Grief and bereavement ... phase 4

Today is Friday. I know that I am not supposed to do it yet I am doing it anyway. Yup, counting the days since bapa passed away. I know it is not healthy yet I am doing it anyway. I count the days to remind myself of him as well as how short life is.

My mind is pretty preoccupied with research. Although I am still doing the transcribing, yet when I got the book that I bought from Amazon yesterday, I haven't do any transcribing today. I am really got hooked up with this book. It is about thematic analysis of qualitative data. Kak N***** told me about it and I bought it last Monday. I got it yesterday. I told Zac about it and before I know it Nihra (who is down under in New Zealand) also got interested with the book within a day! The power of networking. I told Zac because she is also doing something about mixed method research. Thematic analysis is one of the ways to analyse qualitative data. There are other methods. I intend to use it because it suits with the type of data that I have.

The book was well written and as if the author is having a conversation with me aka the reader. Zac told me that the book is rather "old" and thus it could be obsolete. My justification is since Boyatzis is The Man in thematic analysis, it would be unfair to leave him out from any discussion about thematic analysis. Thematic analysis was developed from what psychologists used in their thematic apperception test (TAT). In this sense, it was developed to analyse research data rather than data from psychological therapy. David McClelland was The Man in the creation of TAT. I told Zac, it would be helpful if we know a wide array of methods that we can use for qualitative analysis, just in case we might be asked by the examiner during our viva later on.

Alhamdulillah, I have such friends to share such information. I am blessed that I found such people in this journey as this journey would be much harder had I not have them as my friends. We can talk, we can argue, we can "kutuk" each other without hurting each other feeling because even though we might have our differences yet we know that we will be there for each other without fail.

I wonder if trust is given or we earn it. We expect that people give their trust to us. We think that we might deserve to earn it. Yet, what make people trust or earn trust from others are based on subjective matter.

I trust people when they don't have anything to hide. They are true to their self. Most of the time, from my thematic analysis of people behavior, some people are so afraid to open up (even though they say that they are open minded and easy going type of people). They expect that other people to understand them whereby they themselves do not understand what they want or need on a first place. In short, they are having what we termed as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. We have it most of the time. Just the most important is what we do with the cognitive dissonance that we experienced. Active and optimistic approach to overcome the cognitive dissonance are healthy for one's psychological state.

I am not talking about spirituality here because I believe spiritual health comes from spiritual activities or ibadah (and since every single act is an ibadah, our spiritual state is always at stake).

Coming back to the subject matter of trust, do I trust myself? Trust is different from confidence. I might feel confident about myself, my ability, yet do I trust myself? One might feel hurt due to the fact of not being trusted. My stand is I don't care much if people trust me or not. What matter most how I trust myself. People's trust are subjected on their preferences and perhaps social values that might be different from mine. So, it is something which is beyond my control. I can't control what people believe, don't I? I trust myself that I will be true to myself no matter what. Thus, I will be true to other people around me. If some of them feel that I am not true to them, it is their stand that I will respect. I don't need people to understand me. To understand myself is a challenge in itself that I have to struggle with. Thus, to understand others is another challenge that I should not care too much about it. After all, I have so many things to handle at the moment. Cheers!