By L. Lanie Doerr, LPC, MA 

5-minute read 

Our second of 3 risk factors in my cultural & identity model is Fishbowl Living.  As a farmer, your work is always on display.  If a person owns and operates a main street business, say, an insurance agency or they make beef jerky, and they lose their business due to poor management or some sort of disaster known only to themselves . . .  

they can close up shop & tell their customers, “I’ve decided to move or pursue another or go back to college” – whatever they want.  

As long as their obligations to their customers are fulfilled, they don’t actually have to tell everyone their reasons for closing the business.   

When a farmer goes out of business, everyone in the county knows.  Probably in multiple counties.   

All the equipment gets lined up & the auction fliers are hung in windows and on bulletin boards.  Maybe there is land for sale, & that draws eyes like nothing else. You’d almost think they weren’t making any more of it.   

Risk Factors

One way farming is different from most professions is that some aspects of it are completely public – at least apparent to other farmers, your competitors, friends, neighbors, and agribusiness folks.   

The farm families in your community most likely know who farms what.  So, if you farm the quarter south of the old Williamson place, folks know if you’ve had a crop failure or success.    

Now let’s consider what people in general fear.  According to NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), fear of public speaking ranks #1, with 75% of people fearing it the most.  So, the 75% of people who fear public speaking may fear embarrassment or public rejection.  A farmer cannot choose to keep his work private.   

Another potentially useful tie-in to help us explore this concept more fully is something I learned in a training with Steve Halley, co-founder/director of the Family Peace Initiative, a Kansas professional counseling organization that teacher their mode of reducing domestic violence to people all over the world.  Steve stated that men who batter (who hit their family members) do not have in common that they were hit as children.   

What they do have in common is that they were humiliated as children.   

It is easy to see how the fear of farm failure could cause a lot of pain. Physical pain & emotional pain have almost identical pathways in the brain. Emotional pain is real. Fear of embarrassment or rejection should be addressed as a risk factor. Ignoring it won't make it go away.

  Remember my analogy of healthy soil or a healthy human body from the last post where I described that it is not necessary to eliminate all harmful bacteria.  We don’t have to eliminate all risk factors to have good mental health.  We just need a good ratio of protective to risk factors.   

Protective Factors 

To counter the effects of fishbowl living and the potential for embarrassment or humiliation, we can make or discover meaning in our lives.  This is not “putting a positive spin” on events.  This will be deeply personal and does not have to make sense to anyone but you.   

Let me give an example from the baseball movie, Field of Dreams.  Doc Graham is portrayed as a young baseball player who only got one game in the major leagues.  He later went on to become a doctor who engaged in a lot of charitable work.  His is a true story by the way.  Doc may have made meaning from his lack of success in the major leagues as what brought him into the field of medicine, where he achieved so much good for so many people.  

To make meaning, one must first radically accept his life as it actually is.  To build real meaning, we must have real bricks to build with.  Many people find meaning in their relationship with God or their higher power.  The meaning you discover is up to you, but he who dies with the most toys certainly does not win.