212 million in 2009 following an unprecedented increase of 34 million compared to 2007, according to the International Labour Office in its annual “Global Employment Trends” report. Statistics Canada reports 1.5 million Canadians are seeking work, with one-third of that number having lost their jobs in the last two years.

There are lots of reasons for what is happening, as changing global trends impact domestic markets. But this is not a book about stock market conditions and economic triumphs and tragedies. It is a book about people, specifically the millions of individuals now bruised and disoriented by the steel-toed boot of 6

change. It is about the way people can emerge as survivors from the swamp of this unprecedented social malaise and how we can rebuild our lives and our way of making a living in the future.

In our own lives as the newly unemployed and the lives of those struggling to hold precariously to jobs, we see clear evidence that the model of work as previous generations knew it is crumbling into ruins. A new way of corporate thinking has replaced it. When the dust settles, we are left unemployed, confused and uncomprehending of the new “rules of work.” How is it within a few decades the average North American worker has been transformed from an asset to a liability? From a human being to a commodity?

How does a worker, especially one in the middle years of life, handle the trauma of a layoff and return to productive living and financial health within this new environment? How do we emerge from under the rubble of the world of work as we knew it with any positive thought intact? How do we play the game now that loyalty is a one-way street, dependability is undervalued, pension plans are dismantled, health benefits are endangered, and gold watches and laudatory retirement parties are replaced with pink slips? 7

As people are mercilessly chopped from the corporate line, those left must struggle like frenzied hamsters on wheels to cope with overwork, running running, running, always worried that they too will fall in the path of the swinging axe that chops each quarter into proper profits for the shareholders.

Today’s workplaces are hostile environments, particularly for the middle- aged, middle-income worker. Whereas once workers felt a certain security to land a steady job in a large corporation, many now find more surety, reward and safety by performing as independent consultants or entrepreneurs. It is realistic to predict that within the next decade, the bulk of North American workers will be responsible for their own incomes, benefits and retirements. Most people will be free agents, not employees. The average job will last about three years, and most of the jobs we will be doing have not even been created yet.

Between where we are now and where we are going lies a heavy weight on the shoulders of the workers who find themselves suddenly displaced from their jobs. Sooner or later, almost all workers will face a layoff, even those just starting their career now. In No More Dreaded Mondays, working world guru Dan Miller cites research to suggest that if you are currently under 30, the likelihood that you will be let go in the next 20 years is 90 percent. 8

Being forcibly and unexpectedly pried from our workplace and steady income is a devastating blow for most workers, and it is even worse if we have dedicated a significant number of years of our life to a corporation.

In the three weeks that followed my own layoff, I became physically and mentally distraught. Sleep eluded me, crying jags left me weak, and the practicalities of rebuilding a life in shambles seemed overwhelming. Christmas was an exercise in bearing up and breaking down. Family and friends were kind, and kept me holding tenuously to the edge of sanity’s cliff.

There was a blur of practical, well-meaning advice, some from people, and some from books they brought me. Get a resume. File for unemployment benefits.

Search online job banks. Consider doing something different. Start networking with a vengeance. On the surface, I was grateful for this help and eager to pursue new courses of action. It’s what I would have said to me too, and it was well- intentioned.

But underneath my forced smile, I was wild with despair that I had wasted my life and that everything I thought to be true was no longer valid. I couldn’t even begin to pick up the pieces; I couldn’t see where they had fallen in the dust 9

and even if I collected them, I had no idea how to assemble them to start to feel whole again.

In the literature available on coping with layoffs, I could not find the solace to help me deal with the crisis of identity and social consequences that came hand-in-hand with the financial insecurity that followed my job loss. I was haunted by this question: “Who am I if not for my work?” Who takes the time to seek the answer to that when they are happily engrossed in the work they love?

On my darkest days in the coldest of winter, I doubted I could recover. I knew many people who never found themselves after a mid-life layoff and spent their remaining years drifting aimlessly from depression to restlessness as one year stretched to the next. They described themselves in terms only of what they used to be. Friends would say kindly that they were “never the same again,” or that they were “broken,” and shrug helplessly. These displaced workers, their spirits shattered and their identities devoid of a sense of purpose and self-value, moved through the days like living corpses. I didn’t want to be like that, but I knew

I could be if I did not find some way to feel like a whole person again.

As I talked to more and more laid off people, I discovered that even those who appeared adjusted in the eyes of others were still fighting torment deep 10

inside of themselves. As they moved into jobs they frequently found unsatisfying or more menial than the skills they had to offer, they continued to struggle to define themselves. At social occasions when people asked “what do you do,” they stammered to find the words to define the “self” that was now divorced from the person they had seen themselves to be for years.

One man told me poignantly that the months following his layoff after thirty years with a company became a kind of purgatory, a listless drifting between a heaven and a hell on earth, with no ladder to climb, and no safety net to save him. The hardest thing, he said, was not knowing who he really was any more. He said after four years, he was still struggling to maintain a dignity and identity about the less challenging work he was now doing so that others would not pity him, for that would surely break him.

The greater part of most people’s lives is linked to work. We spend the highest percentage of our waking hours in the execution of our work, thoughts about work, and talks about work. Is it any wonder the sudden tearing away of ourselves from our work leaves us disoriented?

This confusion is heightened because of our culture’s concept about the passage of time. Working people have schedules that are akin to a modern 11

religion. Meetings are booked, projects are charted, trips are mapped, and even time away from work is scheduled, often months in advance. We are a culture of time planners and rarely do we allow hours or minutes to flow naturally without a previously weighed and measured allocation. Working people type time reminders into the latest versions of electronic secretaries until their thumbs are worn, and often back up these appointments with written reminders to ensure they stay where they are supposed to be. As each period of their day changes, they are reminded with devices that cajole and bleep and buzz so there is no idle or “wasted” time.

Laid-off workers, who lived that scheduled existence for years, are suddenly further disengaged from the life they knew by a sudden realization that they now have all the time in the world, and no plan about what to do with it. What do we do with ourselves when freedom strikes? “Time off,” once a freeing experience longingly anticipated, is suddenly a burden. We find it uncomfortable to not have any idea of what lies ahead in the next day, the next week, or the next month.

Can we ever adjust to this uncertainty of hours?

There is no pat solution for coping with the complexities that surround the millions of layoffs occurring at this time in our history. There are as many 12

individual reactions as there are people affected. But there are certain essential common responses that can be ascertained and presented for possible solutions.

I believe that in the two years of study I embarked on after my own work termination, I discovered a concept that has allowed me to regain my sense of authentic self and to move forward confidently into a new life. As part of my master’s level final project in university, I undertook research and practical experiments into a field of study that proposes the idea of “narrative healing” as a means of helping laid off workers restore their sense of self and identity.

My discovery of this method, which builds on the work of hundreds of skilled researchers in the field of writing to heal and applies it uniquely to the laid off worker, has its roots in my mid-life decision before I lost my job to return to university to obtain a Master of Arts degree. I resumed my studies about six months before I was laid off, and decided in my grief, that the one thing I should not discard was my studies. To be more accurate, I actually clung to these studies much like a drowning person clings to the lifeboat in the churning sea...it was something in which I could find order and structure and ultimately, inspiration.

When I enrolled in Athabasca University’s course called “Narrative

Possibilities: The Transformative Power of Writing, Story, and Poetry in Personal 13

and Professional Development,” I was assigned daily writing exercises. The first night I tried to write something in my journal, but the tear-stained pages just show a series of starts, stops, and scribbles. I finally abandoned prose for poetry to express my despair, and this is what came out...

On being redundant

Pin-striped and pressed,

Ramrod straight and unblinking

I firmly clutch the neatly-typed sheet marked

Severance.

The clock stops, the sun blinks off,

My world closes pending renovations.

The writing exercises continued every night. I remember my feeling of scorn when two authors suggested we students should write out what troubled us while burning a candle and listening to Baroque music. Tomfoolery, I thought, but I had 14

nothing else to do, so I gave it a try. Unbelievably, my burden started to lift and I experienced a new calmness.

Sometimes they suggested we write poetry, sometimes we were assigned to compose letters of forgiveness to people we felt had wronged us, and sometimes we had to answer questions about what we feared most in life.

Though I had been a professional journalist all my life, this writing was different. It was not about facts, it was about feelings, something we had always been taught to suppress in the interest of objectivity. And it was not words written for any audience, but just for ourselves. Sometimes we would share small excerpts with classmates, but only if we wanted to. When others wrote about overcoming trauma, I began to understand the real meaning of empathy. Some referenced the pain of losing their jobs, and their angst echoed my deepest, buried thoughts and I would cry again for them and for myself.

Over a period of time, I started to change. New, creative thoughts exploring the concepts of different writers started to make their way into my journals. At some point, I noticed that my daily write was turning away from troubles in my past to expectations for my future. It was so subtle I can’t even pinpoint the exact time it happened in the process of these nightly “writes.” 15

I looked at things I had never previously considered, embraced viewpoints I had once dismissed, and listened to voices inside of me that once only whispered faintly in the background. I grew stronger, I grew more spiritual, and I found peace and what I hoped was the beginning of enlightenment.

I still didn’t know where I was going in life, or what road I should take to rebuild, but I became confident that there was still some creativity left in my heart and soul, and that I still existed as a person. It became clear to me and I could finally accept that the roads of life stretched two ways, backwards and forwards, and I would never have the option of going back.

It was many months and many courses later before I learned that roads actually go in more than two directions, and mine was to suddenly branch out into a series of byways and unbroken paths that would change and enrich my life forever. I learned that I was capable of creating a new self, a new business, and a new passion for life that exceeded and was larger, more adventurous and more financially lucrative than anything offered by the life lost that I once mourned.

Excited at how the writing process was bringing my life back together again,

I contacted a group of friends and colleagues who had also sustained devastating layoffs at mid-life and asked if they would write with me. They agreed, and in less 16

than a month, they told me they were breaking down the barriers of their grief and hurt, and rebuilding themselves in ways they had not thought possible. Each one is now happier than they have ever been and has re-established a creative new work life on their terms.

I wondered if there was a way I could share what was happening to us with others. Could the years of study be compacted into a single book that would present the theory and detail how to do it for the millions of people suffering as we had been?

This book is the result of those questions. By this time I started writing it, excerpts from two essays I had written on my findings had been picked up by two professors and included in peer-reviewed academic journals on narrative healing.

You can read their work at http: www.hihohiho.com newthinking cafclwrtng.pdf.

This book, while including aspects of my personal story of how I moved from redundancy to resurrection, is aimed at opening discussion about what happens to the inner “self” when a person is laid off. It is as much about the impact on our identity, our soul, as our outer self and physical world. It illustrates how individual identity and self-esteem can be restored by using narrative healing techniques. Practically, it includes the “how” of the exercise in the format of 17

explanations and suggestions in a series of steps and exercises how to start our own recovery and resurrection progress and adapt to our changing world of work.

As part of the writing and research process, I visited China to study how another culture distinct from North America and Europe is coping with changes in the work world, and I incorporated my observations about this into Chapter 12.

I write this with the passionate hope that it will help workers facing the trauma of layoffs and the shattering of their own lengthy careers. I urge you to forgo any preconceived ideas and try it.

If you can find the courage to engage in this process, I want to hear about your personal resurrection. Write to me at [email protected] and if you are willing, I will share excerpts of your experiences on a blog I will start in the near future.

When I look back over the writing I did in those early weeks after the layoff and how I responded to the idea of writing to heal, I was struck by re-reading a poem I wrote that chronicles my transition. Here it is:

Laid off

Born in the winter of my fifty-sixth year 18

I am delivered from my four-decade world of routine

Into the no-visibility blizzard of uncertainty.

I wail.

I weep.

Slowly the renewal of springtime arrives

And I follow the sun-brightened road

Seeking signposts for real truths to replace false ones.

I write.

I read.

Like the bird flying without knowing the sky’s dimensions

I dare to be creative without a contracted point of sale

And my heart and mind opens without my “self” falling out.

I study.

I reflect. 19

My metamorphosis moves towards the light of summer

And the miracle of life unfolds in sunrises and laughter

And glimpses behind assumptions I thought were impenetrable.

I see. I feel.

I am, I said.

If my story and this book help you, do not praise my words but rather those from whom I studied and sought inspiration. It is those who have gone before me who have consoled me and given me the tools to recover. As Kim Stafford says in

The Muses Among Us, ...”when I write, I am secretary to a wisdom the world has made available to me.”

Question to think about: Try to describe yourself living one perfect day that does not involve working

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Chapter Two

Build from this: it wasn’t your fault

“The world will never be happy until all men have the souls of artists – I mean when they take pleasure in their jobs.” - Auguste Rodin

No matter how strong you believe your self-esteem to be, a layoff shatters it. Like a hammer colliding forcibly against a glass wind-chime, the severing of a person from his or her work leaves a cacophony of noise, broken pieces of self- esteem, and shards of jagged emotions. 21

“What have I done?” was my first thought, even before my mind scrambled with other questions like “how will I pay my bills,” “what will I do,” or even “how can I tell my family?”

In a culture that preaches “taking charge” of our lives, and pushes positive thinking as an elixir for anyone performing at less than super-achievement status, we are reminded from birth that we are masters of our own destiny. We can be anything we want to be, as long as we apply our talents and work hard.

So when we suddenly cannot be what we want, when we are pushed off the corporate ladder we have so painstakingly crawled up, we can only assume that we have done something horribly wrong.

We haven’t.

Now, more than at any previous point of our history, we must recognize that rather than interpret our layoff as an individual act, we are merely being swept up in a cultural phenomenon that is bigger, stronger and more powerful than we will ever be.

I am talking about the layoff phenomenon and the shocking reality that tens of thousands of corporations, particularly on the North American continent, 22

are choosing at this time in history to break faith with the people who helped create them. If there was not so much shame involved in being laid off, much like in being duped by con artists, the voices of the nations would be raised in protest against this trend. But as it is, with the exception of some thoughtful social scientists and commentators, there is only quiet horror as we watch the wave of destruction.

Louis Uchitelle, author of The Disposable American: Layoffs and their

Consequences, is one strong voice leading the beginnings of a protest. He writes that he is baffled by the collapse of any serious resistance to these mass layoffs.

He says it bothers him that laid off workers he talks to often personally blame themselves.

“Whenever I insisted that layoffs were a phenomenon in America beyond their control, they agreed perfunctorily and then went right back to describing ... why it was somehow their fault or their particular bad luck,” he says. (New York

Times, March 29, 2006, How Pink Slips Hurt More Than Workers.)

Uchitelle notes in his bestselling book on the issue that America’s addiction to the layoff has gone well past the point of economic rationality. He believes that the rash and ready reaction of laying people off in response to any kind of blip in 23

the bottom line of our corporations will ultimately hurt many more people than the displaced workers.

Noting that at least 30 million full-time American employees have gotten pink slips since the Labor Department started to count them in 1984, Uchitelle says the situation is grimmer when we add in the early retirees and the “quits” who saw the layoffs coming, creating a whole ghost nation trekking into what for most will be lower-wage work. This is the Dust Bowl in our Golden Bowl, and to

Uchitelle, layoffs now are actually worse than the unemployment of the 1930’s.

At least then, most of the jobless came back to better-paid, more secure jobs.

Those laid off in our time almost never will.

While Uchitelle admits that downsizing may be necessary under certain circumstances, he believes corporations have gone to extremes.

