Facing Negativity
Our experience of difficulty depends entirely on the meaning we bring to it. Some perspectives empower us and some render us incapacitated. How we hold the circumstances of our lives can either grow us or take us down.
Mary was 48 and had spent her whole life driven to make it big in the corporate world. She arrived at my office and said, "I am totally burnt out and am just going through the motions of my life." She wasn't sleeping. Her relationship was suffering. She'd already been to a psychologist, and that work had shown her why she felt stuck. Knowing why hadn't moved anything.
When I asked why she didn't leave the job or change it, she said even the thought felt like torture. Her sense of self rose and fell with her work. She'd spent decades getting to the top, and now that she'd made it she was looking around asking, is this as good as it gets.
She said the money was why she couldn't move. She also knew, when she looked at it, that her family would be fine on less. The money was the cover story.
Underneath it was this. Her mother drank, and was sometimes present and sometimes gone altogether. Mary had built a life of professional accolades so she would never again feel the way she felt as a little girl: scared and destitute. That was the deal. Keep achieving and you never have to feel it.
Most of us carry a version of that sentence. I never want to feel that again. The stories that run our lives are not just about succeeding. They are about not feeling something.
So the work with Mary wasn't reframing her situation. It was meeting the feeling the whole structure was built to avoid. When she turned toward it, it showed up in her body: fluttering in the chest, queasiness in the stomach, a knot in the throat.
Clients ask me, "Why would I want to be with this shit?" Fair question. The answer I keep coming back to is that whatever you refuse to feel gets to run things. The fear of ending up destitute had been making Mary's decisions for forty years. She had never once looked at it directly.
When she met the terror instead of managing it, it loosened. Not gone. Loosened. She stopped being afraid of feeling it, and the job question got simpler. Over the next six months she found her way to work that looked, from the outside, like a demotion. She sleeps. She has dinner with her girlfriend. She is not going through the motions.