“Crises of professional development. Emotional burnout syndrome as a form of professional maladjustment"

For specialists, stress diagnosis, Crisis Irina Vasilyeva It is believed that a youthful identity crisis is inevitable, just as summer inevitably comes after spring. Sooner or later, a mature teenager gets tired of his puberty storms. He suddenly begins to comprehend: “Who am I? Where is my seat? What role should I play on this theatrical stage called life? Any personality crisis is not complete without notes of self-identification, but adolescence in this sense is the most intense. Is this really so and how not to make a mistake in choosing your “place in the sun”? We'll talk about this today.

Good afternoon, dear reader! Trying on a wide variety of social “clothes”, teenagers dream and see the moment when they will finally become full-fledged adults: they will go to university, go to work, start a family.

But as soon as the hour “X” comes, their “adulthood” disappears completely unexpectedly.

Instead, there is confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety.

The essence of the crisis

During this period, a young man or girl really wants to feel involved in any group and at the same time gain internal integrity, unity with himself. This contributes to the emergence of various hobbies. Unusual religious movements, the invention of original ways of self-expression, self-affirmation through manifestos, conscious demonstrative attraction of attention to oneself.

Just remember the twentieth century. Every ten years, youth invented new ways of self-expression: dudes, hippies, rockers, punks and others.

This age crisis involves opposing oneself to social norms. Through the resolution of this conflict, one’s own identity is discovered.

Youth is the most creatively productive period. A person tries to go out, to slip beyond the ordinary, to change the world, to challenge the patterns, mores, and foundations of society. Remember which of you, going through this difficult age period, did not beat your chest, proving that “your ancestors are wrong” and “everything is completely wrong.”

At this time, the choice of oneself, one’s essence, one’s purpose occurs.

What is an identity crisis?

An identity crisis is a period of formation of a person’s personality through the search for one’s place and role in society, awareness of one’s own uniqueness. Research on this phenomenon belongs to the American psychologist Erik Erikson, who identified eight stages of human psychological development. The transition from one stage to another is accompanied by changes in the perception of oneself and the world around us. Most of them occur before the age of 21, but even after this age the revaluation of values ​​continues. Age limits may change or shift, but the order of steps remains the same for the majority.

Levels of self-identification

The separation of levels is a very conditional process. They are all interconnected and interdependent; they are separated only for the convenience of perceiving information.

Social and professional

I combined these two types into one, because... they are very similar. During this period, a young man is in a state of choosing his own way of survival, acquiring a profession and self-presentation in society.

The choices made during this period can determine the quality of life for a long time.

Often, non-acceptance of a young man’s choice by his parents, other relatives, and friends adds “wood to the fire.” For example, previously no one would have thought that the information technology sector would be the most profitable industry.

About thirty years ago, everyone went to study to become “doctors, engineers, teachers.”

Having become accustomed to IT, the older generation has now chosen to condemn forms of freelance income, considering them something frivolous. Linking a workplace to a specific enterprise or organization gives them a feeling of “reliability and stability.”

All these factors can complicate the course of the self-identification crisis and lead to aggravations in the sphere of interpersonal and family relationships.

Gender and family

Awareness of one's gender role will certainly lead (or not lead) a young man to create a couple, and subsequently marriage. Similar processes can be externally observed in the form of changes in appearance: hair color and outrageous haircuts, piercings and tattoos, trendy clothes.

During this period, young people face many questions: living alone or with parents, having children or becoming “childfree”.

Also, those who have a non-traditional orientation, during this period more often than in others, find the courage to tell their parents and friends about it.

The information openness of society has influenced the fact that many young people are in no hurry to get married, try not to take on much responsibility to society and parents, and promote life for their own pleasure.

Religious and spiritual

At this time, refusals from the traditions of parents are common.

Adolescence seeks and, as a rule, finds the shortcomings of the existing religion (or, conversely, atheism), the worldview of previous generations, and tries to create its own vision.

The most strongly-minded elements begin to prove to everyone and everything that “they say, all this time you, dear ones, have been mistaken. And so I came into the world to tell you the truth.”

This is why newly-minted vegans and “enlightened people” sometimes behave so aggressively, young bloggers categorically introduce their point of view to the masses, and armchair experts swear in the comments.

Due to the variety of information, a young person’s picture of the world becomes unclear, torn, and gives rise to instability of self-awareness.

New advanced ideas are superimposed on traditional, archaic values. All this creates such a kaleidoscope of colors in the minds of young people that many of them join first one informal group, then another.

