In 1974, a book by Frederic Flach, M.D., The Secret Strength of Depression, was important to me in understanding how to move through what was seemingly the unrelenting chaos of a “dark night of the soul”. In his later book Resilience, he is focusing on the necessity of developing resilience to deal with our world, where disarray and change is constant, and how we can learn to cope with it creatively, which is exactly what I teach my clients caught in their “dark night” of career chaos.
Flach emphasizes that: “The psychological changes that accompany stress reaction should lead to a new, more complex and adaptive structure that is qualitatively different from that which preceded it.” (p. 5) In other words, he is saying that we should have learned something valuable from the “dark night” we have been through. We should emerge better put together and more qualified to deal with life’s continuing challenges because of our experience.
He points out that these shifts when we are forced to “forfeit absolute perceptions and ways of viewing things in favor of new, more complex homeostasis more suited to our present and future survival.” Flach calls these points in life bifurcation points (from contemporary physics) representing extreme changes when we become severely destabilized, which may set the stage for regeneration into a new and more effective level of coherence (p. 14). As for complexity – “We have the potential to reorganize ourselves and our lives after a period of stress, a capacity attributable to the fact that as human beings, we are self-organizing systems” (p. 20).
Adults who come in to see me for career coaching often say that feel like their career is on a treadmill going nowhere fast or their career feels like a roller coaster ride. One day everything is going up and then the next day with no warning – it’s down, down, down!