Throughout our lives, we encounter a wide array of crises.
According to Jamila Rodrigues, the individuals she interviewed divulged a multitude of crisis experiences, encompassing illnesses, work-related challenges, living abroad, interpersonal relationships, and family matters.
Moments of crisis
Nick: So let's focus on the types of crisis you identified or your interviewees shared with you. So what what did they narratives of crisis include?
Jamila: So they varied. Some of them, for example, were related to illness. And illness, as in long term chronic illnesses or accidents, for example, operations and moments where they found out about their condition.
Others were related to work, career change, overworking, challenging colleagues, challenging bosses, so work-related crisis. Living abroad, I had a couple of participants that told me they had cultural identity crisis, the fact that they didn't speak a language or they struggled to be culturally accepted in social adaptation and things like that.
Others were very, also, in terms of interpersonal relationships, couple, couple crisis and friends crisis, times when friends die. And that brings the other person the sense of immense lost, such as your best friend dies or your mother dies.
And then family crisis, it's very personal and difficult because they share things, you know, domestic violence, or going through divorce or childhood abuse or childhood trauma. So they were very, very intimate, personal type of crisis.
Nick: Yeah, I imagine that's, obviously that's hard to share with someone. Did you feel that some of the interviewees were comfortable to share these intimate personal stories or experiences?
Jamila: I mean, from the start, they knew what I wanted to interview about. So they knew the topics. And obviously, if people know the topics, they make the decision if they want to talk about it or not. And obviously, people can share different types of crisis.
So some crisis were very light, but they cause stress, and others were quite intimate. And I felt that they wanted to speak about this crisis. So in a sense, it was also therapeutic for them to reflect back about their life experience, and how do they overcome these challenging moments in life.
So there was a sort of common agreement and an acceptance that these stories were going to be shared, anonymized, and published.