Ping Pong Poms. A beautifully alliterative description. If you haven't worked out what it might mean, the words describe people from the UK, who have emigrated to Australia, changed their mind and returned to the UK. They may have gone back again to Australia and so on. I know people who could be given that name and you may do too.
But it's not just people going to Australia. The house I live in, had previously been bought by an older couple, who left the village to move elsewhere in the UK, only to return to the same road, a couple of years later. I'm also aware that I have readers who live outside the UK. For those readers, the place names can change, but the underlying observations stand.
Why don't moves always work out as people hoped?
We make decisions and take actions because we expect something to happen. Something will happen of course, but it may not be quite what we were expecting.
http://emotionalgrowth.blogspot.com/2011/10/you-just-dont-think-consequenses.html
http://emotionalgrowth.blogspot.com/2011/10/you-just-dont-think-consequenses.html
Some moves are forced on us by circumstances and this isn't what I'm writing about here. This blog is about people who move, expecting a better life than the one they are presently experiencing or perhaps an improvement, at least. A move will solve their problems.
I was attracted to the news item, because I have been fortunate to visit Australia on several occasions over the last seventeen years. On some of those visits, I was working as a psychotherapist, giving talks, taking workshops and seeing private clients in three states. I was also staying in homes, rather than hotels for many of the visits. So I have a little insight into the home lives of a variety of people.
In a nutshell, if you have emotional difficulties before you move, you may find that they still exist, hundreds or thousands of miles away. But you don't have the support network that you had in wherever the previous home was.
The grass may look greener, but up close, it can often still have weeds.
Friends and family have always been important, but many don't realise how important until they are not easy to contact. Though the Skype, email, texting and Twitter can bring the world closer. Is it really only 20 years ago when my son use go off on adventures around the world and I would wait for the blue air mail letters like a starving person needing food?
The grass may look greener, but up close, it can often still have weeds.
Friends and family have always been important, but many don't realise how important until they are not easy to contact. Though the Skype, email, texting and Twitter can bring the world closer. Is it really only 20 years ago when my son use go off on adventures around the world and I would wait for the blue air mail letters like a starving person needing food?
The foundations for my blog thoughts and observations are the emotional needs and resources that human beings have been given. (The Human Givens).
Some principal needs:
- A meaning and purpose in life.
- Loving and being loved - healthily.
- Security in home, work and environment
- A sense of autonomy and control.
- A sense of community
- The giving and receiving of attention in a healthy way.
- Balanced nutrition.
- A feeling of status and personal value.
- Fun and friendship.
- A sense of achievement coming from being stretched in what we do and think.
- The need for privacy
Emotional health problems may occur if some these needs are either not met or met unhealthily. Many people confuse needs with wants. We may have what we want, but not what we need.
We look and expect to get our needs met in our present life as adults. Often and unconsciously, we may actually be looking and expecting to get those needs met, that were missing or perceived to be missing when we were children.
As the fulfillment of the child's missing needs is impossible, thwarted expectations can be hard to experience and often people don't know why.
I live near a seaside town. Like many seaside towns in the UK, it has a sizable population on benefits. (NB: Terrible name, they benefit few.) Talking with some of them, many mention that they came to the seaside, because it was the one place that they had happy childhood memories. The drug, alcohol abuse and single parenthood are witness to unmet needs.
I have many wonderful memories of my visits to Australia. I also have several memories than I found concerning. One was the enormous MacDonald's attached to a children's hospital. But for the purposes of this blog subject, I shall never forget the huge advertising banner spread across a motorway bridge: It was a helpline for women gamblers.
Australia is not the panacea, by any means. Nor is the seaside, town, countryside, mountains or anywhere else, if the expectations of what you're hoping for when you get there are unrealistic.
The crock of gold doesn't exist. The rainbow is an illusion and we can become deluded chasing it.
There were many articles written about the news item. I liked the following:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/02/australia-britain-ping-pong-poms?newsfeed=true©RitaLeaman2011
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