The Art of Knowing When to Stay Stuck

Anxiety

I come from a family of do-ers.

My mom was a nurse and high-ranking officer in the Army and my dad, a private, owned and ran the family flooring business.

I grew up watching my parents solve problems together, stretch a dollar, have huge financial setbacks and somehow manage to give my brother and me all they could. The 2-bedroom apartment that was home meant that my brother and I took turns sleeping on the sofa while the other had a stint in a real bedroom. We’d swap every year or so.

Our manner of operating as a family was to fix things, chase goals, get better and do more.

On to the next task, project or destination.

Same with you?

Technology in this modern era lends itself to always being on the go. It has us do-ing rather than be-ing. Who hasn’t stood in line at CVS while pruning their inbox or purchased a pet cam while waiting for the movie to begin? Queuing up anywhere has become a reason to jump on email, Instagram, FB or Bumble.

When was the last time you stood still? Took in your surroundings? Noticed what is was like to live in your own skin?

It had been a while for me, too.

I recently came across a study which gave scientific credence to the fact that many people are uncomfortable with their own company and will do almost anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts, including receive a minor electric shock. In the study, feeling the shock was preferable to sitting idle with too much time to think.

Not joking.

What Should I Do?

A question I get all the time is “What do I need to do? Can’t you give me a homework to do?

I understand. Doing something … anything, gives us a sense of control.

Yet, the capacity to know ourselves – to be self-aware – rests with our ability to be present with ourselves. Growth is less about “What do I need to do?” and more about “What do I need to understand?” Experiencing our experiences is key to solving our problems and growing. To make an emotionally intelligent decision about what we need in order to get unstuck, we must first accept the fact that we are where we are.

I know what you’re thinking.

“That’s dumb. Backwards. I’ll feel even worse if I accept my stuckness.” Let me explain.

Have you ever tried to untangle a snarled and braided mass of chain, perhaps necklaces that have all but mated in the back of a drawer? Or try to uncoil a long garden hose whose ends have mysteriously folded in on themselves to form a snaky, knotted mess? Anytime I’ve come at this sort of project with a histrionic desperation, the knots won. In fact, they got worse, tighter and tighter. What to do? I’ve learned with experience to tell myself to settle down, to look at the bundle before me with the eye of a detached observer rather than the mindset of a sputtering electrical wire, popping and sizzling my way through. To use the best approach, I had to let myself be comfortable with the stuckness of it all and not let my frustrations overtake me.

I decided to let my gaze follow the twists and tucks of the intertwined mess with a tiny bit of objectivity. Doing this for a moment or two allowed me to feel that I was bigger than the clump instead of the other way around. I could then coax one chain out, yes, painstakingly, find where it intersected with the next and after some time, thread my way free.

As humans, we face instances of stuckness on a much grander scale.

For instance, one moment we feel excited about the prospect of opening up to new love. The next moment we talk ourselves out of it, our mind fleeing from scary possibilities – the potential that we may feel rejected or the inevitability of disappointment inherent in every human relationship. Or, we take on an exciting work project, one that could quite possibly bring us more visibility, get us noticed by the right people. Suddenly and without conscious reasoning, we derail our enthusiasm. We get distracted, delayed, deflated. We decide to let someone else have the opportunity to be praised. Or criticized. Or judged. We’re not about to take the gamble, so we forfeit our turn.

Stuckness doesn’t feel comfortable. It’s no wonder we find ways to escape it. We reach into the fridge when we’re not hungry, make purchases when we don’t need anything, watch hours and hours of even good television just to numb our own discomfort.

But escaping usually compounds our problems.

I recently learned how Navy Seals “drown-proof themselves” in a blog written by one of my most favorite blog writers, Henneke Duistermaat of Enchanting Marketing, who teaches bloggers how they can become more enchanting with their writing. You may think that what Navy Seals go through is unrelated to anything the rest of us could possibly experience. You’d be wrong.

In her piece, Ms. Duistermaat describes how the Seals deal with getting stuck, how they have to be able to think things through and not panic, especially if something goes wrong in the water. To train for this, the Seals are dropped into a 9-foot deep pool with their hands and feel bound. They have 20 minutes to complete a series of death-defying maneuvers. They must pass all the underwater events, or they are considered a failure and removed from training.

