FIELD NOTES #01
The Apartment That Wasn't the Problem
This is a new series documenting observations from client work. Unlike the Monday essays (which explore frameworks and concepts), Field Notes show how this thinking works in practice—real situations, real challenges, real shifts. All details are anonymised to protect client confidentiality.
Case: Woman, recently retired, asked for a consultation. Surface question: Should I leave my current apartment and look for a new one, or stay?
Initial assessment: The question felt mundane. Too concrete for a symbolic thinking session. But she specifically asked for this format, which suggested something underneath.
Opening move: I asked what was wrong with the current apartment.
Response: Nothing, really. Nothing broken. The place functioned fine. Good location. Comfortable enough.
Signal: The pause before "comfortable enough." The qualifier doing work.
Context that emerged: She’d worked for the same company for many years. They found this apartment for her when she relocated. She never chose it herself. Now retired, perhaps she was thinking it was time to get a place she actually selected.
That made sense as a narrative. Retirement as reclaiming agency. Choosing for yourself after years of institutional decisions.
But it still felt thin.
Method: We used the cards to investigate. Not for answers—for apertures. Places where the question could breathe differently.
What came up, slowly, across multiple pulls:
Her difficult relationship with her parents. The childhood house she needed to escape. As soon as she found work, she left. Not gradually—immediately. There was urgency in that leaving. Relief in the distance finally achieved.
But also: the apartment the company found wasn’t just a place to live. It held years. Memories built there. A version of herself that formed in those rooms. Professional identity, yes, but also something about safety, friendships, independence, distance from the original home.
The structure beneath the structure:
This wasn’t about choosing an apartment. It was about whether “home” meant:
A place you choose (agency, autonomy, adult selfhood)
A place that holds your history (continuity, the self that’s been lived)
A place that wasn’t the childhood house (freedom, escape maintained)
The company apartment solved all three, but in a way that felt passive. She hadn’t chosen it. It chose her. And now, in retirement, with time to think, that passivity bothered her.
But leaving meant abandoning the history built there. Starting over. And starting over raised the question: what if the new place didn’t feel like home either? What if “home” was the problem, not the apartment?
What shifted during the session:
The question stopped being practical (this apartment or a different one) and became structural (what does home mean to me, and why does that word feel complicated?).
She didn’t need to decide whether to move. She needed to examine what “home” triggered. Why it felt easier when someone else chose it. Why choosing for herself felt both necessary and impossible.
Follow-up: A week later, she called. She decided to stay. Not because the apartment was perfect, but because she realised the issue wasn’t the apartment at all.
It was her concept of home. And that concept wouldn’t change by changing locations.
Observation:
Surface questions often contain the structure they’re trying to avoid.
“Should I move?” was easier to ask than “Why does the idea of home still feel like someone else’s decision?”
The session’s work wasn’t answering the first question. It was making the second question visible.
Once it became visible, the apartment question dissolved. She wasn’t stuck choosing between two apartments. She was stuck between two ideas of what home means.
And that’s a different kind of work entirely.
Pattern recognition:
This happens frequently. A client frames a decision as binary (A or B, stay or go, this or that) when the actual tension lives in the framing itself.
The question “Should I leave my apartment?” carried assumptions:
That home is a place you choose
That choosing means agency
That agency resolves the discomfort
But those assumptions were the problem, not the apartment.
The cards didn’t answer whether she should move. They created space for the question beneath the question to surface. And once it surfaced, the original question stopped mattering.
Note for practice:
When a question arrives feeling too practical—too focused on logistics, too solvable with a pros-and-cons list—pay attention. That concreteness is often protective. It's easier to ask "Should I move apartments?" than to face what the apartment represents.
The real question is the one the person hasn’t found language for yet.
Symbolic work creates conditions where that language can form.
Not by answering the stated question, but by holding space until the unstated one emerges.
Status: Active / Observation documented
Follow-up required: None. Client integrated the reframe.
Cross-reference: See also concepts of identity fusion with place, retirement as identity transition, home as symbolic rather than literal structure.