Johanna in Motion

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Starting Up Your Own Self Detective Agency
Part 12 - Johanna in Motion

An SD case study: Johanna in motion

Johanna had been a carer for her mother from the age of 12.
When her mother died 40 years on, it left Johanna in a state of shock. Not only was she grieving the loss of her mother, but she had also lost the role of being a carer, which was the only thing that had given her life meaning and purpose and structure.

For the next 18 months Johanna hid away in her house and only went out in the dead of night to buy food.
One day she had a realisation – that if she didn’t actively do something about herself and her life, she was likely to do something she might regret. She went to see her doctor, who recommended she see a counsellor. After 6 sessions with the counsellor she made a big discovery:
She had been avoiding life for most of her life. She was frightened of living and frightened of dying.

As the sessions came to an end, her counsellor suggested that she might wish to continue to work on her self-awareness and personal development by attending some Self Detective workshops.

With much courage, Johanna met with other self detectives in a room in her local community centre. For the first three visits she hardly said a word, yet in her mind she was planning and preparing what she wanted to do.

She recognised some of the SD skills that she already possessed, and the skills that would be useful to develop.

As for SD tools: she found a big notebook and drawing pad and pens and pencils. She made a space in her living room with a table and chair. She wore a bracelet to remind her of her work. She set herself a task of doing one hour of SD work every day, and lined up treats for when she completed it.

Her brief was to work out who she was and who she wanted to be.

Her goal was to overcome her fears. To frame her work Johanna hit upon the idea of using railway stations, railway tracks, trains and signals. She had loved her toy train set when she was a child, and still loved to see trains in motion.
Thinking about this made Johanna aware that she was not in motion. She had not been in motion for 40 years.

The next week a newly energised Johanna took a taxi into her town centre and visited a hobby and craft shop. She spent two hours inside looking at all the delights, and came away with bits and pieces to make her own personalised railway set.
At home, she set it up on the floor so that the main railway station was her starting point. This represented her birth, as well as the house she had lived in for the past 52 years.

The first piece of track led to school, which she hated. Other tracks led to friends that hadn’t been very good friends, a father who had abandoned the family when she was 10 years old, and a couple of ‘failed’ relationships with men. The biggest and longest track was to do with her relationship with her mother, which was pretty complicated but not impossible to work through.
Having set about looking for clues, she made the following discoveries, realisations and actions:
  1. When she was a child, she found it awkward being around people. She didn’t know how to talk to people, which led to her being bullied at school. As a result, she stayed at home to care for her mother. This was the birth of her fear.
  2. She didn’t have any good male role models in her life.
  3. She wanted to love and be loved. She still wants to be loved and to love back.
  4. Fear is in her mind and in her body. The bodily sensations of her fear last no longer than seven minutes (she timed it).
  5. While she still doesn’t know who she is, she is going to experiment with finding out – by getting out of the house.
  6. She doesn’t even like the house she lives in. She always felt trapped there, like she couldn’t breathe. She recognised that this was largely to do with her mother, who suffocated her and who she had become too emotionally tangled up with.
  7. She decided to take walks in the park and visit her local railway station. Each day she found she could stay outside of her house for longer and longer.
  8. Once she started to get rid of things (using her real and her imaginary bin), she found there wasn’t all that much from her present life that she wanted to keep hold of.
  9. She was beginning to feel alive for the first time in a long time.
At the end of her SD group work, Johanna shared her story with the other SDs and got a spontaneous round of applause and a hug. She then announced that she was going to go on her first holiday for over a decade: Switzerland by rail (which drew further applause). Finally, she announced she was planning to sell her house and move somewhere she wanted to live, although she didn’t know where that might be just yet. That would have to be another SD case study.
Q: What did you make of Johanna’s story? Did it resonate with you at all?
Q: Could you borrow some of Johanna’s ideas and activities to get you started on your own journey? If so would you use the theme of a railway or something else?

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