The inability to comprehend the relationship between rather different, and often contradictory, positions leads to a real information collapse. By inertia, a person continues to assimilate new ideas, while simultaneously becoming convinced of their inconsistency and impracticality.

It is against this background that the personal development of modern boys and girls takes place.

On the causes of the Russian identity crisis

We live in a period of radical revaluation of values. One of its manifestations was the rehabilitation of neo-fascism in Europe. These processes are often defined as the “archaization of neoliberalism” and “new barbarism.” The response to archaization is the unwinding of the “spiral of passionarity,” which is characteristic not only of the world’s outskirts, say, in the Middle East, but also of Central Europe. This means that the role of traditionalist groups in society is growing sharply and spasmodically. National and religious identity is transformed from an ethnocultural phenomenon into a powerful political factor and receives the right to direct political expression.

The world, as was already the case in the 19th and 20th centuries, is faced with the problem of the nation state and the conflict between the secular and the religious - let’s remember the situation with ISIS or the story with the French “Charlie Hebdo”. Therefore, today in a political dispute, the one whose identity is stronger, more defined, more stable wins. And vice versa: an identity crisis leads to the loss of geopolitical positions in the world. The concept of “identity” is usually defined through a set of well-known parameters (“identity square”): language, confession, ethnicity, common historical destiny and civil legal space. But from the point of view of psychology, identity is something like a collective “I” concept - society’s answer to the questions “Who are we?”, “Where are we from and where are we going?”, awareness of the historical mission. Based on this, we can define Russian identity as an identity based on the tradition of Eastern Christian Byzantine culture, which includes elements of democratic centralism (the phenomenon of “people's monarchy”), a symphony of the secular and religious, the desire for the primacy of morality over law and some social egalitarianism (from the word “equality”, as the opposite of elitism. - Ed.). Moreover, the egalitarian aspect received additional significance and development precisely on Russian soil.

All this now appears, of course, in a historically transformed form. Nevertheless, the parameters of modern Russian identity can be defined as “Orthodox ethics and the spirit of solidarity,” that is, social justice. The most important and paradoxical thing in this definition is the connection of the seemingly incompatible. The pre-revolutionary world and the Soviet world, which historically came together in an irreconcilable battle, nevertheless have common roots and are fully reflected in Russian identity. Its dynamic vector is determined by the imperative of searching and building a “kingdom of truth”, where every person is needed, no one is superfluous, no one builds their happiness on the misfortune of another, everyone is united by spiritual ties and common tasks. The image of “Holy Rus'”, the “vessel of true faith” - and the image of the state of social justice, the “society of equality and brotherhood” - are all different projections of one idea, part of one whole. The idea of ​​social construction (Soviet socialism) and collective salvation (sobornost) are widely divergent variations on the same theme.

This is the common core of tradition and identity, which even a revolution is not able to completely split. And the Civil War, oddly enough, clearly revealed this unity in its time. Because the cause of national tragedy is not historical cataclysms themselves, but the breaks in traditions that cause them. Russian history knows many such gaps. This is a church schism, the year 1917, events of the early 1990s. The last break led to the establishment in Russia of an economic model that has post-Protestant roots and is in certain contradiction with the real historical experience of the people.

The Soviet model of development, held together by the idea of ​​a multi-ethnic nation and a social state, is certainly an integral part of the Russian tradition. But in the 1990s it was supplanted by social Darwinism and the principles of social eugenics. This social format remains alien to both the spirit of the welfare state and a just society, and the spirit of apostolic Christianity.

The Soviet component of Russian identity as an important part of the historical experience of the people was crossed out. It has already been recognized by everyone that the call for “de-Sovietization” is objectively directed not against a single “Soviet”, but against the entire Russian tradition and national historical continuity.

Russian identity after 1991 is seen as a children's construction set, hastily assembled with the help of political technologies. The complex of liberal ideas in Russia was turned into a cult, and it is still confused with national identity. This is all the more surprising since in the liberal West there is no such substitution. There, identity and tradition are viewed as inviolable historical resources, and liberalism, conservatism and socialism are viewed only as political tools.