The key to their survival? Is it strength? Endurance? Stamina? Surprisingly, no. The number one factor that this exemplary group of people rely on for survival is their ability to refrain from “do-ing” and simply give into the reality of their situation. They must allow themselves to sink to the bottom without wiggling or thrashing. Once there, they bend their knees and push up, allowing the momentum to propel them to the surface. They can then get a quick breath of air and repeat the process for almost 20 minutes until the final event which is flipping themselves upside down to retrieve a small object from the pool’s floor with their teeth.

Along the way, the Navy Seal candidate will either relax in the water or fail. In essence, survival lies in the willingness to surrender to the difficult and dangerous situation. Surrender in this case doesn’t mean to give up. It means to resist the urge to fight so that every bit of the candidate’s resources can then be harnessed. Our human tendency is to expend our energy fighting, to rip the ropes off, to pull at the tangles, to do something.
But there are times when it’s better to do nothing. When you think about it, choosing to do nothing but surrender is doing something. It is deciding, which is perhaps the singularly most survival-inducing thing we can do. Try it.

The next time you feel stuck, instead of thrashing about in an unwieldy panic, scrambling to find a solution or get something done or say “yes” to someone’s request right away, sit with your discomfort a bit. Give yourself a little room to catch your breath. Think of those Navy Seals. Picture them bobbing, floating, flipping, allowing their maneuvers to take their cues from a calm mind. Picture them surviving and surviving strong.

When we resist the urge to fight and instead, use our mind to accept where we are, we can find an unexpected sense of calm. We can anchor ourselves in the knowledge that self-acceptance is a strategy, one worth choosing. By acknowledging the reality of things, rather than running from it, we can decide how we wish to get through challenging experiences without requiring the experiences to conform to our wishes. They seldom do.
Even during chaos and turbulence, awareness of who we are at our core becomes the stake in the ground that keeps us from getting swept away – swept away by other peoples’ expectations, opinions, unresolved hurts – and our tendency to be defined by them.

So, go ahead and DO something. Decide. Choose. Acknowledge. Remind yourself of who you are at your essence.

Middle School Scars

Anxiety

To the girls in middle school who left peanuts on my desk with a note that read, “To the girl with the big ears, the circus is waiting,” it took me a few decades, but I’m over it.

Has it happened to you, too? I’d venture to guess it has.

Very few of us made it through our middle school years without encountering mean girls (or boys) whose mission in life, it seemed, was to make us feel badly about ourselves. Other kids who were cooler or bigger, or who cornered the market on social power banned together (they typically travel in coteries), to call attention, mock and otherwise shred our already sponge like pre-adolescent self-image. At a time when fitting in matters more than almost anything else in the world, nearly everything that is thrown at our young sense of ourselves sticks hard to the back wall of our mind, and often does so for life.

As it turns out, I have my father’s ears. It’s not only that they’re too large for my head, they stick out by approximately 75% or at least that is my subjective estimate based on the mental portrait that hangs on my back wall. In middle school, I wore my longish brown hair tucked behind my ears. I thought it looked best that way, parted straight down the center with one side draped across my acne dabbled forehead. Though slightly frizzy, I made sure it always smelled good. Clairol’s Herbal Essence conditioner took care of that. Woodsy yet fresh. I was set.

Apparently, my oversized ears caught the attention of Jo Ellen (not her real name) and became a lightening rod for the ridicule and taunting she doled out. Never directly to my face, of course. I remember her as pretty as pretty can be, polite and generous to her friends, buying them snacks and bringing in delicious-looking sandwiches on homemade Italian bread. She was funny and her prominent Roman nose was often the brunt of her own self-deprecating humor. I admired her look in those days. I even appreciated her noticeable nose. Maybe because it was the exact same nose my dad had. I got my mother’s.

