The question I am in my 20s, surrounded by a supportive partner, family, and friends. I am also lucky enough to have had a good education and to have done well academically.
Earlier this year, I quit my job as a secondary school teacher in an inner-city comprehensive. I loved many aspects of the job and was good at it, but I began experiencing memory fog and the strange sensation of being outside my own body, even when teaching. Shortly before I made the decision to quit, a male student made a sexually violent threat towards me which wasn’t handled brilliantly by the school. After several years, I decided enough was enough and handed in my notice.
Since then, I have been trying to pursue other jobs in all sectors. I have been largely successful in getting interviews and securing roles, which is nice. There’s only one problem: every time I get a job, I start to feel a horrible sense of claustrophobia and distress. Twice now, on my way to a new job, I have taken a train straight back home. I make up an excuse about why the job wasn’t right for me and start the search afresh. I fear feeling trapped again – which is how I did throughout a lot of my teaching career – so stave off this feeling by never properly committing to anything.
But I’m starting to feel worried. Apart from the fact that I am burning through my savings at an alarming rate, what if I always feel this awful sense of entrapment and can’t hold down a job? I had another job before teaching and the same thing happened. Am I simply lazy and just don’t like working?
Philippa’s answer Memory fog and experiencing yourself outside your own body sounds like it could be that you are dissociating when at work. Dissociation is a response to trauma. For example, people who have had bad car crashes often remember the seconds leading up to the crash and then the moments after it, but have no memory of the crash itself, even if they didn’t pass out.
Once the body has a learned pathway to this dissociative response, you can slip into it when experiencing other types of stress. Now you are associating this feeling with work. Perhaps your body is fighting you and winning and not letting you go to work. It won’t have helped that you received a threat of sexual violence in your last job: this will be another negative association your brain will be making with work.
There is also something going on about being trapped, as you mention that you had this feeling at an earlier job. If you free-associate around entrapment, what comes up for you? If I do this exercise, I can see my childhood as being trapped – when we’re growing up, we must live by our family’s rules and don’t have much of a say about where and how to live. Work contracts can also be a bit like traps. Cast your mind back to when you first felt trapped: what was that situation?
What I think you should do is see a psychotherapist experienced in trauma and do detective work together to find your original trauma. If we go back to the source of our troubles and tackle that, it can stop us getting stuck in a cycle of repeating that past dynamic that continues to haunt us. But to pay for this you will probably need to go back to work! Choose temporary work that won’t trap you.
But it might also be that you haven’t found your true vocation yet. There is a book by Richard N Bolles, What Colour Is Your Parachute? containing exercises designed to help individuals understand their own career preferences and goals.
Try, for example, the flower exercise. Draw a flower with seven petals. Each petal represents a different aspect of your ideal job and work environment. To fill in each petal you answer the following questions:
what do you value most in life and work, including your core beliefs and principles? What areas of expertise and knowledge do you possess and are passionate about? Which types of people do you prefer to work with? What are the physical and environmental conditions in which you work best? How much responsibility are you comfortable with and what are your salary expectations? What transferable skills do you have? What are your preferred locations for living and working?
By filling out each petal with specific details, you create a personalised picture of your ideal career, helping you to identify job opportunities and career paths that align with your strengths, values and preferences.
You are not lazy, but you have some kind of mental block. You need to identify this so that you can get around it. Meditate upon this block, see what images arise for you and work with them. When we get stuck, we can also get unstuck – especially when we are proactive about it.
Every week Philippa Perry addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader.
If you would like advice from Philippa, please send your problem to askphilippa@guardian.co.uk. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions