Is the Problem You?
I don’t doubt that your boss is really terrible. I also believe you when you say that your family is insufferable during the holidays. It's true, the political climate is horrendous, especially lately. But could part of the problem still be… you? As a therapist, I’m interested in where people search for answers to their ongoing stressors. It’s not uncommon for sessions to be spent considering all the external elements of one’s life: job, relationship, family, and the feelings of never-ending pressures from every direction. But I’ve noticed that sometimes we don’t always seek out change in the places that we can actually make change, and instead focus on what’s largely out of our control. We practice the right way to ask others to change, we set boundaries (and feel that they’re ignored), we go to therapy, we wait. And from where I’m sitting, I believe that often, people underestimate the way that they can access their own internal resources to transform the external elements of their lives.
It begins with taking stock of your inner world. Do you ever feel like the world is happening to you instead of you choosing how to live, or dare I say thrive, within the world? The barrier from getting to point A (world happening to you) to point B (thriving within it), may be less about everyone & everything around you needing to change, and more about evaluating the condition of your inner world & then deciding what, if any, changes need to be made. I’ve found there are some key pillars for this to work best: having an accurate understanding of your mental health, exploring the most significant relationship dynamics in your life, finding acceptance with what is, and integrating an ability to find grounding.
It's possible your stress meter is in the red without you knowing it. Many of us have gotten used to operating with a baseline high level of stress, so much so that we assume a new ‘normal,’ or have forgotten what our regulated ‘normal’ felt like. An indication this may apply to you: you feel fine-ish until something or someone happens and you react. This is when we tend to fall back into a familiar pattern of assuming that it's the dynamics, people, work environments, that are the problem, when really those were just the triggers. It was, instead, perhaps the underlying stress quietly eroding our resilience and the ability to manage the outside world’s impact on us. It’s important to understand the current state of our mental health as an isolated element, first, in order to better understand the quality of our interactions with the world. Unnamed and unmanaged anxiety, depression, grief, burnout, or even undiagnosed neurodivergence, (to name just a few common struggles I see in my office on any given day), can significantly interfere with our ability to feel good about our lives, and sometimes in sneaky, harder-to-identify ways. Understanding ourselves, where and how our mind, bodies, and souls have been functioning lately, and learning tools to manage the symptoms are all crucial.
A common misconception is that the thing that is stressing us needs to change or else we won’t ever not be stressed. “I can’t handle these working conditions, it would be so much better my boss were to be fired,” or “I should just quit, it’ll never get better,” can sound true in our minds and feel true in our experiences, though largely limit the ability that we can give ourself to explore options within the discomfort, rather than just needing to escape it all together. “I’m angry at a friend so I need to tell them to change or cut off the friendship in order to protect myself” can be equally as limiting in its dichotomy. Of course, this perspective is not speaking on abusive dynamics - in which it is entirely appropriate to remove yourself from a situation causing you or others harm. I’m speaking instead to the dynamics in which discomfort feels like pain rather than a signal in your body that needs something to shift.
There’s another option, and it isn't just to ignore your opinions and feelings. It's to acknowledge the emotions, and support yourself as you process them through. It's individual work. Perhaps what can be evaluated and changed is how we relate to the thing bothering us. This is a classic therapist move from me – we love talking about your relationship to anything. To work, to food, to social media, to your depression. Therapists like to know how you personally relate to things, even more than we want to know about the things themselves. Your relationship to pretty much anything can shed light on the state of your internal world and in turn how you operate in your life. The reason your therapist might be interested in your relationship to any and all things is because we want to reflect to our clients the way that people have innate potential and tremendous power to change their lives solely from looking at themselves, and their engagement with the world, rather than projecting difficult feelings and reactions outward.
