Ask a therapist: I’m Stuck!

16 Feb Ask a therapist: I’m Stuck!

Q: With COVID and all, I have felt stuck for a year now. What can I do to get unstuck?

Dear Fellow Traveler,

The word stuck typically brings images to my mind of being five years old, venturing out into a deliciously dirty, mostly dried-up creek behind my house—and in my quest for fun not noticing nighttime raindrops had created a form of muck, which snatched a flip flop from my foot, swallowing it whole.

Ah, well I’ll abandon it there, I’ll be barefoot and free!  What’s the point in wrestling with stuck, when it is clear I cannot get my shoe to release?

Stuck implies lack of movement, progress, or change. 

But perhaps perception is all relative to scale; nothing is ever truly stuck.  Perhaps, with the proper microscope, I could look deeper into the bog that consumed my footwear and see movement: “Hey, there’s a lot happening in there!” The muck is rich with life, churning with its own bacterial dramas and single-celled scandal, teeming with molecules and atoms and particles I would never have seen without a pause to witness this movement that is slow, but alive…

Is there movement in the seemingly still?

In the third week of February 2020, I was returning home from Cancun, a smattering of people in the airport wore facemasks and rumblings of this flu on the other side of the world were in the news, but I didn’t think too much of it in the airport that day.  Nor did I think too much about the future when I made futile attempts to calm a good friend as she ran the gamut of her fears and anxieties about what was to come. I just did what I always do: Keep moving.

 The following week I worked diligently, helped my full load of clients, assisted in a community clinic, hit up three concerts, saw a play, went to an art show, and enjoyed a few restaurants in Los Angeles— a busy week even for my extroverted, always-occupied, hard-working, fun-loving self. 

Two days later came the stay-at-home order and my whole world seemed to stand still.

My life was all about being on the move, the only way I understood movement to be. What discourses around movement or progress tell us that we’re STUCK unless we’re productive?  Western culture will tell you do, do more, and never stop doing. Have bigger, have more, just don’t stop moving. 

You see it in our packed social schedules, multiple jobs, unused vacation days, persistent time away from loved ones, maternity leaves that are criminally short and paternity leaves that don’t exist, working lunches, our inability to say no…

Run, run, run.

Just. Keep. Going. 

Until all at once we were stuck, just like that shoe in the mud. Movement was no longer possible in the same way.  I initially met this stasis with confusion, fear, and resistance—screaming internally, “What am I supposed to do now?” How on earth can I find movement with all this ambiguity and chaos, let alone help my clients who are suffering in their own ways?

Just. Keep. Going.

I made a list of everything I could spend my time doing while this virus got under control. It couldn’t be that long, right?!?!  I brainstormed and churned my optimistic mind to crank out as many ideas until the list started to resemble less of a comfort and more of a desperate attempt to find any way to move about as much and as fast as I could even in the uncertainty of what was to come.

As the weeks turned to months, I decided to revisit that list and look at movement not with different activities, but through new eyes. What if the comfort I’m seeking isn’t external?  What if instead of looking out the window, I look in, deep within.  

What if the source of hope and possibility has been there, but I was just too busy, too hell-bent on being “productive” to notice? Peace of mind isn’t achieved through activities, jobs, or entertainments, but through a genuine relationship with ourselves and the world around us, in what we are going to be in the face of whatever the universe brings us next.

How about you, “feeling stuck,” are you ready to grab your microscope?

• What’s moving inside you that would love to have your attention?  Does it need your help constructing a creative road map to get out? 

• What about the current state of affairs tells you that you must be in the waiting room before you can live your life?

• What are you willing to leave behind that pulls on your feet trying to hold you prisoner before you release it to run free?

When stuck visits, tricking us into thinking we cannot move until… I think of this quote from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

What is your way? 

Humbly Yours,

Kind Therapist

The information provided on this page is not, nor is it intended to be, therapy or a substitute for therapy. Please consult with a mental health professional to receive individualized support.