When Striving Becomes a Substitute for Feeling
For some of us, stillness has never come naturally. Maybe you're a person for whom homeostasis is movement, rest is action. Maybe you run to process or clean to relax. Maybe sitting still feels like a waste of time — a waste of the resources you have to keep on "doing." Maybe you feel more comfortable moving toward the next thing than pausing in the present. Maybe resting with your thoughts feels treacherous, like being in an open ocean without a life raft or on the edge of a cliff without a rope.
Maybe keeping it together — working overtime, parenting gently, caretaking thoroughly, exercising hard — masks something like disarray inside. Sometimes we are beautifully packaged on the outside, a perfect bow holding together a box that contains mess or even emptiness. We can get lost in this internal emptiness, caught up in trying to fill that insatiable void with the next personal record, bit of positive feedback, or to-do on our list.
The thing with emptiness is that it grows and expands the more we feed it. As it spreads, it seeps out of its perfect packaging as a racing mind impossible to quiet before bed, a tally of what we are failing at. We keep on striving, but our lists are tinted with the stain of pressure, our workouts powered by the sound of self-judgment. Eventually, we may feel like we've lost connection with ourselves and our purpose entirely; like we are moving forward on autopilot, surviving, but disengaged from ourselves.
Sometimes, it can be helpful to pause to ask ourselves, what is all of this striving for if it's hollowing me out?
My goal as a therapist is to meet you at the edge of this journey — to guide you on the harrowing path to self connection and to hold you as you climb its inclines, fall into its gullies, and stand at last on its mountains.
There are many ways to process what is going on internally (whether that's emptiness or chaos), and a critical part of therapy is figuring out what approach works best for you. That might mean turning toward the parts of yourself that have been running the show for so long, or examining the beliefs a painful experience left behind. Whether it's exploring your inner world through IFS or reimagining painful beliefs through an approach like CPT, working with me means adapting to find what actually helps you reconnect with yourself.
If you're tired of striving and ready to pause to reconnect with yourself, I'd love to get in touch.
