Reply to Alison's message on Depression: An obstacle to learning
Thank you so much, Alison, for sharing your experiences with your company
and family. I, too, have had a similar experience with a company that I
went to work for a few years ago. The irony was that the firm proported
to "know everything" about helping small businesses get healthy and
especially pushed their supposed result of having the owner spend minimal
time at the business while it ran itself. What a joke! What hypocracy!
As this was a business conducted by phone all over the country, our
clients didn't know that the owners were control freaks who were expecting
"little unprepared us" (I was one of the consultants) to make good on all
of the promised they made. So, here we were a group of about 10, talking
to folks around the country, caring greatly, taking on the responsiblity
for "knowing" how to fix them. We worked mostly from out guts as the
program was outdated and had to spend lunchtime listening to the owners
wife tell us(we were really quite an intelligent, creative bunch) how she
had channeled Gabriel and was going to shove this thinking down our
throats. Like we were stupid or something. Like we didn't own our own
lunch hours.
All of us cared deeply for our clients and many of us were depressed
because we were in a very weird environment, our true knowledge and
talents sublimated and we had to pretend that we knew what we didn't know.
The pressure got to everyone. Some handled it better than others. Oh,
and at the time I came bouncing in, half of the people had been fired for
some mysterious reason. I, too, entered with great hopes of using my
skills and contributing but found the pressure to improvize and the
control of the owners too much. One girl in her early twenty began
fainting and having heart palpitations. No one could be honest about what
was going on for fear of losing their very low paying jobs. I finally
left to start another business. The saga continues-they continue to
pretend they know how to help small business (some companies are, of
course, helped) and continue to hire people and burn them out. A friend
of a friend went there and her experience was so negative, she set fire to
the wools suits she was required to buy when she left!
I don't know if this answers anything except that you are not alone. I
know there are companies that are not like this but environments of
repression and denial are toxic and can lead nowhere. Each person in your
former company must take responsiblity for themselves and leave, as you,
to save themselves, no matter the consequences.
I think the only way all of this will work is for everyone to honor who
they are and what they feel and not allow themselves to be trapped into
destructive situations-work related, personal etc.
Diana Mordock
104022.36
--Diana Mordock <104022.36@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>