“The global economy is not to be denied,” he writes, but suggests with fewer employees, many companies begin to crumble and innovation is stifled. In the long run, he suggests layoffs cause more problems than they solve. Cutting the corporate workforce in no way has been linked to future prosperity. 24

In support of his argument, it is worth considering that the key profit- makers in the United States right now include companies like Southwest Airlines whose managers refused to let go of their staff just because they were facing tough times after the 9/11 crisis. Southwest, which has never had an involuntary layoff in its almost 40-year history, is now the largest domestic U.S. airline and has a market capitalization bigger than all its domestic competitors combined.

The reality today is that most workers labour under a genuine fear that their job will be the next to go. Not since the Great Depression flattened the world economies have so many workers struggled to endure a hostile environment. And yet, despite the lingering effects of a recession, productivity growth for American corporations is at its highest level in more than 50 years, pushing corporate profits to record highs and sparking economic growth.

Shareholders have started to smile again and prosperity flirts on the horizon.

Despite this, the rash of layoffs and moves to limit workers’ incomes continues.

Canadian writer and politician Michael Ignatieff, author of The Rights

Revolution, notes that “too many workers have no job security, no pension rights, no holiday rights, and they are working too many hours. This is the dark side of our affluence.” (Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, 2007, p.16) 25

As workers around the world reel under record numbers of layoff notices, reasons and patterns for corporate behaviour are sought. The element of greed cannot be ignored, but one must also acknowledge the pressures on corporations forced to deal rapidly with technological change and the coming of age of previously non-competitive countries like China and India.

What has become clear is that when corporations come under fire from any attack on the profit sheet, the first line of defence is to offer up the workers.

Human resources officers still mouth phrases about people being a company’s best asset, but corporate accountants who call the shots in this era clearly don’t believe it for a second. People have never been so expendable. Workers are commodities, to be added and subtracted to attain the most favourable overall tally on the quarterly balance sheet. Regardless of the economic sector, from manufacturing to education to health care to communications, the embattled worker is the foot soldier sacrificed to keep the investments of the wealth safe.

John Schmitt, senior economist with the Centre for Economic and Policy

Research in the United States, is quoted in a New York Times interview as saying that “employers see (the recession) as an opportunity to clean house and then get 26

ready for the next big move in the labour market. Or in the product market as well.” (New York Times, May 12, 2010, Recession eliminated some jobs for good.)

Indeed for the past two years, employers have chanted the excuse of a weak economy to justify the layoff of millions of workers. The first targets were workers whose jobs had been replaced by technology, like ticket agents, autoworkers and clerical workers. In 2009 alone, 1.7 million clerical and administrative positions were eliminated in the United States. Work could be done cheaper and faster by computers and by contracting out to workers abroad where labour expectations were considerably lower. The number of printing machine operators nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, and the number of travel agents fell by 40 per cent.

Next the focus fell across North America on the middle-aged worker, particularly those drawing the highest salaries. In the past, such shifts of workers had to be accomplished for public relations purposes with some degree of finesse, like attrition and golden handshakes. But the public acknowledgement of hard times was the ace that allowed companies to play the hand they wanted by the new rules they created. 27

The corporate chisels were sharpened and every aspect of a workers’ life was sculpted anew. Pension plans were dismantled, health benefits reduced or completely erased, vacations cancelled or reduced, and layoff notices written with rapid-fire precision.

The late Austrian-born American writer, management consultant and university professor Peter Drucker, in 1996 in an interview with Wired magazine, was one of the first management experts to express concern and even sadness at what was happening within North American corporations.

“I’ve found that the very top managers in a lot of the big companies have lost faith in the future of their own companies,” he told Peter Schwartz and Kevin

Kelly in the interview titled “The Relentless Contrarian.”

“They don’t see growth. They don’t see how to develop the company. They don’t really see a sense of direction.”

What they did see, as Drucker pointed out, was that they had a licence to slash and burn personnel ranks.

“What is new and by no means desirable to me is the way in which these layoffs are being carried out,” Drucker lamented. “That is what bothers me. A lot 28

of top managers enjoy cruelty. There’s no doubt we are in a period in which you are a hero if you are cruel.

“In addition, what’s absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There’s no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgiveable, and we’ll pay a very nasty price.” (Wired, 1996, The Relentless Contrarian.)

Robert B. Reich, a former United States secretary of labour and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the book

Supercapitalism, also sees the current layoff situation as unique in history.

“Unemployment rises during recessions because companies hire fewer workers, not because they lay more people off,” he writes. “But this Great

Recession has been different. Layoffs by mid-sized and large companies have surged while hiring has almost disappeared. These companies have used the sharp downtown as an opportunity to cull their payrolls for good –substituting labour-saving technologies and outsourcing to workers abroad and to contract workers here. This explains why almost half of American’s unemployed have been jobless for more than six months – a greater proportion than at any time since the

Great Depression.” (Reich, June 1, 2010, Entrepreneur or Unemployed. 29

www.eldertimes.org) The percentage of unemployed people who have been looking for jobs for more than six months is 45.9 per cent, the highest in at least six decades.

The displacement of workers and the changing skills they will need to ever return to the work force has prompted economists and Wall Street pundits to coin a phrase describing these times as “the new normal.” Even as signs of recovery appear on the horizon, the layoffs continue, and some academics are suggesting the spiral will end only when there is even more government interference in the corporate world.

Drucker, in one of his final comments on the subject before he passed away, said he hoped that American managers, and indeed managers worldwide, would start to remember and appreciate what he had been preaching since day one, and that is that “management is much more than making deals.

Management affects people and their lives.”

For the first time since the rash of layoffs started, studies are now being done on their impact. The results are exposing many myths about the wisdom of layoffs and the end results. For example, a recent study of twenty Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies over a 20-year 30

period by two Dutch economists found that labour-productivity growth was higher in economies having more highly regulated industrial relations systems, meaning countries where workers were protected and could not be easily laid off.

(The OECD is an international organization helping governments tackle the economic, social, and governance challenges of a globalised economy.)

Still other research contributes to the case that layoffs don’t work. Wayne

Cascio, a University of Colorado professor who authored Responsible

Restructuring cites a list of direct and indirect costs of layoffs to corporations that includes severance pay, paying out accrued vacation and sick pay, outplacement costs, the cost of rehiring employees when business improves, low morale and risk averse survivors, potential lawsuits, sabotage or even workplace violence, loss of institutional memory and knowledge, diminished trust in management, and reduced productivity.

Meanwhile, a study of 141 layoff announcements between 1979 and 1997 found negative stock returns to companies announcing layoffs, with larger and permanent layoffs leading to great negative effects. This flew in the face of anecdotal theory which suggested stock prices went up after layoffs. Add to this a study of productivity involving more than 140,000 U.S. companies using Census of 31

Manufacturers` data. The researchers discovered that companies with the highest increases in productivity were just as apt to have hired workers as laid them off.

Cascio himself did a study of profitability of firms after layoffs, analyzing

122 organizations. He found that layoffs in firms actually reduced subsequent profitability, particularly in research and development-intensive industries. (April

2, 2010, Lay Off the Layoffs. www.newsweek.com)

Admittedly, such information does not offer the laid off work much consolation, but it does make the advice to consider what has happened all part of a horrible trend more compelling.

This book is built on the premise that the issue of layoffs must be looked at from the perspective of the worker, but it is essential to lay the groundwork with the argument that what has happened is not the “fault” of the worker. The facts support that it is anything but that.

In the pages to come, we will explore the ways in which severed workers can regroup and return to work empowered with a real fighting chance to change the rules of the game back to fairness and respect for those who labour for prosperity of our countries. 32

At the same time, some of our methods may also be useful to those still in the embattled workplace. The reality is that right now, everyone is at risk. Even if we are still working but have adopted a pay check mentality, it is time to consider who we would be away from this dissatisfying work. We will examine how in the environment of today’s workplace, many workers have ceased to glean any satisfaction or sense of connection from their jobs. They work as if their neck is in a noose, because it is. It reminds us of the line in a Drew Carey skit where he says, “Oh, you hate your job, why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody and they meet in a bar.”

Overwork for the workers who still have a job has reach pathological proportions. This frantic pace impacts our ability to focus and to be creative, and enjoy deep thought. Work life balance is a myth, and instances of burnout and stress have reached the highest recorded number of instances in history. None of this is good for us, as outlined in a European Heart Journal report. Marianna

Virtanen, an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in

Helsinki and lead author of the study showing increased health risks to stressed workers noted one of the factors that mitigated the risk of heart attack, regardless of hours worked, was having control over one’s work (and work hours). 33

(The Globe and Mail, Sept. 30, 2010, “Why the long hours could be shortening your life.”)

The latest surveys in both the United States and Canada show almost 85 per cent of workers today are “desperately unhappy” and unfulfilled in their workplaces. Workers used dramatic terms to describe the depths of their unhappiness, with one noting “my soul is being stripped from me.”

Most of all, we are conflicted with our value systems. Many cultures praise fairness, loyalty and dependability as admirable character traits, but in corporate

America, they now mean nothing. The modern workplace bullies those who would exhibit such old-fashioned concepts as these, and that creates a state of confusion within the worker. A worker’s fate is largely in the hands of one person, his or her boss. Workers are frequently belittled and mired in pettiness and politics and dread.

The tough, manipulative workplace environment further erodes the worker’s sense of self by expecting us to comply to orders without challenge, to live with the company’s values even when they contradict with our own sense of fair play, to display the “right” corporate behaviour, and to adopt the company’s 34

language. The result is a severe limiting of personal development potential and a separated sense of self-worth and identity.

As David Whyte writes in “Courage and Conversation, Starting out with a

Firm Persuasion,” people talk of times at work these days when they see their faces “eclipsed by a total loss of connection with our striving.” (Whyte, p.8) The result is that the workplaces of the world are being overtaken with a pay check mentality which he suggests stifles vision and creativity and even soul for the satisfaction of money. Workers hope that by being able to feed and shelter their families, the more rewarding aspects of life can be acquired by other means. It is a sorry state of affairs.

As workers sell their souls for so much a week, their sense of victimization grows and their contribution to real, creative work weakens. Nobody is benefitting from the creation of these hostile work environments. In 48 Days to the Work You Love, Dick Miller suggests many workers feel victimized by all the changes in their workplaces. Responsible people end up just burying their passions and trying to survive. The pay check mentality has become its own hell for many workers, requiring extraordinary courage to endure ordinary days in ordinary jobs. They dread the financial insecurity of losing their jobs or even 35

worse, having to endure them forever. Sometimes layoffs are even a relief, even though they are fraught with financial anxiety.

The discontentment manifests itself in unusual ways. In 2010 when a flight attendant had a public meltdown allegedly provoked by an unreasonable passenger, legions cheered when he delivered a profanity-laced rant and quit his job on the spot.

In the chapters that follow, we will examine what happens to our lives when the bond is suddenly and irretrievably broken between employer and employee in a layoff and its impact on our authentic selves. What is evident is that the chasm is widening between those who survive in the no rules game of the modern corporation, and those who long for something different.

As Dr. Rita Charon, a pioneer in the concept of narrative healing, wrote in her book Narrative Medicine –Honoring the Stories of Illness, we long for organizations different from the current fragmented bureaucracy adopted by most corporations. We long for managers who lead and practice empathy, trustworthiness, and sensitivity towards individuals. (Charon, p. 6) 36

In the meantime, we know that most of us will at some point in our working lives endure a layoff from our jobs. Those who have no identity apart from their work are the most vulnerable to severe emotional repercussions.

This book is about the process of finding our authentic identity, our

``selves”` so we can emerge from the trauma of layoffs stronger, more whole and more creative than ever before.

Question to consider: Describe how you would work for a day if you had no manager. 37

Chapter Three

What our work means to us

“Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.” - Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist

A month after I lost my job, I was partnered in a creative non-fiction course as part of my master’s study program with a man I didn’t know and would likely never meet. Together we worked with compatibility through our project until it was time for the final written presentation. Then each of us had to add a paragraph of description about who we were.

I struggled more with that than with the entire assignment. Finally, I submitted three sentences that described the newspaper editor and writer status I had in my former life. I used words like “previously” and “was” because I could find no others to describe who I was at that point in time.

My study partner called me, an unprecedented move. 38

“I felt I needed to talk to you about something that I didn’t just want to put in an e-mail,” he said gently. “I’ve been working with you for three weeks now on this great project, and I see you as an interesting, creative person ….so I am not comfortable with letting you describe yourself only in terms of what you used to be. I’ve re-written your introduction to yourself based on how I see you, and incorporated the fact that you mentioned you were starting a communications company.”

What came back from him was a succinct account of a woman who was an entrepreneur, referenced with past accomplishments admittedly, but focused on the present. I read it and slowly it dawned on me that this could be me. On my own, I had not seen myself as someone I could describe in the light of the present or future.

My experience was typical of the worker who is laid off at mid-life. Most people have very little true sense of themselves. We tend to describe ourselves in terms of what we do instead of who we are. We think we are our jobs.

Our culture encourages this. At social occasions, a normal conversation opener is often “what do you do?” When we mingle in crowds, we introduce people to other friends as “this is Mona, she is a travel agent, or this is Tom, he is 39

a sales representative with such-and-such corporation.” We do this knowing that by giving what we perceive to be a description of who the person is, it will open conversation as the other person immediately starts to ask questions about their work. Our jobs are not just our identifiers; they are our connectors to the rest of society.

“Traditionally, identities within society have been determined largely by the work that people do,” writes Molly Scott Cato in her essay “Butcher, Baker, and

Candlestick-Maker: Lifeworlds and Work Identities.”

(www.greenaudit.org/identity_and_work.htm.) She references the German sociologist Ulrich Beck who had a classic passage describing this in his book Risk

Society:

“Nowhere, perhaps, is the meaning of wage labour for people’s lives in the industrial world so clear as in the situation where two strangers meet and ask each other ‘what are you?’ They do not answer with their hobby, ‘pigeon fancier’, or with their religious identity, ‘Catholic’, or with reference to ideals of beauty,

‘well, you can see I’m a redhead with a full bosom’, but with all the certainty in the world with their occupation: ‘skilled worker for Siemens.’ If we know our interlocutor’s occupation then we think we know him or her. The occupation 40

serves as a mutual identification pattern, with the help of which we can assess personal needs and abilities as well as economic and social position.”

Because of this attitude, most of us attach an unrealistic amount of meaning to our jobs. For most people, especially those ensconced in careers by mid life, jobs are much more than an income source.

Ernie J. Zelinksi says in his book The Joys of Not Working: A Book for the

Retired, Unemployed and Overworked, that our work defines who we are. When a layoff occurs and we confront life without our jobs, we are forced for the first time in years to confront the question, “Who am I if not for work?” We search for answers…”parent,”... “spouse.” Usually that’s the end of the list we can come up with.

One man who became part of my writers group as we worked through our layoffs together described his feeling of lost identity as if he were “sailing through fog.”

“I was so disoriented; I set up a little office for myself in a corner of my basement and pretended to work. But I couldn’t even figure out what to put on my new business cards. I felt so isolated, so lost. I felt like I was at the helm of a 41

new ship but all I could see ahead was fog and all of my instruments to set directions were broken.”

Our culture does little to contribute to helping us discern who we are away from work. As Ingrid Bacci points out in The Art of Effortless Living, “For all our culture’s so called individualism, most people have very little true sense of themselves or of a purpose to their lives that they can eagerly espouse.”

We link work so closely with our personal identities because within us all is an urge to justify our existence on this planet as part of some larger, more important plan. Work gives us a sense of belonging to something bigger and more significant than ourselves, says Mary Pipher in Writing to Change the World. It gives us a sense of achievement and is a source of deep comfort and engagement.

In Do More Great Work, Michael Bungay Stanier describes a “flow zone” that workers often arrive at when they are doing their best, effortlessly, and the tremendous satisfaction it gives them.

“The comfort comes from its (work’s) connection, its ‘sight line,’ to what is most meaningful to you – not only your core values and beliefs, but also your 42

aspirations and hopes for the impact you want to have on the world.” (Stanier, p.5)

Writer Marge Piercy puts it more poetically in To Be of Use. “The pitcher cries for water and the person for work that is real,” she writes.

Because of this bond between worker and work, even a job that locks out creative expression can leave a person depressed when it is gone. It is common for people to experience a loss of any sense of purpose in the months following a layoff. The void that was full of purpose is then filled up with guilt.

Our North American culture contributes to our guilt and sense of failure when we are not working. Underlying our religious and capitalistic principles in our modern world is the belief that men and women are put on this earth for a cause, to work, and we glorify the nobility of work. Luther designated daily work as a vocation. Hard work was determined to be its own reward and a sign of salvation to the Calvinists. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, called on his followers to make their daily employment “a sacrifice to God.” Indeed, the so- called “Protestant work ethic” was signalled out by economist Max Weber as the impetus behind the rise of modern capitalism. 43

William Blake first identified this purposeful life linked to work as people engaged in their tasks with “a firm persuasion.” He defined that as a feeling that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at the exact same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American writer, explained it this way:

“There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which He inspires him.”

Buddha says that happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.

Marc Freedman, author of encore: finding work that matters in the second half of life, asks “why do we work?” and then answers his question: “In part, to pay the bills and contribute to the economy. In part, also, to find a sense of direction, to connect with others, to enhance our identity. But equally, to have an impact – to work in ways that are not only personally meaningful but that mean something beyond oneself.” (Freedman, p. 25)

Essayist David Whyte in his work “Courage and Conversation, Setting Out with a Firm Persuasion,” describes the human approach to work as selflessly mature, “a skyful of light and dark with all the varied weather of an individual life blowing through it.” 44

“There is no hiding from work in one form or another. Under the great sky of our endeavours we live our lives, growing our hope, through the seasons towards some kind of greater perspective. Any perspective is dearly won.”

(Whyte, p. 3-4) Whyte suggests that all people want a sense of belonging in their work, a conversation with something larger than themselves and a touch of spiritual fulfillment.

Tom Fryers, a mental health expert and author of the essay “Work, Identity and Health,” says philosophically our culture may attest that it is man who gives work its dignity, and not work which gives man his value.

“But in reality, things are quite different. The general social atmosphere in which we are immersed from childhood, and which influences us without even our thinking clearly about it, teaches us the superior importance of work. Work, as a duty, is seen to be full of dignity, even if it is tedious or inhuman.”

He points out that preparation for work dominates our educational systems, another indication of the social legitimacy we give work in our lives.

People without identifiable jobs are often perceived of as without purpose or plan, and subsequently, less than all the rest. 45

“Preposterous as it may seem, the work world constitutes a tragic case of many mistaken identities,” Zelinski writes.

“Career identities keep people in bondage because their identities hide their true selves. People weren’t born into this world as doctors, lawyers, teachers or labourers. These are things that they decided to become to earn a living.” He encourages people to ask themselves what sort of person they would be if work were totally abolished in this world. (Zelinski, p. 41)

Work gives status and recognition to us, to our families and friends, to our community and culture. It is not unusual for some workers to view their colleagues who are part of their work situation as a kind of extended family.

Communities claim the best workers as their own and good work translated as outstanding accomplishments can unite whole towns and villages. They cheer their native sons and daughters, proudly claiming the super-achievers in the world of work as their own. Not only does the accomplished worker gain a sense of achievement for work well done, but it spills over into all those who touch him or her. Everyone wants to be associated with the person who excels at his or her tasks. 46

Work can also provide people with a sense of power and status. And all of these by-products of work add up to playing a major role in a person’s sense of being a valued person in society. Studs Terkel aptly points out in his book

Working, we work as much for “daily meaning” as for “daily bread.”

When a job disappears, we have a diminished sense of self-worth and a clouded identity. Our sense of purpose disappears with our pay check. And when we turn to our public, our community of friends, family and general well-wishers, there is sympathy, but something less charitable besides. The public subtly contributes to the confusion and despair of the laid off worker by a deeply-held attitude that a person without a job is someone whose life is on hold. Because many people tend to shy away from confrontation or anything that remotely resembles it, the laid off worker is often further ostracized by people who are nervous about what to say and how to connect to them, or who don’t want to

“get into it,” or feel they have to somehow “take a side,” against a big corporation to whom they may be linked economically.

Every laid off worker who once held a fairly public position will tell you the same thing. They are surprised at the number of people who call to express sympathy and wish them well, and surprised at the warmness from some people 47

they felt they hardly knew. They are equally surprised at the lack of even a phone call from people they thought they shared a friendship and closeness with.

Colleagues they worked with 20 years can’t find the courage to pick up the phone to see if they’re okay. Overnight, the laid off worker becomes a kind of social leper, with those still climbing the corporate ladder scrambling far away from them lest their own stars be dimmed by association. There are many other people who just shy away from difficult situations, or who feel they don’t have the words to express themselves to someone who has just endured a trauma of any kind. It is just human nature.

Dealing with lack of structure, lack of resources, lack of meaning and purpose are all part of the package that couple with the confusion of the identity issue to make a layoff traumatic.

The truth is, our identity, our authentic self, is much more than our work and it always has been. Our true, authentic selves are based on much more profound things than jobs, including our creativity, our kind hearts, our passionate pursuits, our generousity, our love, our joy, and our spituality, as

Zelinski suggests. 48

“Being in touch with your deeper self will reveal that a career by itself doesn’t make you a whole person; neither do possessions, status, power or net worth,” he writes. (Zelinski, p. 42)

It is a challenge for all laid off workers to discover our real identifiable traits that are distanced from the world of work, and thus take a step towards uncovering who we really are. Sometimes we have to unravel who we think we are to recover who we really are.

When we start to take the steps presented in this book to find our real selves that have been held in bondage too long by our career identities, the results can be amazing and uplifting. The day you get laid off is the day you get to test who you really are. Sometimes we confirm thoughts about ourselves we have secured quietly inside us for thinking about “when time permits,” and still other times, like Henry David Thoreau, we discover that “we can spend our whole lives fishing only to discover in the end it wasn’t fish we were after.”

Prepare in the chapters to follow to find the roots of your authentic self.

Once you discover who you really are, the road to creating a new life with fulfilling work is closer to a reality. 49

Question to consider: Write down twenty ways to describe yourself that do not involve work. 50

Chapter Four Riding the roller-coaster of emotions

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.” - Helen Adams Keller

The impact of a layoff on the average person can best be described as a thundering avalanche that throws heavy debris that damages all aspects of our lives. In seconds, any semblance of security that we have been clinging to is destroyed and only devastation of the world as we knew it and a deep, throbbing wound in our very souls remains.

The night before it happened to me, I was excitedly planning for Christmas.

The tree was up and trimmed, and I spent many happy hours uncrating my favourite festive decorations and adorning the house with them. Things had been rather tense at work with a series of layoffs occurring over the last couple of months, but I willed myself to believe the worst was over and some degree of normalcy might return. 51

When I walked into my office the next morning, instead of having tremours of anxiety, I was instead busily planning and scheduling to ensure that all major projects would be done in time for the holiday season.

And then the call came to see the human resources officer and within seconds, my world as I had known it for almost four decades came to an end. It was as if a curtain of darkness had come down on the stage of my life, and all acts stilled. I have gotten over it and moved on now, but I would be lying to say that I will ever forget its horror.

As I studied and talked to more laid off workers, especially those who had lengthy careers that were suddenly cut off, I learned that my reaction was typical.

Some people are numb, some people are angry, but very few can honestly say that they don’t care and they weren’t deeply affected.

Susan Zimmerman, author of Writing to Heal the Soul, describes the impact of crises. “Everything is going fine. Then all of a sudden, the earth shifts. Dreams shatter, and we fear the pieces our lives can never be glued together again. We cry out, but no one can hear us. We fall deeper into darkness and have no idea if we’ll ever see the light again.” (Zimmerman, p. 25) 52

Financial worries are the priority response of the average worker, because even if a severance package is included in a settlement, there is a clear and marked ending to the payments and a big wavering question mark of insecurity for the future.

We react by assuming suddenly that our lives will be less. Layoffs are often accompanied by language like “downsizing,” “reducing,” and “redundancy,” and it all adds up to an image of reduced expectations for income, time and freedom.

Typically, we go madly on a search for information about creating a trendy resume since we may not have even used such a thing for the last twenty years.

We consider the latest catch phrases to sprinkle into job interviews to show we are “with it.” (We know ‘out of the box’ is passé, but is ‘blue-skying it’ still avant guard?)

In a quest for some kind of financial security, we endure the humiliation and frustration of the unemployment insurance process. We meet with our financial advisor if we have one to determine how long we can keep afloat before disaster engulfs us. We meet with lawyers or labor experts to examine any alternatives we might have for financial redress. With a flurry of activities, some panicked and some practical, we try to fill the empty cup. 53

While this is happening, our emotions operate like a roller-coaster. A friend calls with encouragement and a job lead, and we feel a moment of optimism.

Another friend calls and is so kind that inexplicably, we break down even when we thought we were bearing up.

Particularly when the newly laid-off person had been with a firm for a long time and made significant contributions to its success, there is a gut-wrenching sense that the world as we know will never be right again.

As Alice G. Brand points out in Healing and the Brain, a layoff is a drastic interruption in a life of meaning and purpose, and to the victim, it seems arbitrary, cruel and senseless. We experience classic symptoms of shock and feel out of control of our lives. Initially, it is extremely hard to handle, and our society must accept that if this turmoil is not eased somewhere along the process of recovery, the laid off worker can succumb to severe depression and never be restored to wholeness of spirit and mind. (Writing and Healing, Anderson &

MacCurdy, p. 224)

Yet little focus is put on anything other than the practicalities of the layoff, and our culture again quickly urges the laid off worker to “buck up.” 54

Our identity, what we feel is the essence of ourselves, is attacked. We no longer know who we are or how to describe ourselves. No matter how a lay off is presented, and whether we were singled out or severed as part of a group, we are left with the over-riding emotion that our employer saw no value in us. We look at those who are left and wonder how they survived, and what made their contribution greater than our own. We wonder if anyone else can see value in us after we have been devalued by a huge corporation, and then we wonder, despairingly, if we will ever see value in ourselves again. No matter how solid we assumes our self-esteem is, this thought will undermine us again and again.

Another thing that was hardest for me to overcome since my layoff came after 38 years in my career was a devastating despair that I had totally wasted my life. I thought of all the times I’d gotten home late for supper because I’d stayed to ensure project deadlines were meant, how I’d missed a few birthdays with friends or failed to visit a sick neighbor because I was wrapped up in my work, and railed at my foolishness for serving this unworthy corporate deity.

My health suffered for lack of sleep and missed meals, my well-being suffered from cancelled holidays for corporate causes and mountains of work on 55

return, and my life suffered from a rigid routine that left little time for adventure. I felt betrayed.

Yet I remembered pride when a project I perceived as worthwhile came together. I knew what it felt like to have a sense of purpose that I was part of creating something of value, a written history of our times. Now I questioned everything and lamented my foolishness and disillusionment and wondered at the emptiness of it all. Why had I bothered? Was there nothing to any of it? These thoughts would leave me in tears and bouts of nausea and it was only after I commenced writing to heal that I began to understand there are no wasted experiences, only lessons learned.

As I began to study the impact of layoffs on long-term workers, I realized my reactions were one of two typical responses. Many people like me despaired at a life wasted; the others went to the opposite spectrum and created idealized accounts of their work lives.

Another emotion that has to be dealt with after a layoff is anger. A little anger and scorn for the corporation or manager who made the decision to lay a person off is healthy, since an angry person often feels more powerful than a hurt or scared person. A little anger can even be comforting, and even though the 56

exercises that follow provide us with the means to ease it, sometimes we cherish it as a child clings to a blanket, afraid if we let it go we will be totally empty inside.

Unrestrained or intense anger, of course, is a symptom of a much more serious reaction and must be handled immediately, often with professional help.

It is little wonder that most people have trouble coping with job loss, since we have had no studies or preparation for it. We spend at least 12 or 13 years at school to learn how to enter the workforce, usually augmented with another four at university. Yet at no time do we take courses on how to exit the work world unexpectedly.

Even workers planning a normal retirement receive counseling and financial planning assistance, but again, that is only when they plan to exit their job on their own terms. Often people at that point in their lives embark on new hobbies, plan extensive travels, or even purchase sailboats or cottages in anticipation of filling up their leisure time.

But nobody busily engaged in their day to day work sets aside time to contemplate what to do if it is suddenly gone. 57

For me personally, it wasn’t until I became deeply involved in the study of writing to heal that I learned there were techniques to take my battered world back to wholeness and an entire new level of creativity. I will share what I have learned in this book, but in essence, we must learn through trauma that we cannot rise above the despair until we discover our authentic selves and start the process of rebuilding.

Rita Charon, one of North America’s foremost experts in the concept of narrative healing, says trauma intensifies the routine drives we have which help recognize the self. In her essay “The Patient, The Body and The Self,” she describes that slowly, through the exploration of self, the possibility of change enters our psyche. Once the laid off worker reaches the point where there is true acceptance of the reality that their life has changed forever, the healing process begins. (Charon, p. 87)

Every laid off person in the world hears a well-meaning friend say “this is going to end up the best thing that ever happened to you.” The frantic, disengaged worker interprets this in much the same manner as the grieving spouse is not consoled by the funeral-goer who tells them the death of their loved one is “a blessing in disguise.” None of us want to be tested in this way; we do 58

not see our blessings at this point in time. We are angry, upset, confused and despairing.

In the same way that medical studies of patients who suffered severe heart attacks and were prescribed a course of healthier living show they failed to comply, the laid off worker is walking evidence that contrary to a popular cultural myth, crisis is not a powerful motivator for change. Change is not motivated by fear and despair and dread. Knowing the uncertainty of our tomorrows does not prompt us to change.

It is only when we start the process of healing that we learn deep within ourselves that it is possible to come back from this trauma with an enhanced measure of freedom, an opportunity for personal growth, improved health, higher self-esteem, less stress, a more relaxed and fulfilling lifestyle, and excitement and adventure.

“By going deep within to a place of honesty untainted by society’s ‘shoulds,’ our vision is enlarged,” writes Susan Zimmerman. “We gain perspective in our lives.” She goes so far as to suggest that perhaps life itself is a journey towards acceptance, toward the belief that everything that happens to us happens for a reason. (Zimmerman, p.26) 59

The thing that matters most at this uncertain point in time is to believe that we will overcome our grief and resurrect ourselves to new and fruitful lives.

“I have learned,” Norman Cousins wrote, “never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate – even when the prospects seem most wretched. The life-force may be the least understood force on earth

…Protecting and cherishing that natural drive may well represent the finest exercise of human freedom.”

Gently and gradually, I discovered that the process of writing helped me to listen to my inner self and accept that my life was forever changed. I learned of the potential of using the experience as a tool to pry open my heart and expand my mind to dimensions I might never have anticipated in my former life.