As a result, Russia today has a population with an unclear identity. This applies to the same 86% of the “Zakrymsky” majority, which “opposition” political strategists call pro-Putin. Instead of a weakened, blurred, but historically reliable society, an “alternative” identity is imposed on society, based on a complex of historical inferiority. This version of identity involves the displacement of the sacred meanings of Russian history from the collective memory. Hence the ridicule of the liberal press at the “Immortal Regiment” action on May 9, 2020. The civil conflict in Russia is precisely a conflict of identities - traditional and quasi-liberal. As a result of the imposition of the latter, disorientation of Russian society occurs. One of the instruments of such imposition is the promotion of conflicts between the Soviet and non-Soviet, between the secular and the religious, between the “reds” and the “whites”...

As a result, real identity weakens, is erased, and is replaced by many group identities, including regional ones: Koenigsberg, Siberian, Pomeranian, Ingrian and others. At the site of each rupture, a vacuum of identity appears.

It is easy for a society in this state to impose myths about itself. These include myths about collective historical guilt, about the inability of Russians to self-organize, their “genetic slavery” and even their tendency towards “fascism”.

The above indicates that our society is experiencing an identity crisis. This provokes the growth of Russophobia in Russia, leads to further erosion of common values, relativism, carnivalization of important ideas and symbols, to trampling down the symbolic space of society - the breeding ground in which identity lives.

The condition for strengthening Russian identity is the synthesis or, in the language of semiotics, the mutual translation of different historical and cultural codes that make up the single symbolic space of the Russian tradition. In particular, Soviet values ​​(code of “social justice”) and Christian values ​​(code of the Gospel). Literally, this means that we must be able to talk in secular language about Orthodox “Holy Rus'” and, conversely, within the framework of the original Russian and neo-Byzantine tradition, about the values ​​of a society of social justice. Then Russian identity will be strengthened, and Russian tradition will receive a powerful impetus for development.

Senoi tribe

A small tribe of just 40 thousand people lives in the mountain jungles of Malaysia. People here live in family communities, engage in agricultural work, fish, and hunt.

Manifestations of cruelty are practically never found among them. They are extremely peaceful and kind to each other.

The most important activity for all tribes is the discussion of virtual reality (yes, yes, I was not mistaken). Their virtual reality is called "The Big Dream". The morning of every resident of this tribe begins with a discussion of the night's dream with the family. After breakfast, the senior members of the tribe gather for a general council, where on the agenda - what do you think?

Of course, dreams.

Sleep is a central aspect of the entire life of this tribe. Based on the analysis of their dreams, they plan work, leisure and creativity.

Meeting with higher powers through dreams, they ask them for a gift: a song, a dance, a work of art, they bring it to life and give it to all residents of the community.

These people do not have a fear of death; they know that one day they will forever go into the “Big Sleep” and are not afraid of this.

How to survive an identity crisis?

A psychological crisis is a condition that requires changes in a person’s previous pattern of behavior. Such turning points occur periodically in the life of every person and are the norm of development. But if an adult has the strength to cope with his condition on his own, then children, especially in adolescence, need the support and understanding of adults.

How does a psychological crisis manifest itself?

• negative emotions are difficult to control (outbursts of anger, sudden tantrums, and so on);
• causeless excitement or panic occurs;
• the feeling of one’s own helplessness and inferiority intensifies;
• it is difficult to plan actions and adhere to a certain algorithm;
• awareness of the mistakes made drives you into a dead end, from which it seems that there is no way out.

7 tips to help teenagers survive a psychological crisis:

1. Praise not only for achievements, but also for aspirations for them;
2. Encourage initiatives and the desire to defend one’s own interests;
3. Take topics that concern teenagers seriously, even if they seem frivolous or stupid;
4. Help in revealing abilities, referring to the idea that each person is talented in his own way;
5. Show respect for the child’s personality, do not impose your views on life;
6. Develop the ability to be responsible for one’s actions, thus teaching responsibility;
7. Accept the fact of growing up, give the child the opportunity to find himself, if, of course, this does not harm his health.

Identity crisis is a process of self-discovery that knocks on every person's door from time to time. If from birth we are provided with comfortable conditions for passing through turning points, then we will greet subsequent visits of crisis with a smile and open arms. But what if this didn't happen? Resentment against the past will not produce results, but will only provoke internal conflict. You can protect yourself from it by looking around. Some child now definitely needs your support. And, as you know, there are no other people’s children.

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Additional Information:
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• What to do if you don’t know how to live further?
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• What is a crisis in a relationship and what to do about it?
• What are age-related crises and what to do with them?
• What is an identity crisis and what are its causes?
• What are family life crises and what to do with them?
• What do I want from life? 7 ways to find the answer
• What is a midlife crisis and what to do about it?