In Brenee Brown’s new book Strong Ground, she confronts the fact that she, as a researcher who studies resistance to change, has had her own experiences with unintentionally stalling the positive change she wanted in her life. She was living in frustration with the issue (the thing) rather than acceptance, and was trying to rush through the difficult parts without first assessing, and then connecting to, her sources of strength. The story she tells begins with a terrible injury on the pickleball court. Brown takes us briefly through her recovery journey which included a paramount physical therapist who inspired her lightbulb moment– that she needed to connect her mind and body and find grounding before engaging with the task ahead. Brown learned the importance of evaluating yourself– how you are, how grounded you are– before moving forward. Brown began reflecting on her connection to her own physical self: “disembodiment is strange to think about: I am deploying my body in the service of what I want to get done, but I’m not fully inhabiting it, or seeking to understand or appreciate it” (9). It reminded me of how often all of us, my clients, and myself included, become frustrated at an issue without considering our own sense of stability in the first place, and experience of whatever it was that triggered our frustration. After months of recovery, Brown was thrilled to be playing pickleball again and attributes her success to her new mantra of finding the ground. She says, “I’ll even quit playing earlier than planned if I can’t feel the ground and get engaged. It’s not worth it” (11). I think Brown would agree with me that she could alter a lot of things to give her an edge and elevate her pickleball game: her partner, her position on the court, she could even buy a nicer padel. But none of it would make enough of a difference if she didn’t find her ground before each swing. When she connects to it, that is, when she turns inward to assess her current self and her relationship to the ground, and then stabilizes accordingly, she can more successfully handle a curve ball, is more likely to want to stay and play longer, is less likely to blame issues on anything or anyone else.
How do we find our ground in real life? As a somatic practitioner, I practice from a similar lens as Brenee Brown: starting with your physical connection between your body to the ground. Maybe there's something to be said about locking into what keeps us physically tethered in order to keep ourselves mentally and emotionally tethered. Sturdy, resilient, able to withstand the boss, the family dysfunction, the alarming headline. In Somatic Experiencing, we don’t just start and end with body/nervous system based interventions. We utilize everything else that makes us the perfectly imperfect humans we are. We explore elements of cognitive and emotional grounding– or resourcing– and find that the nervous system, and entire self, become almost instantly more resilient as a result. Here’s a quick practice:
Do a body scan. So, try dropping into your body and with awareness notice your internal state. What do you notice? (temperature, constriction, heaviness/lightness, movement- breathing or lack of)
Now, think of one of your top values (friendship, independence, kindness– anything). Think of a time you acted on this value. Think of what it's like for you to even know what your values are.
Body scan again. What do you notice? (Hint: is there a sensation of feeling more settled, calm, motivated, or resilient? Happy? More neutral? No right answer.)
In sessions we might then talk about relevant experiences, about your goals, about what makes you feel confident, connected, optimistic, or resilient. Before long, we’re talking about you, and not everyone else.
Reality Acceptance is another important tool here, sometimes called radical acceptance. This can be awkward to bring up in therapy. My clients look at me like: “I came here so you can tell me to deal with it… myself?” My intention is actually to help you change your relationship to whatever situation is bothering you (see? We like doing this). Radical acceptance doesn’t mean you are okay with a situation, it means you are exercising the use of the rational part of your mind to be clear about what the reality is, what is or what is not in your control, and evaluating your choices from there. It’s accepting what is, rather than what you’d like it to be or wish it were instead. You don’t have to like it to observe it. Frustrated feelings are welcomed, frustratedly trying to change something that can’t be changed is also welcome, but not highly encouraged. The reason why reality acceptance is important, is because we can get caught inside circular conversations about dynamics that we can’t actually change. When we accept the situations and move past these no-way-out loops, the real work happens. We can begin to explore our relationship to the dynamics at play. We look towards ourselves. We process new or familiar emotions that relate to the something that felt triggering. We can practice different ways of finding our grounding. We can assess if there are other things contributing to our stress. We can explore what makes us awesome, capable, and resilient, and how to move through the world with this at the forefront. It's even possible that the frustrating, immovable dynamics can change after all. But it won’t be because you exerted more force on an immovable object. And if they don’t change, we’ve learned how to cope so well it ends up not quite as activating to us as it once was; we are empowered in what we feel we can do.
I’m inspired by the way I’ve seen the momentum of people’s lives change after they turn inwards and truly experience what it is to be in their own bodies and minds. I’ve been a therapist long enough to have seen a pattern of ‘stuckness’ that is perpetuated by focusing on the external sources of our distress, and completely overlooking the fact that we are the vessels experiencing the distress. This means we inherently have an element of power and choice, even if we don’t see it yet or know what to do with it. Being confronted with hard events and situations can create the urge to fight or disengage with the situation, and the next one, and the next. The point is not to exist in isolation away from any potential external stressors, and it's also not to become preoccupied with ourselves, pouring over our every experience. Rather, it's to be able to more-than-tolerate living & existing in our own bodies and minds in order to most effectively and wonderfully engage with the world.