All people in crisis ultimately learn that it is actually easier to make drastic changes than to make small ones, again contrary to what we have been taught.

And those changes begin with the search for our authentic self and end conclusively with our discovery that we are more than our jobs, more than our careers, more than any work that we could possibly do. 60

But in the beginning, when we try to listen inside of ourselves, all we hear is our screaming.

Question to consider: Write about the experience of your layoff, describing those who did the deed in the least flattering terms you can conjure. 61

Chapter five

You don’t just lose a job; all aspects of your life are affected

“When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.” –

Alexander Graham Bell

Through thirty years of his working life, Stephen’s friends nicknamed him

“Red” for the condiment he sold, so attached was his identity to it. If he sat in a restaurant and he saw his competitor’s product on the table, he would typically produce his own brand from a seemingly endless supply in his briefcase. Once he is reported to have forgotten to pack product, and instead of using the in-house 62

brand, he ordered his meal and then left his friends while he scurried to a convenience store nearby to get his company’s sauce.

In so many other ways, however, he was remarkably well adjusted and fun to be with, so his behaviour was accepted as the public mark of a man privately committed to his career. Nobody could question the success of his methods. Over time, the brand he sold dominated the entire sales territory in which he worked.

No corporation ever had a more focused and dedicated employee than Stephen.

When he fell under the accountant’s axe in his fiftieth year, he might just as well have been killed as laid off, for all life seeped away from him. Unable to cope with this ultimate ingratitude for his life’s work, he cast about looking for something else to care about and could not find it. He became increasingly depressed, a condition heightened by the fact that he could not find a replacement job that gave him the same economic return and prestige lifestyle that he had grown used to. In time, he lost his wife, his children visited less often, and even his friends grew tired of having their well-meaning advances rejected.

So they stopped calling too. 63

Just four years after he lost his job, he died of what medical science called a stroke prompted by his hypertension, but what his friends called a broken heart.

A spent man, he was never able to get another job, never able to get another life.

His case was extreme and his refusal to listen to the professional help he finally sought notwithstanding, Stephen’s story is still the most poignant example

I have ever personally witnessed of someone who let a layoff take over his life.

But as I started to write with other laid off workers and listened to their stories, I discovered that depression and an inability to cope is not rare following the trauma of a layoff.

Being laid off can trigger serious physical and psychological illness, according to Kate Strully, a sociologist at State University of New York in Albany.

In her study published in the journal “Demography,” she used data from the U.S.

Panel of Study of Income Dynamics from 1999, 2001 and 2003 to track people’s job status and the impact on each person’s health 18 months later. Strully focused her study on people who reported having lost their jobs due to factors completely out of their control.

She found that among people unemployed under such circumstances who did not report any health problems prior to losing their jobs, 80 percent were 64

diagnosed with a new health problem 18 months later. The issues ranged from hypertension to heart disease to diabetes. The most commonly reported conditions among this group were high blood pressure, arthritis, and other cardiovascular-related problems.

“Job loss leads to a lot of physiological changes,” wrote Strully. “That’s definitely what this suggests.”

Similar findings were revealed in a new report from the World Health

Organization. Research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Dr.

Carles Muntaner in the WHO report highlights a profound impact between work conditions and health. Poor mental health was linked directly to precarious employment.

Of all the scientists studying the links between work and our emotional health, the most groundbreaking pioneer in the field is Dr. James Pennebaker. In his book Emotion, Disclosure and Health, he details overwhelming evidence that traumatic experiences like layoffs provoke mental and physical health problems. If the trauma goes unabated, he suggests, it will forever remain a barrier to a worker’s personal growth and spiritual development. 65

Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and author of several books that advise traumatized people to write to heal, explains that emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives.

“You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are – our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death,” he writes.

Judith Herman, author of the essay “Trauma and Recovery”, explains how traumatic events can take over a person. “When neither resistance nor escape

(from the traumatic circumstance) is possible, the human system of self-defence becomes overwhelmed and disorganized,” she writes. Each component of our normal response to trauma persists in an altered and exaggerated state long after the traumatic incident occurs. In the case of layoffs, the person may mentally replay the actual lay-off, substituting various scenarios and things they should have said or done, some behaviourally acceptable, some not. (Writing and

Healing, Charles M. Anderson and Marion MacCurdy, p.88-89)

“Traumatic events produce profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory,” Herman said. Moreover, traumatic events may sever normally integrated functions from one another. 66

“The traumatized person may experience intense emotion but without clear memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail without emotion,” she advises.

I became the latter, seeming cool and distant from what had happened but inexplicably in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. It was only after studying the impact of layoffs on people that I could identify my reaction as a classic response to trauma.

Trauma unchecked can cause flashbacks and nightmares as the traumatic moment becomes encoded in an unintegrated form of memory, according to

Herman.

We see such stories in news reports and movies showing the hell endured by soldiers in wartime who return home and try to live normal lives. Often they are tormented by post traumatic stress syndrome because they have been forced to endure actions beyond what they are capable of coping with. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that large numbers of laid off workers endure the same reaction to trauma as these fighting men and women. But while soldiers generally evoke strong sympathy and understanding from a caring public, the laid off worker who 67

endures painful flashbacks and nightmares is often treated with frustration and even disgust. “Get over it,” they are advised, even by those who love them.

Yet as Suzette Henke reminds us in Literary Life Writing in the 20th Century,

....”most traumatic experiences are not those of soldiers in combat, but those suffered by ordinary people in the course of modern life.” (Henke, p.41)

Untreated trauma creates symptoms that can sabotage future career opportunities and relationships. Such symptoms have been found to become disconnected from their source and take on a life of their own. Trauma is particularly dangerous because it further distils the essence of a person’s identity.

It takes over who we are, and the true self is submerged.

When my own days and nights were lost in a sea of angst caused by the trauma of my job loss, I couldn’t begin to explain to people how I felt inside.

Friends would inquire how I was, and I learned to say “fine,” because I did not think anyone would really understand the symptoms of trauma that were ever lurking just below the surface of my public face.

If you are experiencing such thoughts and feelings, counsellors advise us it is a human reaction and acceptable for a certain period of time. In fact, Herman 68

says failure to complete the normal process of grieving perpetuates the traumatic reaction.

It was only when I encountered the work of Charles M. Anderson and

Marion MacCurdy in their book Writing and Healing that I suddenly realized my reactions were quite typical of other people suddenly severed from the working life they had lived for many years.

“We feel powerless, taken over by alien experiences we could not anticipate and did not choose,” they wrote. “Healing depends upon gaining control over that which has engulfed us. We cannot go back and change the past.”

In Technologies of the Self, French philosopher Michel Foucault suggests there are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking or reflecting at all.

The days following a job lay-off are among such times.

Carl Jung said that we experience trauma in order to know our souls, to give our lives meaning. Before we can attempt to find meaning, however, we must deal with the trauma and dare to examine it closely. Instead of hiding and 69

submerging it as we are encouraged to do in modern society, we must dare to shine a lighted magnifying glass at it and see what happens to ourselves then.

I know firsthand that it is possible to use writing as the means to move through the effects of trauma. It is a tool by which we can move through our losses and wrench open our hearts and expand our minds. I learned that wrestling back responsibility for my life did not mean accepting blame for what happened; it just meant climbing back into the driver’s seat. Perhaps we do become what we think about. If we believe we are being trapped and controlled by our current circumstances, we have already defined our own limitations.

There is only one way to work our way out of the trauma quagmire, and that is to accept that what we think shouldn’t have happened should have happened. That is not to suggest some mind game to play upon ourselves and our emotions, but rather to grasp as Byron Katie puts it in her ground-breaking book,

The Work, that the only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is.

We think we shouldn’t have lost our jobs. But we should have, because we did, and as she advises us succinctly, “no thinking in the world can change it.” 70

(Katie, p.3) Wanting reality to be different that it is hopeless and leads us through an emotional maze that has no beginning or ending.

A large part of dealing with the trauma of job loss, as Katie suggests, is dealing with our own expectations of life. “Wanting reality to be different than it is hopeless,” she says. (Katie, p.2)

Ted Kooser, author of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, puts it another way: “Arguing with reality means arguing with the story of a past. It’s already over and no thinking in the world can change it,” he says of traumatic events. “All suffering begins and ends with you.” (Kooser, p. 298)

The late Dr. M. Scott Peck, author of the best-selling book The Road Less

Travelled, reminded us in many of his works that problems do not just vanish into oblivion as we might hope.

“They must be worked through or else they will remain forever, a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit,” he wrote.

If we do not want to drown forever in the trauma of a job loss, we do not need to suppress our honest emotions or ignore them. But, as Byron Katie 71

suggests, we do need to consider which is more empowering to say: “I wish I hadn’t lost my job,” or “I lost my job, what can I do now?’

Question to consider: What things did you do on your last job that are translated into real skills that you can take with you in the future?

72

Chapter Six

Why writing your way to renewal works

”The essence of health is trusting yourself, your thoughts, your feelings. Self-trust is the ability to know the truth about what you think and feel in your very bones – and then to use this information to guide your life.” - Dr. Christina Northrop

You could fill a bookstore with advice on what to do when you lose your job.

I know because when it happened to me, I purchased and read most of the books available. But though the authors were earnest and eloquent, reading their words did not give me the solace I received when I wrote my own story each night in my journal.

My experiment started simply as an academic exercise. My professor in the course I was taking insisted that all her students write something...anything...each night in their journal. I began to experience, hesitantly at first and then with 73

growing confidence, the positive effects of writing to find my authentic self and to heal from my layoff.

By the end of the course, I knew I had stumbled on something worth talking about to others in my position. We all know there are writing rituals to help bring peace to the minds of those nearing death; there are writing exercises that help bring those who have suffered the loss of loved ones to begin to live again without them.

Now I began to understand there was potential for a writing to heal program that could have tremendous healing and restoration potential on the soul of the traumatized laid off worker. Reconnecting with our authentic self, I believe passionately now, is as much a part of our resurrection as resume writing or filling out benefit forms.

If you have lost your job and find yourself at a crossroads in life, I invite you to explore this idea with me. This is not something I can do for you, but I can guide you based on the experts I have studied and my own personal experience. It is time to embrace a new, holistic approach to rebuilding our work life and thus the rest of our lies through study and reflection. 74

I can and will cite experts and scholars who demonstrate great wisdom and eloquence in making their case, but my firmest conviction that this path is worth following stems from my own experience that it worked for me. It brought me back to life, it made be excited about the future, it made me understand that I was more than my job, and that the talents and skills I had amassed over the years could find new sources for creativity that would be less stressful and more lucrative than my former employment. I believe that it has the potential to work for others as well, and I have seen evidence of that among my own small research group.

Writing my way to health and a life resurrected from shambles has been a truly positive experience that has led me to a more satisfying and fulfilling way of living and working than I had ever previously considered possible.

There is a solid bed of science to support the concept of writing to heal as a viable approach to rebuilding after the trauma of a job layoff. In fact, the development of self has long been linked to language, both oral and written, so the idea that putting trauma into written words is not new in our society.

T. R. Johnson in his essay “Writing and Healing and The Rhetoric Tradition” details some historical supporters of writing therapy as a means of knowing our 75

souls and reawakening ourselves to new, meaningful lives and dissolving our trauma. (Writing and Healing, Anderson & MacCurdy, p. 85)

Some Greek philosophers in ancient times (before the fourth century BC) believed that if we look deeply inside what’s visible, we will find what’s invisible and universal. This applied to the search for our authentic self. The Greeks held a theory of language as a healer and that concept has reappeared at various points throughout our history from a variety of psycho-analysts, writers and scientists.

Freud referred to it as the “talking cure,” and he was a pioneer in the use of language as a remedy for bodily ills. By talking it out, by writing it out, he believed we could rid ourselves of the demons that were destroying our mental health.

Author D. H. Lawrence called it “shedding one’s sickness in books,” suggesting that when we wrote of things that troubled and traumatized us, we would eliminate them from ourselves in the process. The American cultural philosopher and Jesuit priest Walter Ong spoke of the “shaping influence” of the alphabet and detailed the effects of “the technology of writing” as he called it on shaping ourselves and our culture. 76

French philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty asserts that language is meaning, that our thoughts are not really our thoughts until we express them in words. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested full and unrestricted engagement with language facilitates the student’s ability to make original meaning and to incorporate the past with the present (represented in the act of writing).

Susan Zimmerman, in Writing to Heal: A Guided Journey for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval, suggests that writing is one of the most powerful and effective means of easing and ultimately healing sorrow. The act of writing brings a structure and order to the chaos of grief. Human beings take stock of the passage of time through narratives, so even when bad things happen, we fall easily back to this written record of them as a means of healing.

(Zimmerman, p. 18)

Zimmerman also focuses on the survivors’ needs to tell their stories because by writing about traumatic experiences, we discover and re-discover them. When we write we lay out a line of words and move deep into new territory, so writing is the most profound way of codifying our thoughts. Writing is an act of both concentration and reflection. 77

In particular, Zimmerman recommends losing our trauma in the writing of poetry.

“Each of us is a poet, though we’ve been told – in many different ways – that that isn’t so. Poetry is connected to breathing. It fills us. It has a rhythm and a sparseness. Its compactness offers no padding. It is closer to the heart than other writing. Poetry gives us a way to capture an image, a moment, a feeling, a memory.”

Zimmerman reminds us that writing our way through the pain will ultimately enhance the joy of the rest of our lives.

“Pain forces us to be different, because only we can chart our course through it; only we can discover what is that brings us joy in the face of loss; only we can sit down and write our stories; only we can know when the miracle has occurred and we are no longer beaten down by our sorrow, but fortified by it,” she writes. (Zimmerman, p. 132)

Dr. Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine: Honouring the Stories of

Sickness and Health, is convinced that sickness and health alike “declare themselves” in our writing. Writing allows for a displacement of oppositions so a 78

healing discourse is achieved. To Charon, writing is the best tool in our society for exposing “unknown thoughts,” a phrase she borrows from Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst. All of us know things that we don’t know we know, and when we write, freely and without editing or restriction, we let this knowledge escape to help us in our current trauma.

But the most modern proponent of narrative healing, and indeed the one scientist who has done years of studies into the subject area, is Dr. James

Pennebaker.

“When individuals write about emotional experiences, significant physical and mental health improvements follow,” he wrote in Writing About Emotional

Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. And by “writing,” he doesn’t suggest the traumatized person has to aim for War and Peace. Simply writing down your deepest feelings about an emotional upheaval in your life for 15 or 20 minutes a day for four consecutive days will start you on the immediate road to recovery, he suggests.

“When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health,” Pennebaker said in a feature 79

story on The University of Texas at Austin website. “They go to the doctor less.

They have changes in immune function.”

In explaining why the writing exercises work, Pennebaker says our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us. When a traumatic layoff occurs and we cannot begin to understand why it happened to us, our minds have to work overtime to try to process the experience. Thoughts about the event preoccupy us in all our waking moments, and often keep us awake at night. They distract us even when we attempt routine chores in life.

When we translate the experience into language, that is, when we write it down, what we are actually doing is making the experience something we can get a hold of. Almost immediately, once various aspects of the trauma of a layoff are transferred to a written page in a journal, the victim starts to calm down, and sometimes for the first time since it happened is able to think of only one thing at a time.

