Why Do I Continue To Feel Stuck Despite “Doing The Work”?
There comes a point in the healing journey when you’ve read the self-help books, you’ve talked about your problems in therapy, you understand where your issues stem from…
and yet… you still feel stuck!
It can be really frustrating and confusing to feel this way after doing so much work on self-growth. This blog offers a map to help you cross the bridge from understanding your symptoms to actually feeling better.
The Lightbulb Moment
Everyone who starts on a mental health journey experiences a moment of insight where we understand ourselves from a new perspective. Maybe we realize we had a narcissistic parent. Maybe we learn that we have people-pleasing tendencies that stem from childhood. Maybe we experience crippling self-doubt because we were never offered reassurance that we are good enough just the way we are. Whatever the thing is, once this light turns on, it cannot be turned off. From here, we have a choice. We can learn how to heal from the source of our pain or we can deny that it exists. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably chosen the former, which led you to the Learning Phase.
The Learning Phase
Once we realize something is wrong, we do our best to learn about it. We follow mental health experts who specialize in different topics, such as adult children of emotionally immature parents, perfectionism, high-conflict relationships, etc. We read their books and listen to their podcasts. We invest in support groups or individual therapy. We talk through the moments from childhood that led to the burdens we carry in adulthood.
This phase feels so illuminating…
we gain so much insight…
we finally understand…
There’s just one problem: We still feel like crap. This can be so upsetting because how can we possibly have invested so much time, energy, and money into our healing and still be stuck in the same old behaviors or still feel the same old anxiety or depression? This must be the bad place! My friends, I promise that you are not being punished by some all-powerful, external forces. This is what’s happening…
Reckoning with Living in a Society
We live in a culture that rewards our thinking mind over our feeling hearts. Most of the time we forget to breathe or we’re so disconnected from our internal experience that we can hardly access what’s happening on a deeper level. This isn’t our fault. It’s a result of grind culture and pervasive stress. This means we have minimal resources to respond to the lightbulb moment, which is why we typically start by getting the information about our wounds before learning to embody our healing.
The Embodiment Phase
The cutting-edge of the therapy world is leaning into approaches that prioritize our internal experience as the key to our healing. This means moving toward the emotions we feel and the physical sensations we experience. When we can access these parts of ourself without judgment, we rebuild trust within ourselves.
“Why didn’t I leave sooner?” becomes “I did the best I could with the tools I had in the moment and I’m grateful for the part of me that knew when to leave.”
“I’m such a people-pleaser” becomes “There’s a little girl inside of me who learned she had to earn love by over-extending herself for others. She makes so much sense to me and I want to relieve her of all the hard work she’s done for me over the years.”
“I’m unloveable” becomes “Love was never given freely to that little girl who deserved it. My heart aches for her, and I want to offer her that love now as my adult self.”
As illustrated in these examples, there is an inner wisdom in all of us that allows us to access deep self-compassion. In somatic therapy, we work step-by-step to bridge the gap between inner wounds and inner healing.
Somatic Therapy
Two of the most common types of somatic therapy are EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and IFS (Internal Family Systems). Both allow us to connect the information we already have about where our issues stem from with our felt experience of those issues. For example, we may know certain memories from our childhood are connected to our current state of over-achieving. EMDR allows us to move beneath the surface to bring empathy toward the younger version of us that learned how to over-achieve as a strategy for gaining a sense of worthiness. EMDR typically engages with our inner world through memories that are connected to the present moment, but IFS tends to access the feelings, beliefs, and physical sensations in the present moment and are likely connected to our past. IFS connects us to our intuition in order to work with parts of our internal world such as an inner critic or an inner child. They are different ways of reaching the same healing and they can be offered simultaneously. I highly recommend getting in touch with a therapist who offers one of these approaches if you are ready for this step in your healing journey!
Getting Started
Need more support? I’m Danielle, I specializes in helping intuitive women create real, lasting change through EMDR and IFS therapy. Reach out for a free intro call to learn more about individual therapy.