The Search for Fulfillment by Susan Krauss Whitbourne

Author:Susan Krauss Whitbourne [Whitbourne, Susan Krauss]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51483-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Frank

A major player in what at the time was the highly profitable mortgage loan sector, Frank should have been sitting on top of the world. All of the facts at my disposal indicated that he was a wealthy and powerful man: his prestigious occupation, his address in a swanky neighborhood. But we know that material success is not the key to happiness. I knew from his answers to my questions that he was dissatisfied with his life, cynical and distrustful, inhibited, uncertain of his identity, and despairing about his life’s decisions. To understand the discrepancy between his outer success and his inner turmoil, I began to examine in depth the on-the-record revelations of his past business dealings.

But first of all, how did Frank get to be so despondent about his life? His early days seemed promising enough. In his late twenties, as a finance major getting a degree from a top program, he took a low-paying job in a community reinvestment corporation, where he could put his training to use in an important public-service role. As a financial advisor, he could invent the programs necessary to help develop housing and retail properties in the rundown urban areas of a Rust Belt city experiencing high unemployment and crime rates. His work directly benefited thousands of people. Perhaps reflecting his sense of commitment to working for the public good, Frank’s identity scores showed a large jump between his college days and his early thirties. That would suggest that Frank had found himself and his purpose in life through this work.

There were some warning signs, though, even at that time, that all might not have a happy ending. His identity score at the age of thirty-one was actually the only one of the set showing favorable resolution of his personality issues. All the other scores were in the unfavorable direction. Something else was going on to depress his other personality scores, perhaps reflected in the fact that he was to divorce only a few years after that phase of testing was completed.

It’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma: It’s possible that Frank’s low personality scores caused family strife, or it could be that his family strife caused his personality scores to dip. That he may have been suffering inner conflicts that contributed to the disintegration of his marriage is supported by the fact that although his scores bounced back somewhat by his fifties, they were never to go as high as they were in college. What might have contributed to this downward trend? He was moving up the rungs of the reinvestment company, reaching a high-level executive position. It would not make sense, then, that he would have been fired. But, in fact, he ended his employment in his midthirties to enter the growing private mortgage-lending industry, eventually to go straight to the top of a major corporation, where presumably his salary made a precipitous rise.

Now let’s go back to those personality scores just prior to leaving his community-reinvestment position and his feelings of frustration in his early thirties.

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