In Pennebaker’s book Emotion, Disclosure, & Health that came out in June,

2007, he made a strong case to illustrate how he and his students found a link between expressive writing and physical and mental health. 80

“Writing about emotional upheavals in our lives can improve physical and mental health,” he concludes. “Although the scientific research surrounding the value of expressive writing is still in the early phases, there are some approaches to writing that have been found to be helpful. Keep in mind that there are probably a thousand ways to write that may be beneficial to you.”

For Pennebaker and his followers, the acceptable “talking cure” that forms the foundation of modern therapy can reasonably be extended to a “writing cure.” He illustrates through his studies that writing encourages structure and organization of thoughts, and it results in slowing down one’s thought processes.

In fact, writing clears the mind of unresolved trauma and helps people to foster problem solving abilities. (Pennebaker, p.395)

Pennebaker further demonstrated that writing that connects emotions to the details of an event, reflects on its significance and assimilates its personal meaning induces a relaxed physiological and psychological state that has the effect of lowering blood pressure and empowering immune system functioning.

In 1999, a study by Joshua Smyth published in the Journal of the American

Medical Association reported writing could alleviate symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, conditions that worsen under prolonged stress. 81

One idea is that translating experiences into words forces some kind of structuring to the experiences themselves. In the case of layoffs, for example, the victim is often confused and unable to comprehend why we are the one selected over others to lose our jobs. This questioning eats away at our personal sense of self-esteem and value. Somehow, in the process of writing about the trauma, the experience takes a form and format that makes it easier to comprehend and move forward from. While writing about traumatic experiences is sometimes painful, writing leads to short-term and long-term improvement.

Another suggestion as to why the process works comes from American psychologist Jerome Bruner and his work on narrative thought and categorization.

He believes that to perceive something, people must categorize it, and he maintains that people interpret the world in terms of its similarities and differences. Therefore, those who tell or write stories about their personal trauma experience the power of structuring perceptual experiences and organizing memory, and this allows them to reshape the trauma into something manageable.

A host of other modern writers have embraced the concept of narrative healing to deal with trauma in their own lives. Wilma Bucci in The Power of the 82

Narrative: A Multiple Code Account, describes her multiple code theory, a new theoretical model required to account for the effect of language and in particular the effects of storytelling on physical and emotional health. Bucci believes that language is primarily a symbolic format and that “words are entities that refer to other entities and that have the capacity to be combined in rule governed ways.”

(Emotion, Disclosure and Health: An Overview by James W. Pennebaker, Ch. 5.

Bucci, p. 95-96. )

In seeking to understand the concept of narrative healing, and how writing in words can help us to become whole again, Bruce explains the “code” of language and its effect on us.

In her essay she writes: “We can produce only one message at a time, and can listen to and understand only one. Language is the code of communication and reflection, in which private, subjective experience, including emotional experience, may be shared, and through which the knowledge of the culture and the constraints of logic may be brought to bear upon the contents of individual thought. It is also the code that we may call upon, explicitly and intentionally, to direct and regular ourselves, to activate internal representations of imagery and emotion, to stimulate action and to control it.” 83

Writer Anais Nin claims “scriptotherapy” offers people a psychological sanctuary in which to “reconstruct ourselves after shattering experiences.”

Stephen King, recovering from a horrendous accident and working through intense pain, in his book On Writing tells how putting words to paper helped him

“spit in the face of despair.”

In Writing Towards Personal Development, Reinekke Lengelle describes the process of “transformational writing.” She explains that writing separates the known from the knower and thus sets up the conditions for objectivity and the sense of personal disengagement needed if we are to view familiar situations in new ways. When the writing connects the emotions with the images, healing occurs, and so also does good writing. The healing is subtle but effective; in the act of writing we are changed.

Charles M. Anderson and Marion MacCurdy in Writing and Healing suggest the process of writing may help ease trauma, in the case of the laid off worker, because it gives some measure of control over that which we cannot control. It forms order with chaos and locates the traumatic stories outside of ourselves.

Mary Pipher, in her book Writing to Change the World, says in a chaotic and disordered world, writing offers calmness and clarity. 84

“There is great joy in putting one’s brain to work in the ordered universe of language,” she says. (Pipher, p. 222)

Now it is time to examine some of the recommended ways to practice writing to heal.

Question to consider: In the midst of all the chaos around you, take time to write down ten things you have always wanted to do but haven’t had time to complete.

85

Chapter Seven

Strategies to get started

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase just to take the first step.” - Dr. Martin Luther King

If you are ready to take the first steps of putting pen to paper in the process of discovering your authentic self and then returning to the world of work stronger and more creative than when you left it, I would recommend as the first strategy to become aware of a practice called “Proprioceptive Writing.” This is a program outlined in the book Writing the Mind Alive, The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice by Dr. Linda Trichter Metcalf and Dr. Robin

Simon.

Metcalf and Simon were both professors of English and Humanities at Pratt

Institute in New York when they stumbled on the writing practice that would 86

change their lives and so many others. The word “proprioception” comes from the Latin word “Proprius” which means “one’s own.” Our bodies have a proprioceptive system. It is that little known “sixth sense” that gathers and processes information from the inner world of our bodies just as our other five senses, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing, take in information from outside of ourselves and transmit it to our brains.

The goal of Proprioceptive Writing is to unite our hearts and minds. The mind of the laid off worker is a conflicted one, with our intellectual thought often divorced from our emotional thought, and this process will help to bridge that gap. One day we logically have a thought of how our skills would blend well with a particular career or business; the next minute our emotional trauma tells us that we couldn’t possibly make it succeed. Getting past that intellectual-emotional disconnect is the first big step toward healing.

“In Proprioceptive Writing, we express our thoughts in writing so that we can reflect on them. It is a self-guided exercise that calls forth your imagination, your intellect, and your intuition all at once to open your heart and clear your mind. You practice it for 25 minute sessions while listening to Baroque music 87

which roughly reflects the steady rhythm of the human pulse,” Simon and Metcalf tell us. (Simon & Metcalf, p. xxi)

There are two other physical components we must assemble before we can start to make this mental exercise work for us: we need a candle to burn and a quiet space where we will be uninterrupted. I prefer to have a clock as well.

Exercise One

In our quiet space, light the candle and turn on the music. Assemble paper and pen. I liked to have a clock nearby when I started, because I could not imagine writing about “nothing” for 25 minutes.

Then just sit down and start to write...put words on that blank piece of paper, anything and everything that comes into your head. Do not worry a whit about spelling or grammar. Do not edit, do not rewrite....just go, go, go....let the pen fly and fasten on any words that come into your head about anything, and let the ink capture those words and thought patterns on the page.

Write what you hear. Imagine your thoughts as spoken words and write them exactly as they occur to you. After each thought you express, and indeed anytime you are unsure how to proceed, ask the question, “what do I mean by...” 88

As you near the end of each session, take the time to ask yourself and answer in writing these four questions about your writing session:

What thoughts were heard but not written?

How or what do I feel now?

What larger story is the write part of?

What ideas came up for future writes?

Then blow out the candle, staple the papers together and date them, and keep them in a folder for your personal reference throughout the process.

This is a simplistic ritual, with the candle burning and the music playing gently in the background, but for me it had deep and profound results. How few people in corporate positions ever take the time to write only for themselves, only in private? How few of us ever dare put down our thoughts, uncensored? We can even tear up our work when we are done if we want to although I saved my out of academic curiousity for six weeks to see how I was changing. 89

Remember, the words on the page are not important, they are not the goal.

Instead, they are the means to gain insight and power into how we think.

There is a kind of wild and reckless freedom that evolves out of these daily

“writes.” We do not plan what we are going to write about. We do not revise. We do not worry about whether it even makes any sense or not. We don’t care if it’s silly, we don’t care if it’s profound. We don’t care if it offends: nobody is going to read it. We just sit down and let our pen guide us to whatever thoughts pop into our head. And out of all this recklessness, a kind of magic results, as we dare to put onto a page our deepest thoughts that we would never dare talk about or even share with another person.

For me, as a lifelong journalist, the concept of writing for myself and not for readers, was foreign indeed. The idea of writing wildly and without thought for grammar or spelling or form was immensely freeing, and the freedom of writing impetuously and spontaneously without research or outline was actually quite difficult at first. Anyone who is used to measuring their words in their former job will at first feel like they are doing a mental bungee jump.

But within a short time, the freedom of the experience becomes exhilarating. It really is okay to describe in detail what we would like to say to the 90

person who made the decision to lay us off....nobody can hear but our pen on the paper. It’s okay to use descriptive and colorful colloquialisms if the mood strikes us. It’s okay to admit that we are not fine, thank you very much, that we are in fact stark screaming mad and if one more person promises we’ll be okay, that it’s all really a blessing, we just might commit justifiable homicide.

Pull our darkest thoughts out into the candlelight and see them dance in the flickering shadows on the page. We might even feel our blood pressure rising, our guts in a knot. It’s okay...just keep writing. Write like our life depends on it, because in a way, it does.

And then, somehow, miraculously in this nightly process, we find ourselves becoming calm, becoming more attentive to the voices inside of us, and we start to listen, really listen, to what’s on our mind. We start to get to know ourselves, away from the constraints of the world as we knew it.

Looking back over my own writes, I notice now that while my first ones are full of anger and vinegar, within a very short time my words started to move away from the “woe is me” story to the dreams of what might be possible next. I started to free myself to explore my new world with no boundaries, no fear of failure. I discovered there is a kind of freedom that follows a hard fall...we know that it 91

hurts, but we also learn that we can live through it, so we are less timid to climb another hill. Through these writing exercises, by engaging my thoughts, I was able to somehow separate myself from them and remove darkness and servitude and replace them with lightness and confidence.

“As with meditation, you try not to control your mind or force it into a direction: rather, you leave yourself open to discovery and surprise,” write Simon and Metcalf. (Simon & Metcalf, p. xxiv)

My growing sense of freedom and daring to tackle life in a new way was a typical reaction to what Simon and Metcalf predicted.

“Because it works so well as a tool of self-discovering, Proprioceptive

Writing sometimes brings about changes in people’s lives that they do not expect or feel prepared for; they may find themselves taking risks they had not had the courage or the capacity to take up previously,” they note.

In wanting to understand why Proprioceptive Writing exercises work so dramatically, I dug deeper into the works of Metcalf and Simon. They point out that people cannot process and cope at the same time. By writing our thoughts down, we free ourselves of the process of selective remembering, ordering and 92

re-ordering. We don’t just move through traumatic experiences; we move beyond them.

“The magic that happens through a Proprioceptive Writing practice happens because of the feelings we uncover throughout our writing while we are completely focused on and attentive to our thoughts,” they explain.

Overall, these daily writes help us to gain freedom from the attachment we have to our thoughts. If we are dwelling on our job layoff, replaying what we could have said, should have done, might have avoided, or even unable to think beyond the paralysis of financial insecurity, we need to break loose from that thought pattern to heal. In the writing exercises, we work towards that goal by engaging the thoughts that come to the forefront. We examine them, we consider them, and we do not shove them to the back of our brains and try to ignore them.

Ultimately, by reconsidering them as we write about them from many different perspectives, we start to see them in a different light and move past them.

I also noticed that the more I wrote about a story, the less intense my emotions about it became. Writing about the same thing repeatedly from slightly different angles is a healthy part of the process. We create new dimensions. We 93

gain distance and clarity. Writing about an experience, any experience, inevitably changes it.

It was through Proprioceptive Writing that I found the courage to continue my studies at university, and to consider starting a communications company as a viable work alternative. I never thought I had the strength to strike out in the work force without a regular salary, to ride the waves of organizing and completing many contracts simultaneously or staying calm if I had a period of none at all. But suddenly, I found I not only had the courage to work this way, but I really wanted to. I doubted I could ever work the old way again.

I encourage you, if you are willing to delve deeply into this method of writing to heal, to make the investment of Metcalf and Simon’s book, for it is rich with material and an inspiration in itself.

Proprioceptive writing is a therapy and a meditation, and it will change our lives. The more vivid and detailed way in which we articulate our frustration and anger at being laid off the better will be our chances of healing and recovering.

Dare to write a hateful letter if you feel a person wronged you, (destroy it later), dare to chastise a former manager you feel betrayed you (best destroy this too), and dare to scream and weep and wail as much as you want at the hypocrisy and 94

greed around you, but end each session with answers to the four key questions. It will work.

Proprioceptive Writing is now starting to be used by more traditional therapeutic practitioners as more clinical studies are supporting its effectiveness, even though it is not yet mainstream. However, many hospitals across North

America now have writers in residence to help patients in palliative care units write their last stories, thus easing their emotional burdens as they face death.

Many classrooms are incorporating forms of writing to heal as the means to reach special needs children. The work of Dr. Rita Charon and Dr. James Pennebaker and their colleagues are swaying more and more scholarly minds to weigh in favour of the healing power of words.

Try it and see if it takes you over the initial trauma of your layoff. Then move on to explore other aspects of a writing to heal program as you engage on a personal journey of reinvention.

Exercise to consider: Acquire a candle, some paper, a CD of classical music, preferably Bach, and write tonight for half an hour about anything you want. Do this for the next three weeks. 95

Chapter 8

Do you need your money to be safe?

“When you argue with reality, you lose – but only 100% of the time.” – Byron Katie

An ever-present nagging worry to the laid off person is how we will pay our bills. It digs into our psyche within seconds of receiving our layoff notice, and it never really leaves. When least expected, it surfaces to disrupt the days and nights. Sometimes it’s when we watch a family member’s face light up in anticipation of a new commodity, sometimes it’s when we receive notice our rent or heating fuel is going up, and sometimes it’s when we try to start our cars and realize the battery is dead. How are we going to manage?

It is the concern about money that pushes us back into the labour force before we have coped with the trauma of leaving it, determined to “get back on the horse,” and ride our way to financial security, even if to a lesser degree than what we had before. 96

We have all done that, and who can argue with the practicality of it? But even though we may have grabbed the first replacement job offered, we must take the time to work through our reactions to our layoff, and in particular, our concerns about money.

I came face to face with this wall as I continued to engage in the practice of writing to heal and came upon the works of Byron Katie. In one of my writes about exercises she suggested, the question posed was this:

“Where would you be without the thought ‘I need my money to be safe?’

It was an unimaginable question to a practical person like me. I found myself almost annoyed by it, and then deeply troubled, and sadly, almost without an answer. How could I, a newly laid-off person, even consider who I could be without the need for money to pay my basic essentials? I have always lived modestly, but nonetheless, the thought of considering my identity without any money at all was unsettling.

It also drew me further into the challenging writings of Byron Katie, and that has been a blessing for which I am grateful for every day since. 97

Byron Kathleen Reid (best known as Byron Katie) became severely depressed in her early thirties. A businesswoman and mother living in a small town in southern California, by her own admission she spiralled downward for nearly a decade into paranoia, rage, self-loathing and constant thoughts of suicide. For the last two years of her illness, she was unable to leave her bedroom.

However, in 1986 when she was placed in a halfway house for women with eating disorders, she had a "eureka" or what she describes as a moment of

“waking up to reality.”

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being.

Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment.”

In her first book, co-written with her husband Stephen Mitchell and called

Loving What Is, she sketched out her philosophy. She followed up with The Work and A Thousand Names for Joy and has since inspired legions of followers. 98

Katie’s premise is simple. The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. And yet, particularly to those engulfed in the trauma of layoff, we constantly suffer because we truly believe it shouldn’t have happened to us.

In The Work, Katie argues that what we think shouldn’t have happened should have happened.

“It should have happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn’t mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle.” (Katie, p.3)

In other words no one wants to be laid off, no one wants to know that the company in which we laboured had no appreciation for our efforts, but how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them?

