Breaking the Chains of Being Stuck: A Path to Growth Amid Chronic Shame
The weight of chronic shame often manifests as a profound sense of being stuck, hindering progress in various aspects of life. This stagnation extends beyond external tasks and permeates internal experiences, creating a complex interplay between the desire for growth and the need for stability. Understanding the delicate balance between these opposing forces is crucial for those seeking to overcome the grip of chronic shame.
External and Internal Manifestations of Feeling Stuck:
If you are mired down by shame, then you know what it feels like to feel stuck in life. Feeling stuck can manifest externally, in tasks and responsibilities. You may feel stuck in moving forward in work, in completing schoolwork, in changing your living situation, in cleaning your house, in repairing something broken, in starting an exercise program, in doing your taxes, or a myriad of other possible ways to feel stuck regarding things to do. People often call themselves “a procrastinator” in such situations.
Feeling stuck can also manifest internally, in one’s sense of self and expression. You may feel like words get stuck in your throat, or ideas get stuck in your head and can’t get out. You may feel stuck in being able to approach someone, to make a new friend or find a romantic partner. Sometimes you may feel as if your feet are literally encased in cement.
The Paradox of Stuckness:
Regardless of how stuck you feel, your system wants to feel better and get better. Your system wants to grow, evolve, and move towards greater organization, resilience, and even greater yet, prosilience. But to grow and evolve means that your equilibrium is going to be disturbed. For a seed to become a leafy plant or a mighty oak tree, there is a radical change in organization that has to take place. Elements have to break down in order for a new form to emerge. This creates a temporary state of disequilibrium, or chaos, which can feel uncomfortable and be challenging to the status quo of our system.
However, balancing uncontrolled growth are mechanisms that keeps our system stable. Just as the simplest of life forms, our systems will try to maintain “homeostasis,” keeping our biological organism within certain parameters so that we stay alive. When we stay stable, we don’t de-evolve or disintegrate or fragment. The ultimate fragmentation is death, so if you are breathing and reading this, your system has a significant amount of stability.
Staying stable, however, can come at the expense of staying stuck, which many people who experience chronic shame know well. It’s helpful to note that even feeling stuck in life serves a useful function: fragmentation and death are worse. If our system doesn’t know how to manage the chaos, or the chaos is too great, then staying stable by being stuck is preferable. Growth consumes a significant amount of energy, and being stuck is a state of energy conservation. When there isn’t enough energy for such growth, then staying stuck is the experience of conserving energy for a later time.
With a heavy dose of chronic shame, we often are in the “stay stuck” experience. This manifests as being tethered to familiar, but unfulfilling patterns. So, to come out of chronic shame, the pertinent question is the following:
How do we support growth and evolution while remaining stable enough, without getting stuck?
By embracing the idea that growth need not be radical or forced, we allow our systems to experience positive change in a gentle and nurturing manner. There is no shame associated with incremental progress. This natural ebb and flow, characterized by moments of growth followed by periods of rest and integration, honors the delicate balance between stability and evolution.
Embracing the Protective Role of Stuckness:
Acknowledging that the feeling of being stuck serves a protective function can be a significant step toward breaking free from chronic shame. When we can see that our system is trying to protect itself from too much disorganization, we can tolerate a bit of stuckness and maybe approach our stagnation with some compassion.
Supporting Growth in Small, Positively Reinforcing Ways:
To navigate the delicate dance between growth and stability, it is essential to start with small, simple, neutral, manageable steps. This allows for positively-reinforcing experiences that don’t tax the energy reserves, but can add to those reserves. When the system can have positive experiences in growing slightly, the system can gently re-organize.
The first step in this process is to utilize what our system is already doing, which is orienting to the external environment through the senses. The process of “orienting” allows our system to find that which is neutral or pleasant all around us. This allows our system to have a small bit of activation in a pleasant way, which helps the system organize at a higher threshold. (For more information on Orienting, see “Establishing the Initial Conditions for Shame to Melt”)
Embracing the Role of Rest & Integration:
After a small growth experience, allowing the system to rest and integrate is crucial. Rest is not a sign of weakness but a necessary pause for the system to reorganize and adapt to the new change. With sufficient rest and integration, there is a natural impulse towards the next threshold of growth. This happens without coercion or force.
When we try to use excess coercion and force to get ourselves to do something, either we burn out because our system doesn’t have sufficient energy to accomplish the task without a subsequent collapse, or we make partial headway and then feel shame when we can’t complete what we’ve begun.
Redirecting attention away from major difficult tasks or overwhelming goals and focusing on orientation and then smaller, more manageable goals can create a cascade of positive experiences. As one positive experience leads to the next, the energy, motivation, and capacity to tackle more significant challenges naturally emerges. This approach sidesteps the pitfalls of coercion and force, fostering sustainable and authentic change.
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