Vow to Get Unstuck
Through the years, a question that I often ask in workshops around the world is “Where are you stuck?” Inevitably, in every workshop, wherever given, there are questions about the questions: “What does this mean?” “Can you give an example?” “Is this all right?” These questions are understandable at one level, but at another, they are symptomatic of the unstated problem of personal authority: Is this what you want, and therefore I will have your approval? Can I do this? And what happens if I guess incorrectly? The presumption is that of the parent-child template no matter how much we contend otherwise. I write this not in judgment or criticism but merely to point out how subtle, how systemic, the template of external authority is, how it persists even in the most productive of lives, and how stuck one may be even around the question “Where are you stuck?”
Still, in all those occasions and geographies, never has anyone asked me to define what I mean by stuck, even when the word is translated into Swedish, Russian, or Portuguese. And everyone starts writing in their journal within one to two minutes, suggesting that the concept of stuckness is quite close to the surface in our lives and that we all have a sense of where we are stuck. But if we find it so easy to bring to mind our stuckness, why is it so difficult to get unstuck?
For millennia, humans have recognized that we are often our own worst enemies, that the same problems show up again and again in our lives. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul observes that though he knows the good, he does not often do it. Why? He employs a Greek word, akrasia, which might be translated as a “dilatory will,” or an insufficiency of intention. Why then — if these stuck places hurt us, embarrass us, and perhaps even spill over onto others — don’t we will more, will better, be more resolved?
We may be sure that wherever there is a stuck place in our life, we have a sore toe from stubbing it, and that a complex has built up around this contentious, tender place. We can, of course, mobilize even more will, which sometimes proves effective, and the obstacle is pushed through. But most of the time, renewed, ever-persistent stuckness prevails.
I suggest two principles of depth psychology that might be useful here. By depth psychology, I mean to take into account the whole person, not just the externalized behavior. I propose to dialogue with the unconscious world (an impossibility from the perspective of limited consciousness), to track the invisible energies that course through the venues of the visible. To that end then, two principles:
It’s not about what it’s about.
What you see is a compensation for what you don’t see.
The first principle tells us that the place of stuckness is not about what it appears to be about. So what then is it about? For example, a common resolve, so easily frustrated, is the desire to lose weight, exercise more, or practice other self-improvement behaviors. But why do these intentions get set so easily aside?
Much of eating, to choose one example, is driven by invisible agendas, the nutritive needs of the psyche, the hungers of the flesh and spirit. The more concrete the need, the more easily understood. The more abstract, the more elusive. If food were just about food, then we could measure the amounts and count the calories rather easily. But food is animated matter. And matter derives from the Mater. What feeds our needs most deeply? We project onto the raw material of food our emotional and social needs, far in addition to the nutritional needs of the organism. Food becomes love, continuity, ready presence. No matter how miserable the day, we can come home, open the fridge, and “lights on, and welcome home!” And why is it we have so many eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, obesity? These disorders are hypermanagement efforts in a world elsewhere beyond our control or a plaintive cry that there is never enough love, security, or reassurance. Why not? When the life of the spirit is compromised by the decline of the mediatorial institutions and connective imagery to the transcendent, one transfers the search for the numinous — that which speaks to the soul, engages the spirit — to some surrogate such as power, business, sex, satiety, or a palliative substance.
So, how difficult it then becomes to regulate by will alone these metaphor-carrying, symbol-embodying substances. We think it’s about food alone, sustenance alone, but it is about all that is missing in our life — and why would we let go of our available anodyne, our treatment plan? That is where the stuckness originates and then grows armored with Maginot Lines of defense, rationalization, and reinforcements. So, we have to analyze what the stuck place is really about. Also, we need to recognize that what we are readily able to identify, the behavior, for example, is only what is visible, while it is the invisible mechanism that runs our lives.
Under each stuck place there is a wire, so to speak, that reaches down into the archaic field and activates a field of anxiety of which we are largely unaware but that has enough power to reinforce whatever complex has been holding the line against change. As anxiety, it is amorphous, free-floating, imperceptible, yet quite real. If we can reach into that obscuring cloud, we might find specific fears. To give an example, if I let go of my daily connection to the food as a reassuring object, what then will be there in the darkness for me? I recall a woman in a bad relationship saying to me that she would not let go of that hand until there was another hand in the darkness for her. So we cling to that which in the end offers only a modicum of nurturance and leaves behind its traces in the corpulent body. So too of sexual dependency, ritualized behaviors, and all that seems to offer continuity and connection in a disjunctive world. What numinous links were once provided for many through tribal mythology are presently scattered amid the secular world, where individuals now must search for their own connections.
