Running away with the family

Multiple identities, avoidance and acceptance.

My blog is officially out of autumn hibernation, and I'll be embracing all things psychological with you for the festive season. Join me each Sunday for what I envisage will be a pick and mix selection of science and reflections.

Talking of reflection, I posted my last blog around three months ago and we'd just said goodbye to our 15-year-old labrador, Sam. There was no conscious intention to pause writing for this amount of time but once I'd committed that initial grief to paper, I wasn't sure where to go next. Lots of ideas would come and go, but the stuff I was excited to share with you, about my Imposter Phenomenon research was being prepared for a podcast.

It felt right to let one project take priority over another, so here we are.

Psychologically Speaking, the podcast, launches in the New Year, the blog will stay, and I'll link one to the other behind the scenes so you can listen as episodes are released, plus irregular blog content.

The driving force for this blog which I started last year was to get into the habit of writing before I started PhD research. And here’s my reflection, starting a PhD and a new work contract, breaking a little toe, losing a pet, and supporting a kid back to school in the same month was not conducive to a good writing habit.

No major psychological insight here other than - life does get busy and silly. Why it took so long to get back into the habit of writing is worth exploring from a psychological lens though, and there are some curious behavioural clues to unpick about how I have been spending my time.

I've travelled. Finding ourselves as a family unexpectedly dog free, we embraced spontaneity and took our camper van on a weekend trip to Sherwood Pines in mid-September - this came on recommendation from my friend Jules as we jogged around Parkrun the Saturday after we’d said goodbye to our dog. The house already felt incredibly empty and quiet, so we were happy to avoid being there. As a bonus, the forest is home to a beautiful parkrun, and I caught up with another friend who lives locally.

Then came a planned trip to the Isle of Skye in October to see friends who have built the most amazing huts on their croft overlooking a loch. We took a slow drive north, passing over the Forth bridge and through the Cairngorms with some bonus snow topped mountains. The autumnal colours made the long journey even more worth it, and we were blessed with mild midge-free weather when we got to Skye.

Images by Leila Ainge, Isle of Skye 2023.

We were home a few weeks when we booked a last-minute trip to York for my birthday in November, staying in a luxurious premier inn, we dined on takeaway fish and chips in our room with the 8-year-old later than evening.

During this time, I kept lots of little notes on my phone about things I wanted to write about, and I kept telling myself that I should write, but the ideas weren’t settling in a way that I needed them to. My thought process swung between thinking I was avoiding something, and telling myself It was ok to take time. But sitting to write this blog today, I can see that the obvious avoidance going on has been intentional travel to escape a house that is dogless.

It was curious this week to listen to Vic Powell talk about creatives getting stuck, and her approach to writing and parking the ideas that don't come together, how her content purpose has become focused around a theme. I've sometimes felt I need to structure or centre this blog around something more concrete, yet my very nature is someone who likes to bounce around different topics both on paper and in my head.

So my second reflection is one that I shared with Lucy Werner last week, around the challenge of  having or promoting a 'brand or voice' when you invite shifting and multiple identities into your life. I work in a leadership role with a University, I coach, I sit on an advisory board, a committee and I'm researcher at another University.

I'm researching groups and identities from an entrepreneurial perspective, perhaps this is my occupational hazard!

I'm also mum and wife - these roles all make sense to me, and complement each other and my career journey. But it introduces complexity in some social spaces, do I talk about my blog on LinkedIn or promote the work of my employer, or the university where I research? There is some low level conflict I need to resolve in my own mind.

Interestingly the second episode of my podcast introduces a psychological term called Context Collapse and how this explains our avoidant behaviour in some online spaces, I'll make sure to add a link here for that episode once it's live, but the theory is supported by the idea of imagined audiences, and in my case there’s a rock concert, poetry recital and gameshow all in the same venue.

Psychologically speaking, perhaps running away with the family has helped me avoid thinking about these things too deeply, but yesterday I spent the day on a PhD writing retreat, I used the morning to work on my PhD and the afternoon to script a podcast episode, and the structure of the day gave me time to reflect and think about why, I enjoy sharing the thoughts in my head with others. Something shifted, as it often does psychologically when we start to notice what the real issue is.

Acceptance comes after avoidance, so here I am reflecting on my autumn writing hibernation with you, and why I've been holding back what I'm really thinking.

See you next week

P.s the podcast is a mixture of guest interviews and solo episodes from me, where we talk about Imposter Phenomenon, real life, outcomes of my research and how this ties up and informs our understanding of psychological theory past and present. I can’t wait to share it with you in the New Year.