One morning, as I approached my school desk, I could see there was something scattered across the top of it. When I got closer, I saw what it was. There, to greet me, was a pile of peanuts in their shells with a handwritten note that read something like, “To the girl with the ears, the circus is waiting.” I don’t recall which was worse, the gut punch message itself or the fact that Jo Ellen and her cohorts were poised and waiting for me to discover their calculated prank. When I did, they had a good giggle. They didn’t say a word, but their eye contact with each other said it all. They were in. I was out. They were good. I was nothing. Looking back, I have less to say about how scalding that moment was and more to lament about how many years the replay of it followed me. Like a cataract that clouded my vision of myself for years, decades even, my view of myself was skewed in the direction of how Jo Ellen and the others saw me. I was never able to see myself independent of what I internalized about myself that day. The rest of me – my grades, my friendships, my accomplishments (there’s been a few) – were organized around a core belief that something like that could happen again at any moment. I could walk back to my desk, unsuspectingly, and be confronted with my imperfections, my short comings, my shame. I’ve worked hard to avoid that. I worked at it even when I had no idea I was working. I suppose I became numb to the sting and just used to my strategy to defend against it.

The inner middle schooler in us does not go away easily, if ever. The hurt we felt back then can’t be erased. It happened. It’s a fact of our lives. Denying it won’t help. Suppressing it will make it worse. Going these routes will only siphon our psychic energy making the juice we need for living well a scarce resource. Not good. Scarcity makes life an uphill climb. So, what can we do to free ourselves from the grip of outdated beliefs that have imbedded themselves into our psyches? How can we undo the reflexive tendency to view ourselves in situation after situation through Jo Ellen’s lens? How can we see ourselves on our own terms, according to our own intelligent and realistic self-assessment?

Here are a few of the steps I took to warm up to the unfamiliar and experimental notion that Jo Ellen and the other middle school girls no longer define me. Try them on for yourself and see what happens.

1. I called my younger self to mind.

I pictured her as a person outside myself. I allowed myself to envision her the moment she discovered the peanuts. I noticed her hurt and didn’t turn away from her. I decided that if she felt it, I wasn’t going to let her feel it alone. I decided to shoulder the pain with her. I let myself be touched by her pain. I stayed there for a few heartfelt moments. I chose compassion over harshness. I chose to care for her for being hurt rather than despise her for being weak.

2. I talked to her…like a good friend, not a drill sergeant.

I told my innocent, inner middle schooler that I not only recognize how badly she feels, I have her back. I told her that now that I’m older and bigger, I can protect her against bullies and mean-spirited people. Even those who mean no harm but are clumsy, insensitive and out-of-touch. I will put up stop signals. I will say “no” when necessary. I will fight for her. I told her I will never leave her. I committed to be the protector she needed back then but didn’t have. I took an unshakable stance that if anyone tried to harm her, they would have to go through me. Few would be so foolish as to try. I told her she could trust me.

3. I validated her.

I told her that she didn’t deserve to be treated in the manner she was. While it happened, it wasn’t right. I reminded her that the world is full of people who themselves are hurting and they handle it by hurting others. That way, they don’t feel so alone. Although it’s counterproductive and hurtful, it is also one of the givens of life.

4. I let her cry if she needed to.

I let her express what she couldn’t express all that time ago. I told her she is entitled to her emotions, her anger and her sadness, and that I deeply want to know how she feels. I let her know I can handle it.

5. I told her it’s okay to feel sad.

I told my adult self that although I felt I needed to hide the true “me” all this time, I can think about being the person I truly am. I let myself know it’s okay to grieve all the lost time and opportunities trying to protect myself.

6. I told her she will never be alone again now that she has me.

I let her know that she has a protector now. If anyone tries to harm her, they’ll have to get past me first. I have her back and I always will. No exceptions. I made sure she knew that she is my purpose now: I am responsible for her safety and happiness. Then I envisioned myself holding her close until she almost melted into me.

My inner pre-teen and I have a lot of heart-to-hearts these days. I’ve gotten better at remembering to reassure her, console her, honor her. I’ve come to love her. How can I not? She is lovable. She always was.

As for Jo Ellen….I ran into her a few years ago at a department store in NYC. We exchanged pleasantries. She was still as pretty as pretty can be. She seemed softer than I remembered. I liked her old nose better. As we spoke, I felt a warmth swell inside my chest, grateful that my cataracts have cleared up, grateful that I can love as fiercely as I do. Grateful that my inner 7th grader and I are pals for life and share one heart.