Katie says she is a lover of what is, not because she is a spiritual person, but because it hurts when she argues with reality. 99

“We can know that reality is good just as it is, because when we argue with it, we experience tension and frustration. We don’t feel natural or balanced.

When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind and fearless.”

She believes in the age-old adage that there are only three kinds of business in this world: mine, yours and God’s. Most of our stress comes from mentally trying to live outside of our own business.

Try this simple exercise. When we are feeling stressed, ask ourselves whose business we are in. If we are thinking that our former company shouldn’t have laid us off, realize that that decision was actually their business not ours. If we are thinking bad things like the layoff shouldn’t have happened to us because we are a good person, realize that our destiny is actually God’s business, not our own. Is our load starting to lighten?

“If you understand the three kinds of business enough to stay in your own business, it could free your life in a way that you can’t even imagine,” Katie writes in The Work. “And if you practice it for a while, you may come to see that you don’t have any business either, and that your life runs perfectly well on its own.”

(Katie, p.4) 100

Applied to the traumatized laid-off worker, Katie’s theory is intriguing. After all, she is not counselling us to let go of all our conflicting and often negative thoughts; she seems to understand that that is unrealistic. She is not suggesting that we control our thoughts, that we “buck up” and “just deal with it,” as well- meaning friends suggest. Instead, she admits that nobody can really control their thinking, that thoughts pop unbidden into our heads whether we invite them or not.

“I don’t let go of my thoughts,” she admits. “I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.”

Exercise Two

To apply Byron Katie’s methods as a writing to heal process, we need only pen and paper and a little quiet time. We start by writing down how we feel about any aspect of the stress caused by losing our jobs. Write about the individuals involved, and do something that our culture largely frowns upon.

Judge them. That’s right…are they good or bad people? How will their actions be 101

remembered in the future? Write freely, write hard….dare to judge and hang the consequences!

Then let’s conclude our write with these four questions:

Is it true?

Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

How do we react, what happens, when we believe that thought?

Who would we be without that thought?

This exercise works best when we write about people involved in our lay-off process that we have not yet forgiven. Take the owner of the company and judge his contribution as harshly as we wish. Take the doers of his or her deeds and dare to write precisely how we would assess their value as human beings. Point that finger of blame at what has happened to us at any target we want. Let loose and be uncensored. Tell those people what they should be doing, how they should be living, how they should be treating their workers, and what they need to do to be honest-to-goodness human beings again. 102

I and my writing colleagues shared no sentiment when we tackled this exercise. Who knew how many adjectives there were to describe myopic, entitled, uninspiring and mean-spirited people? I swear there were moments when my blood pressure went up just in the pursuit of the perfect words to describe certain people as I remembered them. None of us were sure how this could be helpful to us in the long run, but in the red-hot screaming moment we were doing it, it certainly was cathartic.

Sometimes we would confront situations instead of people. We would challenge what had happened to us by starting our story with “I shouldn’t have lost my job.” They we would judge the stupidity or short-sightedness of those who laid us off, and list all the reasons why we shouldn’t have been the ones let go. In another situation, we might judge those around us. We might say, “I wish Joe was more sympathetic. He should be more sympathetic because…’ and then we would rail and rant at will.

Then, when we had spent our adjectives and our fingers tightened around our pens were white and paining with the exertion, we had to ask ourselves the four key questions and answer them honestly before we could put our papers away. We read our stories again, our diatribes about the people who had wronged 103

us, and asked these four questions: “Is it true? Can we absolutely know that it’s true? How do we react, what happens, when we believe that thought? Who would we be without that thought?

That last question was always the killer. We had to admit, over and over, that without such thoughts, we would be lighter, freer, more open to what comes next and more accepting of what had happened.

We saw many other subtle benefits to our mental health as well. The first realization is that when we were pointing your finger at somebody else, it is away from us. So many people are so self-absorbed after a layoff that this is a marvellous way to turn the focus away from ourselves and onto somebody else.

After all, it is human nature that we all know better to tell other people how to live than to advise ourselves.

The second benefit of this exercise is that it allows us to see who we think other people really are. And then, just as Katie predicted, we began to understand that everything outside of ourselves is a reflection of our own thinking. We are the lens through which the story is seen, we are the projector through which it is shown. And thus, we have the power to change the story. 104

“Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can happy,” Katie writes in The Work, another book we should invest in as we go through this process. “This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector – mind – rather than the projected. …This is the end of suffering and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.”

It was a tremendous revelation to understand for the first time that we could control our own suffering. If we accept that the job we had is gone, and there is nothing more to be done about it but move on to the next one, we have made one gigantic leap over the chasm of confusion, shame, and blame, and up the steps towards full resurrection.

Through doing “The Work,” I began to remind myself that I am not the quality control officer of the world. I began to honestly answer her question:

“Which is more empowering? – I wish I hadn’t lost my job, or I lost my job, what I can do now?”

When I applied her four questions to my layoff, it was again helpful. The first question is whether or not the question of uncertainty that troubles me is based on truth. Is the fact true, she asks? Yes it is, I answer. I have indeed lost my 105

job. Next question: Can I absolutely know that it’s true? Yes I can. I have the documentation to prove it. How do I react when I think that thought, she asks?

With anger and with hurt, I answer, and I am not sure which sentiment is dominant, since both wrestle for attention.

Lastly, Katie asks the pivotal question: “Who would you be without that thought?” I answer: I would be someone with a lighter heart. I would be free of this darkness, this sadness, this burden. I let the thought go.

Later that night, I express myself with poetry:

Weight of the world

Tying up my words

In heavy dark twine,

I sling them wearily over my shoulders.

I have been wronged.

Twenty pounds of care.

I have been disrespected.

Thirty pounds of despair. 106

I have been betrayed.

Forty pounds of angst.

What happens if the string

Unravels and thoughts tumble away?

I am suddenly awed

By the lightness of my step.

Katie taught me that the only times I suffer are when I believe a thought that is in argument with reality. I took other assumptions and applied them to her four-part test, and again felt bolstered to lay down another burden.

I willed myself to let go of one assumption a week, and to do that for the duration of the course I was taking. At first it was easy, but towards the end I was afraid to set free assumptions that kept me comfortably weighted down. But within a few more weeks of study, I came to the inevitable conclusion that the layoff was the best thing that had ever happened to me. How few of us get to rebuild our lies to our liking? I had been given that incredible opportunity. I was 107

free to consider values as something distinct from price, investment as something distinct from money, and creativity was no longer attached to the stone of the corporate bottom line thinking.

I started to listen, really listen, to conversations and I heard things in new ways. I read new books and magazines, and discarded old ones. I dared to let my imagination go in directions it had never travelled. I began to understand that some stories needed to be told, even if they weren’t saleable to certain publications.

Some of us find it hard to let go of our stories. It is unimaginable that we could function without being fuelled by our dislike for those who wronged us. We have no reference for how to act.

But we can function without those stories, and more clearly and fearlessly.

We can be full, self-fulfilled people living happy lives. We can replace those stories with appreciation and gratitude for where we are in life now, and understand that this is where we are meant to be, and for this moment, we have everything we need. 108

Exercise to consider: Write your response to the question: Where would I be without my money to keep me safe?

109

Silent tears and words not spoken

“Survival goes not necessarily to the most intelligent or the strongest of the species, but to the one that is most adaptable to change.” -Charles Darwin

Our stories, written or spoken, are what we use in our society to determine where we came from and where we are going. They are the keys to understanding the meaning of our own lives.

Dr. Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine, Honoring the Stories of

Sickness and Health, says that the engine of narrative is its urge to make sense of why things happen, “its longing to find or imagine connections among things, either through motive or cause.” (Charon, p.48) 110

It is little wonder that laid off workers, whose life stories seem to have been suddenly wrestled out of their control, find solace in putting words to paper in the search for new, workable, understandable stories. Trauma intensifies our normal drives to recognize our self. It is when we have been traumatized, as in a sudden job loss, that we have to face the same challenges as a person who suddenly discovers they are critically ill. We know that our life has changed forever and there is no turning back. It is up to us at this point to decide how valuable life is, which relationships are most meaningful, and what terrors or comforts await us.

Charon suggests that illness distills the essence of the person’s identity, and working further from her assumption, it is my contention that sudden job loss does the same thing. A dramatic loss of position in life prompts us to closely examine the pattern of our lives and how we live it. Like the ill person, we suddenly see all distinctions of time erased: we only know time as one of two phases, before we lost our jobs and after. If we want to change that experience, writing is our only hope.

“Writing is full of potential for rich reward, where your life and your sense of self and abundance really can be changed,” writes author Anne Lamont in Bird 111

by Bird. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation…they feed the soul…we are given a chance at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”

Goethe put it another way: “The beginning and the end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me.”

To use writing as a therapy to find our authentic selves and heal after trauma, we must be open to all forms of writing exercises. We have explored the art of Proprioceptive Writing and the soul-searching questions from Byron Katie’s body of work. Three other kinds of writing have been directly linked to the healing process, and they are poetry, journaling and the personal essay. This chapter deals with poetry.

Reinekke Lengelle, a Canadian poet and scholar, has matched the healing powers of poetry to life’s crisis in a number of her works. In Blossom & Balsam,

Poems That Reveal and Heal, she suggests that poetry “reconnects us with what we might call perennial wisdom and we often find that what we come up with in our writing is, as yet, wiser than we are.” (Lengelle, p.5) She suggests that healing 112

poetry is possible when we are willing to express the things that affect or move us the most.

“Courage is required to venture into this territory: first, the courage to feel and admit to ourselves what we’re thinking and feeling, and second, the courage to express, and if we dare, to share what we’ve written with others.” (Lengelle, p.7)

As other proponents of writing to heal point out, Lengelle says healing is not possible if the traumatized person is full of self-condemnation and a fearful refusal to go forward.

“We can too easily relegate our deepest yearnings to the forbidden rooms of our psyches and when we do so, we kill each time, one seed of aliveness.

Therefore, poets must trust not only the process of language and creativity, but extend this trust into their very lives. “ (Lengelle, p.18)

She points out that as humans, we rarely grow by staying in the zone of safety and familiarity. Instead, we grow by risking.

“This is true for the writing craft and for crafting our lives.” 113

When we write poetry, we gain insight through our writing. We have no choice but to look for the words that describe the world as we see it and experience it, and in that process as we put the words on the page, we come to accept it.

Exercise Three

Look back over your last month on the job and your first month of living as a laid off worker. Fix your memory on one single emotional aspect of that time, and create one poem. Even if you have never written a poem and scarcely have even read one, try to do this exercise.

(I found this a difficult segment of my writing to heal, but once I started to fix an image in my mind the words came easily. This is my poem of an image:)

The Mentor

She cries for me, her make-up in rivers down her cheeks,

As I am moved out in the impersonal grip of the executioner.

When she arrived, on shaky steps of self-doubt 114

I saw her worth and welcomed her under my wing.

She read my survival manual

And thought she could last in any storm.

Now the survivor is vanquished

And her world needs restructuring

Since the game has changed forever.

I cry now as I remember her tears;

She cries now too,

Remembering my lack of them.

American poet Ted Kooser, author of The Poetry Home Repair Manuel, says healing poetry is possible when people are willing to express the things that affect or move them most.

The word poetry itself has a link to healing by its point of origin. Coming from the Greek work meaning to compose, it can also be defined as to create, to 115

shape, and even to assemble, to pull things together. Similarly, the word “healing” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “hoelan,” which also means to make whole.

In an essay called “The Web of Words, Collaborative Writing and Mental

Health,” Graham Hartill explained how he came to find it useful to use poetry in his writing workshops designed to encourage wellness. But his was not any traditional sense of rhyming or even classical poetry.

“By ‘poetry’, then, I don’t just mean a genre or specific technique of writing, but something in the essence of all expressive language, whether written down in blocks of prose, scattered syllables across a page, or even colourful talk; it is the power we feel in language by means of its shape, its metaphors, its imagery and its music,” he explained.

Hartill expressed his belief that change is not only possible but inevitable in our lives, and poetics can help us acknowledge that truth and engage with it in a helpful way.

“We talk about being ‘moved’ by a poem, but this movement must lie also at the heart of all philosophy of healing,” he suggests. Later in his essay, he 116

concludes: “When we make a poem, we make something of ourselves, and the world, anew.”

That is precisely what the laid off worker must find the tools to achieve.

Poetry is one of the writing tools on the road to finding a new life. It is easy to dismiss poetry as something too complicated or even too simple to tackle when the stresses of dealing with an entire changed work world are upon our shoulders. But I encourage you to try it, because it does work.

Into the evenings after a day of combing want ads and trying to figure out my new life, I would sometimes try to write a poem, and in the process, again for no identifiable reason, I would find my burden lifted and a peaceful sleep possible.

And again, just as in writing prose, I found words like “despair,” and “loss” became less necessary to use, and words like “freedom” and “chance” and even

“joy” crept into my poetry writing vocabulary.

I have thought a lot about why the process seems to work, and my theory is that it is instrumental in unlocking our neglected creativity. When we work in a corporate environment, the word “creativity” is tossed around as an attribute worth cultivating, but in actual fact, the higher up the management structure we climb, the less creativity is encouraged and the more conformity is demanded. By 117

the time the worker is laid off, it is sometimes possible that all the idea bubbles that circulated around their heads when they were younger have burst, and every new dream is anchored with a cost per unit analysis or the black ink of a contracted point of sale.

Daring to do something that would have been considered in our corporate life, like the writing of poetry, almost seems sinful or hopelessly indulgent when we first attempt it. But then we find the words to emotions deep inside of us tumbling out onto the page, and we are amazed at the torrent of words we had long forgotten. We learn to listen to ourselves in a way that was not possible, and sometimes the message that comes out surprises us. Always it will be a clue to the new direction our lives will take.

The great English poet William Wordsworth referred to poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity” and that is another clue to its effectiveness as a therapeutic writing tool. In front of the human resources officers who dismiss us, in front of the family who supports us, in front of the friends who bolster us, we must keep check on our deepest emotions following a layoff, emotions like rage, like wailing, like bitterness. They are so unattractive and so socially unacceptable, 118

that we carefully place them in little compartments inside our souls, hoping that by depriving them of oxygen and expression, they will somehow die or evaporate.

Of course they don’t. Instead, they fester and, unexamined and unextinguished, they will rise up unexpectedly to thwart all our efforts at life’s renewal.

Writing poetry allows us to open these boxes, one at a time, examine them, find the words to let them escape bit by bit, and eventually, to evaporate or change into a powerful force for creativity that will fuel the next phase of our lives. By writing poems and having the tools of imagery and metaphor at our whim, we can sometimes tell our stories from different perspectives, or find the words to express those hidden stories and things we could never say. In the process, we learn that how we see our story one day can change the next.

“As humans, we rarely grow by staying in the zone of safety and familiarity,” Lengelle reminds us. “We grow by risking. This is true for the writing craft and for crafting our lives.” (Lengelle, p. 15)

Ken Plummer, a leading symbolic interactionist, and author of Telling Sexual

Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, expresses how all of these fractured presentations can lead us to discover our authentic self. 119

“I have slowly come to believe that no story is true for all time and space: we invent our stories with a passion, they are momentarily true, we cling to them, they may become our lives, and then we move on,” he writes.

That is what happens when we write to heal after a layoff. The story that we start with is full of the shock, the sadness, the anger and the fear at how our lives are going to change and how it could even have happened to us. Then we move into a new phase, a phase of analysing what happened. Finally, in the same way that we move through any other trauma in our life, we emerge whole again, the memory never erased but somehow weakened, and the prospects of a new life ahead of us.

