Thoughts on Feeling Stuck
For the past six months, I have published quite regularly on Monday evenings. Of course, this article is coming on a Wednesday. Not on purpose, despite my love of real-life irony, but because I really was stuck while writing it.
The feeling of being stuck sucks. You know it, I know it, we all know it.
In writing this article, not being able to put the words to the document drove anxiety, made me feel inadequate and insecure. Being stuck makes me question my capabilities and brings me an unwanted anxiety that I definitely don’t need any more of.
While being stuck came up quite recently in writing this piece, the feeling is present during all stages of life. We feel stuck finger painting when we want to start counting. We feel stuck when we want to drive and can’t. We feel stuck trying to choose a field of study or career path. We feel stuck in stagnant relationships, in meaningless jobs, and trying to figure out how we feel in a given situation.
Getting stuck is inevitable. Some of us are fortunate and tend to find our way out quite easily. Others, who feel the paralysis more deeply, can be impacted for days, weeks, or longer. The feeling can be existential as we find ourselves between rocks and hard places, trying to make life decisions or simply existing in a lifestyle that we cannot find a way out of despite the deep desire to do so.
In trying to map out my thoughts into more categorical areas of where being stuck tends to come up most often for me, I came up with three core areas. We can be stuck emotionally, professionally or relationally.
Here’s what I mean…
Emotionally Stuck
A common example here is that you have feelings going on inside that you are unable to express on the outside. We want to express ourselves and feel heard or understood, but feel that those we express ourselves to will reject or react to that expression. Gregory Bateson’s Double Bind theory is a good example of feeling emotionally stuck.
As children, this can happen when our parents tell us to come to them with any problems we have and then admonish us when our emotions make them uncomfortable. This used to happen to my siblings and me all the time:
Parents: “We’re always here for you and want you to come to us with any problems you have”
Kids: “We’re sorry, we broke the vase in the living room”
Parents: “How could you be so irresponsible! Don’t you realize how hard we work for the things we have? Go to your room!”
The examples of this are quite easy to come by. They even continue on to adulthood when we find ourselves emotionally stuck at work. For instance, let’s say your company has asked everyone to be more collaborative but still only rewards individual performance. Here’s where you may get emotionally stuck:
Boss: “We really need you to focus more on helping your colleagues and working collaboratively”
Employee: “I understand and I really enjoy helping my team but my year-end bonus is determined by how many calls and sales I make on my own. I don’t know which to prioritize.”
Boss: “Well, you’re going to have to figure out what is more important to you.”
Feeling emotionally stuck is often a hinderance to finding our own integrity and comes from the way we interact with people. We know we feel one way but struggle to live that experience.
This feeling of being stuck can be quite existential as well, as we seek purpose and meaning in our lives, yet find that our day to day existence does not support meaningful experiences. This can lead to very difficult feelings of helplessness, meaninglessness, and drive depression.
Professionally Stuck
My most frequent “stuck” feeling has been from my professional path. Early on, I struggled finding a job that paved a clear way. Graduating in 2008, I entered the job market at one of the least opportune times of the past 50 years. I hadn’t made the process much easier by focusing more on partying in college than my grades or networking.
My choices were limited. No matter how many jobs I applied for, nothing landed. I was stuck. Of course, over time, I ended up finding work. Yet even after getting a job, the stuck feeling would ultimately manifest again as I would always be looking out for something more, something better. I couldn’t quit, I had bills to pay. I couldn’t tell my boss I wanted to leave, that is just never going to work out well. So the cycle began.
This feeling had a way of repeating itself as I would work different jobs and hope for something more fulfilling. Interestingly, it took about 10 years of bouncing around to realize that the fulfilment would never come from the external job/work/activity.
My professional “stuckness,” like many others feel, I’m sure, stemmed from depending on the external to feed my meaning. It stemmed from me never doing the internal work to determine my vocational calling.
This was inevitable as I was taught growing up that I needed to work to earn a living. That my job was supposed to pay my bills, help me with my insurance, and start me on an upward track toward the top, if I worked hard enough over time.
My profession would be my identity. I could be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect. I could be whatever I wanted to be, if I worked hard enough. Little did I know that a singular mindset of the purpose of work and tying my identity to it would create a severe lack of perspective as to what me as a human needed from work.
Like many, I spent years cultivating this professional identity that infused with how I saw myself. I spent money on degrees and certifications. I spent years trying to learn the ropes, selling myself as a professional, worthy of executive and client approval.
Looking back, I can see that my investment was relatively small.
Imagine spending the hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of energy to become a doctor or lawyer or architect, only to realize 15 years later that being a therapist was your real calling? Can anyone easily make that transition?
Feeling professionally stuck comes in many contexts and impacts us in many ways.
Relationally Stuck
We grow up believing in the perfect image of a family. It shows up in stories, on television, in movies, and even in the perception of our own families (if we’re lucky). Then, life happens.
Our meaningful relationships are an essential part of a healthy way of life. Unfortunately, we exist in those relationships according to scripts that we follow and an unconscious approach to what we believe is right or wrong.
We grow up unconscious to the required evolution of our relationship with our parents and our siblings. We unconsciously enter into professional relationships when beginning a job or career according to what we believe those relationships should look like as we chart our growth path.
When I say unconscious, I refer to relational living that does not explore the depths of each member in the context of that relationship. This occurs when we follow the relationship script. We meet someone, we date them, we propose to them, we marry them, we have kids with them. Along this script, we end up avoiding our own self-exploration.
With everything planned out, so to speak, we unconsciously choose to put our energy into other things like our jobs, our hobbies, or major events (weddings, children, holidays, etc).
Without this exploration, we chart a bit of a blind path into knowing ourselves and knowing our partners. Distracted by the external events and needs, we never deliberately take the time to learn more about what is going on with our own emotional evolution or that of our partners.
This is how we get relationally stuck.
All of a sudden, after years of passively going through our relationship, we start to feel some level of unfulfillment. This feeling can come at any time but a common example is when the kids all of a sudden don’t want to be at home any more and the parents no longer have them as an external distraction from each other.
You also see this with partners of a business who are attached at the hip at the beginning of a company being built and grown, only to learn they hate each other once the operation is successful and no longer needs their full attention.
We become relationally stuck by not paying attention to who we are as individuals and who we are in the context of that relationship. This lack of attention accumulates as mud over time, only to find us in a very sticky situation once any previous distractions have cleared.
Getting Unstuck
Feeling stuck has been a frequent experience on my own journey and quest for emotional maturity. Look, I don’t have the answers or the proverbial stick that I can extend to pull you from the quicksand.
For me, one of the most important perspectives I try to keep is that of patience (I know many will want to punch me for that “solution”).
The feeling of being stuck manifests in different ways. It can be from an immediate pressure to do something, change something, or achieve something. We want to sooth that pressure as quickly as possible, which can tighten the ropes even more and constrain the space we have to operate. It can also result from a lack of attention to something over time and finally deciding to look, only to see a shortage of options.
The key to getting unstuck (wait for it…) is not getting stuck in the first place. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Fuck you, dude.” And that’s fair.
But perhaps a more realistic approach would be to not get TOO stuck in the first place. This can be accomplished through mindfulness. We need to be deliberate about paying attention to how we feel, what we need, and who we are in the contexts of our emotions, professions, and relationships.
Instead of ignoring our feelings, it would be wise of us to reflect on the things that create different feelings in our lives. We need radical self inquiry, we need to question our career paths, and we need to embrace constructive conflict in our relationships.
It is through a deliberate exploration of who we are and how we exist in the different systems we belong to that will allow us to avoid feeling stuck.
