Hello and welcome.
This week I want to reflect on a message that seems to be growing louder with time. I see it in my clients, in myself, and in conversations everywhere. The message?
Your worth equals productivity.
And on the flip side of that sits:
Rest equals laziness.
I do not know how this lands with you or if this resonates with your reality in any way. I notice that when I write these words, I have so much to say about these messages, it is hard to know where to start from.
There is so much I want to say about this that I momentarily feel paralysed by it.
So, let me start by asking this question, which I will then explore in more depth:
What happens to us when doing has become a mechanism for survival?
When doing takes over, we lose time and space.
Our ground fades in the speed of daily demands.
Our ability to respond narrows, and before we know it, we are reacting.
And in that reactivity, growth becomes harder to access.
I often come back to a quote by Viktor Frankl that has stayed with me for years:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The pressure to keep up and the need to be productive shrink that space.
And when the space disappears, so does our capacity to pause.
The more we do, the less we know how to be with ourselves, and the more caught we feel in anxiety and discomfort we want to numb.
Doing more becomes the numbing mechanism.
When working with trauma, this mechanism becomes even more apparent.
As part of my practice, I am one of the online therapist team at a charity that supports male survivors of sexual abuse. Every week, I sit with these men who want the pain to go away.
They just want to live a “normal life”.
They want a quick fix to make it stop.
There is a part of them that thinks that if they come to the sessions and they work really hard, they will overcome the trauma faster. All their nervous system wants is relief. Most of them have learnt strategies to numb the pain as the only way to survive the horrible experiences they had to endure.
When the adaptation has become the fix, learning to slow down and do less can be a really scary thought. The most common fear is:
If I allow myself to sit with the feelings will I ever come out of that place?
After learning that doing something to move away from pain whether through substances, relationships or work stopping and simply being can feel terrifying and easy to dismiss.
I know this mechanism intimately.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend, sharing my frustration about a situation that seemed to have come to a halt.
I had done all the things I could think of to shift things and nothing seemed to be happening. What was going on? I heard myself ask with some confusion in my voice. We had a good conversation about it, although it took me the entire journey home and some time at home to actually get a powerful insight.
Most of my life “doing” had become the way I had got myself out of those unpleasant situations I did not want to be in.
When I decided to change careers and become a psychotherapist, I worked full time through my training.
When I wanted to build my private practice and leave the full time job that was slowing me down I worked three jobs to transition out into my current part time role at the charity.
When I wanted to show “the world” that I am more than just a foreigner who came here for a better life I excelled academically.
And so, doing became the mechanism that moved me from the pain of feeling not enough.
I did more to run away from the pain.
I did more to fix the situations I did not want to be any more.
I did more because sitting with the pain, the loss and the discomfort was too much to bear.
Was that wrong?
I do not think it was.
I think that is human.
And I also know that what once worked does not necessarily need to become the perpetual response.
When working with trauma, not only in the organisation but also in my practice, I often see how my clients adapt to it in different ways.
Some use work as an antidote to painful memories and feelings. Productivity becomes a way to regulate their nervous system.
Others seek self-improvement in various forms to avoid the agonising introject of not being “good enough.” They believe that if they reach a certain status or gain recognition, the validation will finally be enough.
I am often most moved by those who perpetually attend to others in order to avoid sitting with themselves. I see this as a two-fold mechanism in which not only they avoid sitting with themselves and their feelings, but also they model what deep down they would like to receive themselves from others but dare not ask.
Seeing this in my clients and in myself is what led me to write this post.
The question that kept popping up in my head was:
What would happen if, instead of doing more, I sat with the discomfort and listened to what it had to say?
I cannot say I have an answer yet. And even if I did, it would only be an answer for me.
What I can share about where I am with it so far is that I decided to support myself by experimenting with a “doing ban”.
A what? I hear you ask…
A “doing ban” in which I stopped trying to fix the situation that was frustrating me for four weeks. I am two weeks in, and I feel less frustrated, more reflective, more curious, and I am sleeping better than I have in a while.
By no means is this ban a “bed of roses” or my path to enlightenment.
What not doing has created is space.
Space for the uncomfortable feelings that were locked away for years while I was training and working three jobs to emerge and take their rightful place so that I can engage in meaningful dialogue.
As I learn to be here and now, with all the feelings that surface.
Another caveat I feel is important to include is that not doing does not mean to be in the uncomfortable feelings 24/7.
It does not mean sitting with discomfort alone.
It does not mean sharing the feelings with someone is being indulgent.
After all, relational wounds are healed in relationships.
And when we find it difficult to hold pain and grief alone, there can be immense healing in sharing them with others.
This is one of the reasons why being part of a group or a community can be so powerful.
Because sometimes what an individual cannot hold alone can be held by the community they are part of.
But that is for another post…
Going back to the question of what might happen if we stopped doing, and experimenting with it myself, what I can say is this:
I do not know where it will lead.
But naming it and sharing it has already shifted something.
I feel less alone.
Perhaps learning to be is less about withdrawing from the world, and more about allowing ourselves to stay in it differently.
And I wonder what might unfold for you.
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