When we write, privately and for healing purposes, we are not expressing our layoff experience objectively as if we were a journalist striving for some acceptable truth. We are instead telling our story as we experienced it, in prose or in poetry.

Plummer explains how this leads us to the truth:

“When talking about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become confused, and get things wrong. Yet they are revealing 120

truths. These truths don’t reveal the past ‘as it actually was,’ aspiring to a standard of objectivity. They give us instead the truth of our experiences. Unlike the truth of the scientific ideal, the truths of personal narratives are neither open to proof nor self-evident. We come to understand them only through interpretation, paying careful attention to the contexts that shape their creation and to the world views that inform them.”

Can we not think our stories, we may ask? Can we not just ponder every aspect of our layoff and examine it from all different perspectives, and still emerge whole again? Why must we put the words to paper in either prose or poetry?

Trevor Pateman, author of “The Empty Word and the Full Word: The

Emergence of Truth in Writing,” addresses this in his essay.

“Finding a voice is something which can only be achieved and confirmed in enactment – you don’t find your voice by silently soliloquising,” he writes. “You find your voice by doing something with your voice.”

In other words, we must think, we must listen, but then we must put pen to paper, feel the sureness of the touch, animate the words in our minds, and make 121

them something we can read back to ourselves. This allows them to escape and gives us still a new perspective on our deepest thoughts. The process of writing becomes our guide, our way to experience what has happened to us and envision how our tomorrows can play out. It allows us to feel again when trauma has numbed us.

Most of all, it allows us to express ourselves, bringing about a wholeness and healthiness of spirit.

For example, when we see a small child building a sand castle on a beach, we look, but we often find ourselves smiling. We remember our own experiences, or those of our own children, and the connection with a past memory and a present action creates a whole and pleasant experience. When we see a beautiful sunset, we long to share its beauty, and will often call out to a friend or loved one to come and view it with us, so profound is the vision that we must take it outside of ourselves to experience it.

I had the same sense of peace and excitement when I wrote my story a hundred different ways after my layoff; finally I could be at peace and move on to experience all the new things life had to offer. 122

Exercise to consider: Write a poem about the experience of being laid off. 123

Chapter Ten

And this is my story...at least for today

“Life is neither memory nor record. It is something of our own making that slips through and disappears. A remorseless wind merely lifts and carries us where we might have gone otherwise, given the chance.” - Robert Hilles in “A Career in

Farming”

When our careers are cut short with layoff notices and the barest minimum of severance packages, we feel as if we have been dumped into the trashcan. But by learning to experiment with different forms of writing about our dilemma, we can find new ways to measure where we have been and new dreams for determining where we want to go in the future. 124

We have looked at some basic “get back on your feet” writing therapies such as Byron Katie’s The Work and Simon and Metcalf’s Proprioceptive Writing and even dabbled in the healing power of poetry. But in the lull between where we’ve been and where we are going a new perception on life can also be gleaned by taking the time to write creative non-fiction inspired by our situations.

Creative non-fiction is a broad term that encompasses many different kinds of personal writing, including personal journals to meditations, memoires, autobiographies, and personal essays. While Carol Bly in the introduction to

Beyond the Writer’s Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction points out that “our current junk culture gives poor support to people who want to use writing to find meaning,” a growing band of researchers are suggesting solace and salvation comes via the written word.

Even before the modern studies, a mountain of anecdotal evidence from distinguished journal writers of the past alluded to the effectiveness of regular writing about our lives to stay healthy and focused. Among those who religiously subscribed to journal writing at least twice a week were Marco Polo, Cleopatra,

Winston Churchill, May Sarton, Anais Nin, Andy Warhol, Anne Frank, Virginia

Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. 125

Stephanie Dowrick, author of Creative Journal Writing: The art and heart of reflection, says journal writing is the most instinctive type of writing we have as a society.

“That’s why it can be such a powerful support for our creativity generally, if we allow that,” she says. (Dowrick, p.7) “Writing a journal...can be really life changing. It can be the companion you need whatever life is bringing you. It lets you ‘read’ your own life even while you are writing it...... Writing something in your journal that is fresh, driven, authentic, observant, and deeply felt is also highly energizing and, at the same time, surprisingly calming.” (Dowrick, p.9)

The first study on the benefits of expressive writing to be widely circulated was by Pennebaker and Beall in 1986. Their conclusion was that “writing about earlier traumatic experience was associated with both short term increases in physiological arousal and long-term decreases in health problems. (Pennebaker, p.280)

Repeated studies by Pennebaker in 1994, 1997, and Symth and Pennebaker in 1999 continued to find the same conclusions. Participants who wrote about trauma in their lives experienced fewer stress-related visits to the doctor, improved immune-system functioning, improved moods, and feelings of great 126

psychological well-being. In terms of those who wrote after sustaining dramatic layoffs, those who wrote experienced quicker re-employment after job loss and improved working memory.

A study by S.P. Spera, E.D. Buhrfeind and J.W. Pennebaker in 1994 called

“Expressive writing and coping with job loss,” published in the Academy of

Management Journal (1994, Vol. 37, p. 722-733) detailed an experiment with 63 recently unemployed professionals. Those who were assigned to write about the thoughts and emotions surrounding their job loss were reemployed more quickly than those who wrote about non-traumatic topics or who did not write at all.

“Expressive writing appeared to influence individuals’ attitudes about their old jobs and about finding new employment rather than their motivation to seek employment,” the researchers concluded.

The loss of one’s job is frequently cited as one of the top 10 traumatic life experiences, along with divorce or the death of a spouse. As such, it can have tremendous negative effects on physical and psychological health, particularly in middle aged workers and during a lengthy unemployment period.

“But can’t we just talk it through?” people ask. 127

To a certain extent, describing the experience of the layoff to sympathetic family and friends is helpful, of course. And there is a natural desire to talk with others about what has happened, and this generates empathy and support which is a tremendous help to the troubled laid off worker, and helps to reaffirm a sense of worth and being loved and needed.

“However, events that are humiliating or embarrassing may not be discussed,” the study noted, and sometimes the release of these deepest, most hurtful thoughts are only possible in the privacy of one’s journal.

It is worth noting too that while talking about trauma may be an emotional catharsis, writing about trauma has another, deeper result.

“It is likely that the development of a coherent narrative helps to reorganize and structure traumatic memories, resulting in more adaptive internal schemas,” the researchers found.

Does all writing have the same uplifting value? All writing helped, the studies showed, but participants whose health improved most used more positive emotion words and a moderate number of negative-emotion words. 128

They also used an increased number of “cognitive mechanism” words such as “understand, realize,” and casual words like “because, reason,” Pennebaker discovered.

Elizabeth Scott, a specialist in stress management, in her article “The

Benefits of Journaling for Stress Management,” says that journaling allows people to clarify their thoughts and feelings, thereby gaining valuable self knowledge.

“Journaling about traumatic events helps one process them by fully exploring and releasing the emotions involved, and by engaging both hemispheres of the brain in the process, allowing the experience to become fully integrated in one’s mind,” she suggests.

She says writing in a journal 10 to 15 minutes a day has been found to decrease the symptoms of asthma, arthritis, and other health conditions, improve cognitive functioning, strengthen the immune system, and counteracting many of the negative effects of stress.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says “when you write, you lay out a line of words...Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.” 129

Writing a journal, like the other kinds of personal writing this book suggests, requires us to put down your feelings, our yearnings, our anger, our hurt, our hopes and our dreams and in the process of laying them down as words on a page, it shifts the way we see them and think about them.

“You engage with your thoughts and feelings from the inside out,” is the way Dowrick puts it. “The process is very different from keeping those same thoughts in your mind and turning them over and over by worrying, ruminating, or daydreaming.” (Dowrick, p.15)

She notices in her journal writing that we become curious about a complex situation, rather than overwhelmed by it.

After my own layoff I branched out from the original exercises that gave me immediate benefits into the more reflective world of journal writing. I notice looking back now at the journals I kept in the early months how my phrasing evolved from anguish to hope and from hope to planning and a renewed sense of purpose.

At one point, I decided to write each night about what I thought was the most important thing that happened to me that day. To my surprise, it turned out 130

to be quite a different highlight than the one I might reel off if I were just talking about it. For example, because of a modest profile in the community where I live, when I lost my job it was reported on the radio news. A man I knew only as a passing acquaintance cheered and comforted me tremendously by calling me when he heard the report, telling me he understood how it felt to hear of one’s own lay off on the news, since he too had lost a fairly public job once at a point of his career. When I talked over the day’s highlights that evening with my husband, I told him of the call and how it comforted me.

But my perspective broadened when I sat that night to write about it in my journal. I began to reflect on what is “the news,” and what is not, and how it shapes and teases all sorts of reactions out of our society. What makes one person’s tragedy headlines and another’s just a silent, private pain? How many people, hearing of another’s trauma, bother to call and comfort the afflicted? How many are apathetic? How many enjoy another’s pain? As a long-time journalist, I had always thought in terms of “the news report,” and less about the impact of those reported upon. I knew that something inside of me had just changed forever, and I could not see my old world with the same eyes again. 131

Journal writing has that way of drawing our right-brain skills forward and linking them to our left-brain skills. As Dowrick explains:

“One minute you are writing something about your day that is ‘useful’ to remember (left brain), then suddenly you are off, making an association that takes you in an unexpected direction (right brain).” (Dowrick, p.27)

What I liked best about journal writing is the distance it afforded between me and my thoughts. In the throes of trauma after a job layoff, our minds are full of so many thoughts and often we forget that possibly for the first time in our adult lives, we now have genuine, real choices to make about our futures. Writing about our problems, but also our options for solving them, reinforces these choices and gradually, we are filled with a sense of balance, a feeling of stability. It is the beginning of real self-knowledge.

It is simply not possible to write regularly in a journal and not become better acquainted with yourself. The more you reflect, the more you blend what you think you know as facts into what you think you believe as culture, the more you are able to emerge with something newer and greater than the sum of both.

You come out of the exercise stronger, freer, more willing to venture into areas 132

that previously seemed off limits. In seeking to chronicle your own life, your vision broadens to encompass all of life.

The words we lay out on the page each night to describe situations and others and our reactions to things ultimately weave their way through the maze of troubled emotions that follow a job layoff and link us to our deepest sense of self. Only then can we really start again from ground zero and build our way back with confidence to the outer world which we now view with more creativity and spontaneity. We have plumbed to the depths and unplugged our creative valves; now all that remains is to focus them on finding a new world of work where we can apply our best talents and skills.

“I used to think that my journals should be full of ideas and plans of things I could do,” said a colleague of mine who was laid off around the same time as myself and joined my writing group. “Then I realized those things were just for jotting down in an idea book, a sort of options collection. Because night after night as I wrote in my journal, I learned that it was more about process than goals. The ideas came after I reflected on incidents, after I worked through my reactions to the trauma of the weeks after job loss.”

Exercise Four 133

Under ideal conditions, journal writing should be done in a quiet place where you can assure the confidentiality of your writing and journal. Try to write at least three times a week, for at least twenty minutes at a time. Write freely, without editing or censoring yourself. Keep putting words down on the page even if you don’t know what’s coming next. If your tears blur the ink, write through them...some words will follow and you will be surprised what they might tell you.

If you stare at the blank page some night, don’t give up.

Once, in desperation, I looked at the open space on the journal so long I started like this:

“I can think of nothing to write tonight and these words are only an exercise of pen and ink across a blank page because I have committed myself to this project. I hate journaling. What can I say to fill this page when my whole life has become a blank page? How can I fill the blanks between the lines of the world I once knew? Where will the story start and end? What page number am I on? Is there any plot?....” 134

I continued in this vein for some time until the negative tone of my writing, unbidden by my moving pen, suddenly turned positive and I began to see the white space and the lines of the page as synonymous with the new opportunities my life presented itself. The entry ended like this:

“When have I ever not had to colour between the lines? Write to the allotted space? When did I not have to put down the lead of the story first and go from there? What if, just once, I start at the middle and go both backwards and forwards and see what happens? Middle is under-rated....we say it as if it were a bad thing: “middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income, middle-man, middling...

I’m likely at the middle of my life and what’s wrong with that? I can see years of learning skills, raising a family, finding love, making friends behind me....I can see endless possibilities of making sense of what I know, nurturing those in my life, growing and creating from this base to ascend to places I couldn’t imagine from the perspective of just beginning or just ending. Middle is as good a place to move on from as anywhere else!”

I closed my journal for the night and slept soundly, and the next day started a new project that brought me my first post lay-off success! 135

“We do not write in order to be understood,” said British poet Cecil Day-

Lewis. “We write in order to understand.”

All personal writing gives us an opportunity to extract meaning from the events of our lives, and that is what we all ultimately seek. In the darkest days after a layoff, when we struggle so hard to make sense of it all, we need to rediscover what really matters to us and how rich our lives are. We need to embrace the ordinary and hug it so tightly that all the things we worry about are squeezed out of the picture.

Whether or not we move further from the journal writing experience into the other realms of personal writing like essays, memoirs and even autobiographies depends to a great extent on our time and our inclination and even the personal joy we gain from writing. Journal writing will give us the menu ingredients to graduate to personal essays in which we interpret the world around us.

As in all creative nonfiction, the facts of our lives are only part of the story.

Our response to those facts and what we make of them complete the narrative. It is not surprising in the turmoil of the times that we live in that creative nonfiction is rapidly growing in popularity as a favourite genre. As a culture, we have always 136

sought meaning for who we are and why we are on this planet. In an era where the bottom line is a corporate deity and shareholders worship only numbers, it is of little surprise that more and more people are turning to writing, art and music to find solace when their lives are suddenly fractured and the numbers don’t add up. We yearn for what we have lost in life.

David Carpenter explains the phenomenon in his personal essay “The End of the Hunt.”

“City life everywhere tends to create a need for its opposite. Too much noise creates a need for quiet. When the brain has to process too much information....it yearns simply to think. Too much fast food or processed meat creates a need for something healthy. An almost entirely domestic world creates a yearning for the wild earth. The body wants to live again.”

The idea of creative journaling, personal essays, or even memoir is not so much as to make order of our world, but to allow ourselves to rediscover it, to live again with the dimensions changed. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to

Arms that the world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong at the broken places. 137

Recovering from the trauma of a job layoff means growing strong again in the broken places. Or, as Lynn Van Luen explains in Going Some Place: “Healing, to be real and complete, doesn’t mean that scars reminding you of severe past wounds disappear. It can and should mean a restoration of one’s faith in the enduring possibilities of life and love. Your life, your love.”

Exercise to consider: Start the practice of journaling and make a commitment to write for at least 10 minutes in it three times a week.

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Chapter 11

Vanquishing the dragons, changing our worlds

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world...The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimetre, the way...people look at reality, then you can change it.” – James Baldwin

When we sit across from a human resources person advising us that our employment has been terminated, it’s a bit like the seconds before we feel the impact of a bad car crash. People who haven’t endured it think that we will respond emotionally, but the majority of people actually sit calmly, listening but not hearing, not really reacting at all. It’s like we see an axe falling between the person talking and ourselves, and we know in our gut that it’s going to land on our 139

head, but everything’s in slow motion and we can’t move fast enough to escape, even if we try.

