Leaving your volunteering role means
you take off many parts of your
Protective Armour: your uniform, professional role, sense of identity and purpose, fitness regime and camaraderie of colleagues. It can be a stressful time so it’s important you look after your physical and mental health.
Some of you will find
other ways to contribute to your organisation and community through working in other public service roles or volunteering. Others will set yourselves challenges to help you maintain your physical (and therefore mental) fitness. You can think of these are your new armour.
As you remove your protective armour,
watch out for unfinished trauma business. It is inevitable there will be some jobs that have stayed with you through your volunteering career. These may be incidents that you can talk about and remember with sadness, but there may also be jobs that haunt you and which you’ve avoided thinking about for years. If you've been doing this, then retirement is when your brain will try to process them. You’ll be dealing with old injuries without your protective armour and that can be hard.
If this is happening, please have a look at the explanation and advice on
What can I do if I'm not OK? part of the site to understand what is happening and what you can do to help yourself.
If you need help, please contact
your GP or one of the services listed on the
welcome page.