“How to properly support a man during a period when he has difficulties with professional self-realization? My boyfriend has a good job, but he doesn’t feel happy there. And now he is in a state of depression all the time.
I see how he despairs, trying to come up with an interesting application in life. He has been looking for more than a year and does not find his favorite pastime. Depressed mood has a bad effect on everything else. He is constantly sad at home, depressed. I worry about him and for the fact that I don’t know how to help him find his favorite job.
I understand that a favorite job for a man in life is very important, so my heart is also restless because of his dissatisfaction in life.
Tell me how to behave in such a situation? Love more, pay more attention and warm? Something for him to seek and advise? Leave him alone? I really want to understand how a wise, experienced woman would act in my situation … »
How to support a man in this situation?
To do this, it is worth understanding what is happening to him, to designate not “difficulties with professional self-realization”, but promiscuity.
And you need to shake your man and not condone the debauchery into which he dived headlong.
What is clear from your story?
With some thought, your man decided that he could sit down and quickly figure out an interesting activity for himself. And this is where it doesn’t work. And now he is in anguish, so that everyone can see how important it is for him to have an interesting occupation in life! What is his number one goal! That is why suffering is so bitter and long!
Yes, this, of course, is a passion, how important it is to burn, so that everything can be easily and brilliantly argued, and the society for this occupation would pay off a lot of money. Who doesn’t want this?
And now you have to somehow, sitting by the window, dodge and discover in yourself a talent for something and instantly shine there.
Is it real?
From the point of view of an experienced woman, this is an empty idea. You won’t be able to instantly shine anywhere. Only where it is planned to invest. And it takes ten years to invest in order to achieve brilliant results. And three or four years to get to the good ones. Therefore, with a running start it will not be interesting anywhere. Interesting — after all, in the brain of many it is interpreted as «easy.» Right?
And on any path you will have to plow, practically not getting results for a long time (recognition and money). And only the most stubborn who are ready to painstakingly improve their professionalism for years and decades will reach the results (an interesting lesson).
Has your man ever moved long and hard towards a goal?
Most likely he had no such experience. Because stubborn men don’t get depressed for a year. They sit down, evaluate their opportunities and prospects at their place of work, and if they understand that both are zero, then they make a decision and move to another place. Yes, at the first stage it is lower paid, because there are no skills yet, you still need to learn, but more promising for his abilities.
The depression of this man suggests that he would like to painlessly change one life opportunity for another. Does not develop painlessly. Then he sits and takes offense at life, pretending that he is looking for something in agony, but he can’t find it. Yes, it won’t. He is looking for, as it were, so deftly and without pain (without difficulties), so that on a white horse and in sparkles to enter a new life. And this, alas… At moments of fateful abrupt decisions in our lives, there are almost always setbacks, because we have to go not along the path of evolution, but along the path of revolution: to reject the old and create the new from scratch. It’s scary. I would like to somehow attach a closet on the side and so that the house immediately becomes a palace. Yes, it doesn’t fit. And so in your head you twist this fantasy project and so on. And everything doesn’t pan out. You all sit on the priest evenly and, so that at least some work is visible, you give out suffering to the mountain. Familiar Russian game. We must stop her.
The advice is this: Offer him, like a wise woman, to end the suffering — there is little sense from them, but great harm. Offer to spend your energy on building professionalism in your work. Grip your teeth and build up. Then it will get more interesting. Not in two days, of course. If the work is completely across his throat, then let him appoint another one in three days (no more). I repeat once again — it takes three days to decide! After that, he will sit down and analyze what he needs in order to get this other one (it is quite possible that retraining, preparation of a springboard for two or three years), to engage in this preparation.
How can he tell if he loves someone else? No way. We can fall in love with what we have seriously invested in, where we have become aces.
To do this, to become an ace, the best choice is to hammer at one point, not for one year. And spend less time on suffering. It does not add skill to a man’s life. So inform him that this is not the most masculine thing to do, to sit and rot, believing that it looks like «a man is seriously thinking.» He rots, but does not think! Here is what you tell him.
Say it with love.
Men think in action. Everything else is not a thought, but an escape from life. And the more a man goes away from life, the more he gets used to being a coward.
Do not reinforce the cowardice of your man! Do not cherish his melancholy and depression. And it’s not even an hour, he will like this game. Remove the beautiful name «depression» and explain that this is ordinary cowardice, an ordinary fear of a difficult fate, an insult to life for a difficult fate.
So that he would be less offended and fantasize about a difficult fate, let him read books about those who lived at the turn of the century — read Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Frankl. Then his life tasks will seem like a cakewalk to him.
In general, you have a serious and demanding conversation with your man. I wish you good luck in this conversation, from the bottom of my heart. Don’t be afraid, talk. And, if he doesn’t hear, doesn’t understand, will continue to “jelly” and “rotten”, then again, don’t be a coward and end the relationship with the weakling. You still have children!