For ten, twenty, thirty or maybe close to forty years as in my case, our story and our life were wrapped tightly in our company’s. They likely owned the spot we parked in, the chair we sat in, the tap we drank from and the tools with which we created. They provided the corporate language we spoke, the culture that governed our behaviour, and the dress code to which we submitted ourselves. In many ways, the corporation had more control of us and influence on us than our spouse, our parents, our children or our friends. Even the most independent minded of workers must succumb to some set of rules.

Rebellions against such systems as occurred in the 1970s with Howard

Beale’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” rant from the movie “Network” and singer Johnny Paycheck’s famous worker’s anthem “Take

This Job And Shove It” have long been silenced. Ours is an economic climate in which jobs are no longer available around every corner, and keeping silent and powerless is the survival code of the smartest.

“Workers have learned to internalize and mask powerlessness, but the internal frustration and struggle remain,” writes Jefferson Cowie, an associate 140

professor of labour history at Cornell University. “Today the concerns of the working class have less space in our civic imagination than at any time since the

Industrial Revolution,” he writes in his book Staying Alive: The 1970s and the Last

Days of the Working Class.

The result of this is that even when we are suddenly freed from this culture through a layoff, we have been part of it for so long that we have often lost our own identity to it. As we write our way to a new perspective on life and working we start to question everything around us, and this can be unsettling for those still comfortable in their routines.

“One of the difficulties with the creative life is that when we have creative breakthroughs, they may look and even be experienced as breakdowns,” writes

Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way Every Day, A Year of Creative Living. “Our normal, ordinary way of seeing ourselves and the world suddenly goes on tilt, and as it does, a new way of seeing and looking at things comes toward us.”

Despite the unsettling times we are in, we must search and continue looking until we identify our authentic selves and determine anew how we can best use our talents in this world in which we live. For though the weeks following a layoff are the worst of times in many ways, in others they are often the first 141

time in a person’s life when they can actually figure out what is of value to them and what is really theirs. It is a time to find out what our own story is.

Every time we move deeper into the ongoing discovery of who we are, we vanquish a dragon. We bring new life to ourselves, to those around us, and to our culture. We change the world, starting with our own small place in it. The more we are able to let go of our fears, the more we can tap into the life force.

Once we discover who we are, we are able to determine what we really want to do to make a living in this world. This book is not suggesting that we dispose of all our worldly goods and go trekking in Nepal, though that may be what someone decides will make them happy. But for most people, still tied to numerous financial and familial responsibilities, we can learn it is still possible to expand our thinking and consider options we never thought possible in our former lives.

Writing to heal is a process in which we learn about ourselves and what will really excite us as purposeful work. It is also a process of becoming aware that the stories we might hold true today are not our stories for all time. We will never be stuck in them again. Anybody who writes reflectively every day is acutely aware 142

that no story is true for all time and space. If we don’t change our stories, nothing in our lives will change.

In No More Dreaded Mondays, working guru Dan Miller says the key to real success is knowing yourself so completely that you can identify a work fit that you will find enjoyable, rewarding and profitable.

“You can achieve an existence that is more about soul and less about pay cheque,” he says.

For those of us finding our way after layoffs, we are reminded that time spent “not working” is a vital part of our new productivity process. We need time to explore, to think, to reflect, to develop our talents. We need to redefine time.

Our lives are an entire universe of fragments, yearning for coherence.

Times of trauma force us to reconsider the essence of ourselves and the things that we truly value and from which we can build.

No one can cavalierly suggest that a traumatic layoff is a good thing; that would be just cruel. No worker needs to be devalued and cast aside, especially after years of creative and loyal service. But by writing to heal, learning about 143

ourselves and learning about our options, we can come to celebrate the freedom that survival of a trauma brings.

As poet Ted Kooser points out, all suffering begins and ends with ourselves.

To watch our work world collapse, to discover that all our efforts to a corporate cause, and all those painful beliefs we’ve carried around for years, are not true for us, that we’ve never needed them at all, is an incredibly freeing experience.

We must celebrate the wisdom of discovering that happiness is not about the things we possess or the position we have climbed to on the corporate ladder.

It is, as Byron Katie reminds us, a clear mind, a clear and sane mind that knows how to live, how to work, what e-mails to send, what phone calls to be made, and what to do to create what it wants without fear.

Ultimately, we must accept a new standard of thinking that work is not all that society makes it out to be. We have to learn that we are more than our work, and that our lives are more than our careers. As Emerson said, we must learn to finish every day and be done with it.

Success means one thing only; that we have done our best and not squandered the gifts we were given. We must be conscious that the consumption 144

of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become in accomplishing this task.

Just as a traumatic experience like a layoff takes something away from us, it also gives us something back, and that is a searing clarity about the life being lived around the job. Sometimes, when we thoroughly investigate the job we lost, we find ourselves finally understanding that perhaps we were not laid off at all....perhaps we in fact escaped from the job.

Life and love are full of enduring possibilities. We can’t go back to what we were, but we can transition ourselves to something new and more endurable and satisfying. If we can finish this book and all our writing exercises, and look around and finally understand that it is now our choice to be exactly where we are right now and where we will go in the future, than we will be happier than most of the people in this world today.

Question to consider: Who did you become while doing your former job? How is this person different from the one you want to be?

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Chapter Twelve:

Epilogue: Ready to rejoin the labour force?

Look closely; it’s story has changed too.

It’s 6 a.m. on a warm October morning in Shanghai, China. Night’s shadow has scarcely lifted and the sun is hours away from burning through the smog, but already platoons of orange-garbed street cleaners have swept the squares clean.

Tourist guide “Jamie,” (“I picked my English name; do you like it?” he asks) has been travelling by train and then by bicycle for two hours to reach an upscale hotel in the New Pudong Area. He smiles cheerfully as he greets the four

Canadian tourists he will be escorting with a driver. It will be at least 12 hours before he returns to what North Americans would call a substandard home for a few hours sleep, but he gives no indication of fatigue or unhappiness. 146

“I want to make money, money, money,” he confides at one point in his long day. He is wearing western style blue jeans and a thin white windbreaker that bears The Playboy Club insignia. He asks many questions about the United

States and a few about Canada, and it is clear he is well aware of western culture.

Although a graduate of a computer technology program, he tells me on my recent visit to China to see first hand the changing world of work that he ended up being a tour guide because his English is good and he can make more money at it than working on computers.

Billy is just one of the 700 million people in China’s labour force, the largest in the world. He and the other 699 million workers just like him have the attitudes and low salary expectations that makes them increasingly attractive to the profit- hungry North American corporations. Contracting out to China and India will be an ever-growing trend in the years to come, adding just one more challenge to the laid off middle-aged Canadian and American worker.

As a result, finding our place in the new world of work has the potential to be our greatest story of all. Is there really going to be work out there for all of us who have sustained layoffs in the last couple of years? What will be the impact of 147

competition for jobs from workers in countries like China and India? And where will we even start to look to find creative work?

Most importantly, how can the time we spent in reflection and contemplation to discern our authentic selves give us an advantage over those who have remained trapped in their jobs, unable to raise their heads over the rims of their cubicles and consider independent thoughts?

There is no conclusive answer to these questions, since the ways and means of returning to work are as individual as each person, and enlightenment is more about extended process than instantaneous flashes of brilliance.

In Courage and Conversation, Setting Out With a Firm Persuasion, David

Whyte says that any life and any life’s work is a hidden journey, a secret code, revealed in fits and starts. The details are what present the whole to us, and the whole is fully dependent on the details (which reveal themselves to us through our writing).

Our ultimate goal through this soul’s guide to survival is to move from energy to wisdom, thereby increasing our value when we return to the working world. 148

We have all learned after facing layoffs that the rungs of the North

American corporate ladder are wobbly and rotting. Old equations, like skill, loyalty and dedication equalling appreciation, security and reward, are no longer valid. If we want to thrive in the future, we must hone our self-reliance and make our own rules. And on top of the skills we cultivate, we must also grow expertise in marketing ourselves as independent contractors.

Author Daniel Pink describes modern workers as “free agents.” In his book

Free Agent Nation, he describes tomorrow’s labour force as people “free from the bonds of a larger institution, and agents of their own futures.” They are the new archetypes of work in North America.

In the process of finding our way after a layoff, we have learned to listen to ourselves. Before we return to work, we must listen again, but this time to the workers of the world and what they are saying, and what they are doing, and we must use this information to chart our own new course to fulfillment and prosperity.

Workers in North America are among the unhappiest in the world. In a

Conference Board survey released in January of 2010, more than half of working

Americans were reported to be dissatisfied with their jobs. Drawing a link 149

between worker discontent and productivity and innovation, the study’s co- author Lynn Franco said the worker dissatisfaction is at its lowest level in more than two decades.

The Conference Board, a non-profit organization that helps businesses strengthen their performance, contacted 5,000 United States households. People reported a drop in interest in their jobs, in dealing with co-workers and bosses, commuting and job security.

“As a group, neither young people who are just entering the workforce nor employees who are about to retire are happy with what they do,” Franco said.

The crisis of disenchantment of the North American worker is being experienced in other developed countries as well.

“There is a growing feeling that the dignity of work has been devalued; that it is seen by prevailing economic thinking as simply a factor of production – a commodity – forgetting the individual, family, community and national significance of human work,” is the way the situation is summarized in “Changing

Patterns in the World of Work,” the Report of the Director General of the

International Labour Conference at its 95th session in Geneva in 2006. 150

“And people are reacting in conversations at home, in the secrecy of the voting booth and, when necessary, by forcefully voicing their complaints on the street.”

In 2005, of the 4.6 billion people of working age in the world, more than three billion, around two thirds, were either working or looking for work, and that trend has just continued to climb. Of these people, 84 per cent live in the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the

Caribbean, as well as the transition countries of the Confederation of

Independent States (CIS) and South Eastern Europe. The remaining 16 per cent live in the European Union and other Western European countries, North

America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

According to the International Labour Office in Geneva, within the developing world, the populous Asia and Pacific region dominates, accounting for more than 57 per cent of all employment.

“The two giants, China and India, have 26.0 per cent and 14.8 per cent of world employment, respectively. Africa, south of the Sahara, has 9.3 per cent;

North Africa and the Middle East, 4.1 per cent, and Latin America and the 151

Caribbean 8.4 per cent. The non-EU South Eastern Europe and CIS countries account for 5.9 per cent,” the report states.

By 2015, the International Labour Office projects, the working age population of the world will be about 5.35 billion, of which some two-thirds, or

3.48 billion people, are expected to be economically active.

“Of this total, nearly three billion will be living in the developing world.

Some 60 percent of the world’s workers will come from Asia.”

In China, even to my casual observance, it was immediately clear that the people work very hard there, with long days and few periods of down time.

Nonetheless, they remain on the exterior cheerful and eager to do their jobs. In the 30 workers I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with informally, I interpreted their positive attitudes as those of people who still believe what many

North American workers are being denied by their bosses: the hope that hard work will bring predictable rewards of money and an easier life.

“I made more money this year than last...that is good, isn’t it,” said Jo-Jo, who operates a stall at the pearl market in Shanghai. “I can send money now to help my sister who is having a baby and can’t work for a few weeks.” 152

Who will be the winners in this changing world of work? I believe that regardless of the country of origin or residence, it will be the worker who understands that what he or she does has value, just as they as individuals have worth. The winners will be those who are instrumental in creating a better life for themselves, their families and their companies.

The losers will be those individuals and corporations who fail to comprehend that wealth will not naturally roll into their bank accounts without working hands to shape it, to create value from it and to add dimensions to it with imagination and innovation.

We need not see the labour forces in our emerging work of world as stories of “us” or “them” in the sense of competition for wealth. Instead we can learn from each other and grow together.

For example, I was struck by contradictions between the Chinese way of doing business and the North American way as I puzzled out my own work strategies. My experience with North American corporations has taught me that time is a harsh task-master, with the ticking of a timepiece a nagging reminder of money wasted and deadlines looming. The Chinese managers who were kind enough to answer my questions explained that they approach their business deals 153

knowing that time is their friend, not their enemy. They emphasize the importance of looking at business deals from a holistic standpoint. Before papers are signed, there is a long process of negotiation, where all aspects of the arrangement are considered. Major business decisions are not made quickly, certainly not as knee-jerk reactions to each quarter’s profits or losses.

Boye Lafette De Mente, author of The Chinese Mind, Understanding

Traditional Chinese Beliefs and Their Influence on Contemporary Culture, writes that China’s ancient philosophers taught that once you understand the nature of life and yourself through contemplation, you are able to exercise considerable control over business and other affairs, and what is going to happen in the future.

He says the Chinese word for this is “hong” which can be translated as

“profundity” and refers to great depths of feeling, intellect and meaning. While

Westerners look at aspects of business as absolutes, as the only story, the Chinese consider the fluidity of situations and understand there is more than one story and that a story is not true for all time.

In essence, as we worked through the exercises of this book to discover our own authenticity and our own stories, our minds have been opened up to how other cultures may view the changing world of work. To understand the value of 154

contemplation and reflection, but also to carry our intimate knowledge of North

American corporations, we newly laid off workers may become the bridge to successfully negotiating new places where a worker’s contribution is valued and appreciated.

The title of the International Labour Organization report, “Changing patterns in the world of work,” for example, stresses a reliance on self-knowledge and the ability to change and adapt as keys to a prosperous future. In other words, the laid off worker who embarks on a mission of self-awareness and emerges ready to view all sides of new stories in their life, will actually be the long-term winner in this modern tortoise and hare race to the finish line of financial security.

“There is always a pattern, different but related to the one that comes before, which will change again with another twist of the barrel,” the work study authors explain. “A number of powerful drivers of change mean that all actors in the global labour market must plan for constant adaptation and aim to shape the process to increase opportunities for decent work.”

In terms of trends to watch as your survey the scene with an eye to starting a new business or embarking on a new profession, it is clear that there is a 155

continuing decline in semi-skilled manufacturing jobs and middle-management office and factory jobs. However, there is a clear and continuing increase in jobs related to the services sector. Some of the fastest growing opportunities are linked to business services such as managerial consulting, technical consulting and professional skills on contract. Do these fit with the interests and skills you have discovered within your authentic self?

Also growing in opportunities are the service sectors of health and education, and retail and transport jobs, and there is no indication on the horizon of any decline in these areas.

Each government in each state and province currently campaigns with promises of budget allocations to create more and better jobs, but the public has long lost confidence in their ability to deliver on these promises. We see instead another figure emerging, and that is the “hour-glass” shape of our society, with a full top and bottom and a shrinking middle. This is not something that can be fixed overnight, but it must be confronted unless our society is to change dramatically.

We can start by supporting companies who are known to value their workers. Then we can raise a loud and collective voice and start demanding that 156

our governments, instead of making empty promises to create jobs, instead introduce tax incentive programs to corporations that favour labour rather than capital. We can encourage our labour departments to enact legislation that builds into our tax structure incentives for learning sabbaticals.

Charles Handy, author of The Age of Unreason, illustrates the urgency of the situation by telling an amphibian story. If you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat it, he explains, the frogs adapts its body temperature to that of the water until at 100 degrees Celsius it boils alive.

For several years now, workers have been told to “buck up” and deal with ever increasing workloads and unofficially extended work hours, threats of layoffs, and almost inevitable extinction at middle age. They have adapted, trying harder and working longer. When they are unceremoniously laid off, they summon all their strengths to try to get right back into the same scene again.

Perhaps it is time for the worker frogs of the world to cry out for change before we all find ourselves boiled alive in our sleep.

Question to consider: Write about the kind of work you would really like to do in the future 157

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