In the end, there are two existential threats to our survival and well-being: the fear of overwhelmment and the fear of abandonment. In the encounter with the former, we are reminded of our relative powerlessness in a large and potentially invasive world. This discrepancy, this unpredictability of the environment, is inculcated in childhood, reinforced and ratified by multiple experiences of the power of the world over our capacities. No wonder so many power stratagems show up in intimate relationships, for who does not want to stake out something measurable, predictable, and controllable.
Similarly, the opposite existential threat, abandonment, means the person is driven to achievement in order to attain the reassuring accolades of the other, or transfers the need for nurturance, constancy, or reassurance to some promising surrogate yet estranges the other through coercive behaviors. The person might also seek a position in life wherein approval and reassurance are structurally provided, or become addicted to a substance whose presence is easily managed yet whose payoff in satisfaction progressively declines. This need to connect to, hold fast to, and fixate the other is one of our most common human patterns in reacting to change, discontinuity, and ambiguity.
It is for this reason that fundamentalisms of all kinds, in all corners of the world, respond to the changes in our time, the deconstruction of presumed fixities, with so much militancy and even violence. Those same troubled souls would not insist on the medicine practiced millennia ago were they to visit the ER of their hospitals tonight, yet they insist on tribal, agrarian, and parochial dogmas ratified by tradition in their tribal histories, with all of their primitive rules and prejudices. All of this disparate and desperate behavior is a reaction to abandonment, however unconsciously it is playing out in the depths of their unconscious. As they are abandoned by certainty, so they grow desperate to reconstitute certainty’s presumptive authority, its presumptive presence.
So, we begin to get a picture of why it is so difficult to get unstuck. The stuckness is not about what it is about, and what we are able to see is usually only a surface manifestation of what we don’t see. What we don’t see is the way in which this sensitive organism we are mobilizes its defenses, its projections, and its fixations on objects, behaviors, images, practices, codes, institutions, and dogmas precisely because they seem to offer some relief from the archaic anxiety to which we all are subjected.
None of us is free of addictive patterns — by this I mean reflexive anxiety management systems. Frankly, we have to have these systems, but they can come to manage us rather than the other way around. That is when the cost of the addiction accumulates. Reflexive means that our response is automatic, not reasoned, not nuanced nor differentiated, and replete with rationalizations assembled in advance to defend the behavior the moment it is questioned. Anxiety is ubiquitous and drives the human animal, so it is understandable why we would develop our protective techniques. Through repetition, these protections get locked in and become systems that take on a life of their own, becoming the titular governors of our separate kingdoms. It is typically these management systems that we vow to replace or transcend, but this also explains why they are so resistant to our wills. To replace the systems will mean we either replace them with other systems, perhaps even more pervasive and costly, or stand nakedly before our two greatest threats, overwhelmment and abandonment.
Accordingly, we either have to make peace with our stuckness and move on as best we can or risk the activation of the archaic anxiety that pools in the historic basement for all of us. If we can discern what the stuck place is really about, then we will have flushed a specific fear out of the morass of disabling anxiety. In most cases, that fear will not happen, but it could, and we carry always the memory of when it did happen and was too much for us. Such fears include implicit premises, such as “If I move forward on this front, I will be out there alone, or I will lose the understanding and support of loved ones or my tribe — and I will not be able to bear that.”
Naturally, we do not think this consciously, for if we did, we might first realize that such will not happen, or second, that were it to happen, we could manage the cost, given that a resilient person has grown in place of the dependent, powerless child. But third, sometimes we have to go there, the place of the fear, in order to grow up, to recover our lives from all the assembled defenses, of which denial, repetition, and rationalization are the accomplices. Only in those moments when we take life on, when we move through the archaic field of anxiety, when we drive through the blockage, do we get a larger life and get unstuck. Ironically, we will then have to face a new anxiety, the anxiety of stepping into a life larger than has been comfortable for us in the past. This growth itself can be so intimidating that we often choose to stay with the old stuckness. We have to want something larger, really want it. We have to risk feeling worse before feeling better, and we have to risk the loss of the oh-so-comforting misery of stuckness.