Why You Know What to Do but Still Feel Stuck

You can understand a problem remarkably well and remain completely unable to change it.

This is particularly maddening when you are someone who has already done a great deal of thinking about yourself. You have read the books, talked things through and perhaps spent years in therapy or other forms of personal work. You can see the pattern while it is happening. You may even know exactly what you would tell someone else to do in the same situation.

And still, there you are.

The email remains unsent. The boundary gets postponed. You keep returning to the relationship you know is hurting you, or avoiding the conversation you have rehearsed twenty times. You want to begin something and cannot quite begin it. On Tuesday you make a decision with complete conviction and by Friday find yourself quietly negotiating your way out of it.

For an intelligent, self-aware person, this can become its own peculiar form of torment. Once you know better, surely you should be able to do better.

Except human beings don't work quite that efficiently.

We tend to treat insight as though it sits at the top of an internal chain of command. Once the conscious mind has reached the correct conclusion, the rest of us is expected to fall into line. When that doesn't happen, we reach fairly quickly for explanations involving discipline, motivation, procrastination or that particularly loaded favourite, self-sabotage.

I think we can become unnecessarily cruel to ourselves at precisely this point.

Knowing matters enormously. It just isn't the whole process.

The body gets a vote

One of the problems with the phrase I know is that it can mean several different things.

We can know that a relationship isn't good for us, that we need to have a difficult conversation or that an opportunity is exactly what we have been working towards. None of this guarantees that taking action will feel safe, comfortable or even possible.

Antonio Damasio's work on emotion and decision-making was influential in challenging the old division between reason and emotion, particularly the assumption that sound decisions are produced by rational thought operating independently of bodily and emotional experience. We don't simply calculate our way through life. What we feel participates in how we assess choices, consequences and risk.

This becomes especially relevant when something that makes perfect sense in the present carries a different meaning somewhere else in us.

Leaving a job may be financially and professionally sensible while stirring an old fear of instability. Setting a boundary with a parent can be entirely appropriate while some younger place inside us still anticipates punishment or withdrawal. Becoming more visible in our work may be exactly what we want and also collide with years of learning about what happens to women who are too noticeable, too ambitious, too opinionated or simply too much.

The adult mind may understand perfectly well that circumstances have changed. That doesn't mean every protective response immediately receives the update.

This is one reason I am cautious about the language of self-sabotage. It makes it sound as though there is a small, malicious character somewhere inside us deliberately wrecking an otherwise excellent plan. When we look more closely, what appears to be sabotage often has considerably more logic than that.

Internal Family Systems offers a useful way of understanding this. We are not as internally singular as we sometimes imagine. Different parts of us can have different priorities and different ideas about what constitutes safety. One part may be thoroughly ready for change while another associates that change with humiliation, rejection or loss. Another may simply be exhausted and have no intention of signing up for the latest ambitious plan devised by the part of us who loves a fresh start.

And sometimes change threatens an arrangement that has been holding more together than we realized. If I stop being the person who always helps, what happens to certain relationships? If I become more successful, visible or boundaried, who might object? If I no longer organize my life around keeping the peace, what am I going to have to confront?

Seen this way, Why can't I make myself do this? begins to feel like the wrong question.

I am much more interested in what happens inside us when we try.

When the brakes come on

We usually notice stuckness once it interferes with action, but there are often smaller signs before we reach that point.

You think about making the phone call and something tightens. You open the document and suddenly making tea seems urgent. The task you could describe perfectly yesterday becomes strangely difficult to sequence. You sit down to do something important and discover an astonishing capacity to accomplish everything except the thing you sat down to do.

Sometimes this is psychological protection. Sometimes it isn't.

Exhaustion affects initiation and concentration. So can chronic stress, grief, illness, anxiety, depression, hormonal changes, executive functioning difficulties and plain old practical overload. Not every unfinished task contains a buried psychological revelation. Occasionally the explanation for not doing something is that we are tired and don't want to do it.

But specificity can tell us something.

If we have plenty of energy until we approach one particular conversation, if our thinking becomes foggy only when a decision starts to feel real, or if an opportunity is exciting right up until somebody actually offers it to us, I become curious.

Our behavioural repertoire changes with our state. Things that seem possible when we feel relatively settled and resourced can become much harder when we are highly activated, frightened, depleted or shut down. Most of us don't need a theoretical model to recognize this. We have all had days when the world appears to contain options and others when it appears to contain none.

The mistake is assuming that the second version of us merely needs a more persuasive lecture from the first.

When effort becomes more pressure

Capable people often respond to stuckness by increasing the pressure.

We make a better plan, set an earlier alarm, create a deadline or buy a planner sufficiently beautiful that surely this time we will become the person who uses it properly. We apply discipline to the problem and then become annoyed that discipline was apparently required.

Sometimes this works. Urgency can be extremely mobilizing, particularly for people who have relied on it for years.

The problem is that pushing harder can reproduce the very conditions that made action difficult in the first place. If some part of us already anticipates overwhelm, adding pressure confirms that the task is indeed going to be overwhelming. If mistakes have historically carried shame, turning the task into another test of character raises the stakes. If we have spent years overriding exhaustion, a body that has finally started applying the brakes may have good reason to be unimpressed by our new productivity system.

There is a difference between supporting ourselves through ordinary discomfort and repeatedly overriding information because we find it inconvenient. That difference isn't always obvious.

Nor does understanding a protective response mean it immediately disappears. This is one of the more humbling aspects of personal work. We can have a marvellous insight on Wednesday and discover the same old reaction waiting for us on Thursday morning, apparently untouched by developments.

Experience tends to be more convincing than argument.

We can tell ourselves repeatedly that it is safe to disappoint someone, but something different happens when we actually disappoint them, tolerate the guilt or fear that follows and discover that we remain intact. We can intellectually reject perfectionism for years, then submit something that is merely good and survive the exposure. We can understand boundaries beautifully in theory, but the body learns something new when we say no and don't immediately rush back to make everybody comfortable again.

This is where knowing begins to become lived knowledge.

Getting interested in the hesitation

When I work with stuckness, I am often less interested initially in getting rid of it than in finding out what happens at the point where movement stops.

Imagine doing the thing you have been avoiding.

Before explaining why you should be able to do it, notice what occurs. Perhaps there is tension, restlessness or a sudden drop in energy. Maybe your mind immediately produces a convincing list of reasons to do something else. A familiar prediction may appear: This will be too much. I'll get it wrong. Someone will be angry. What if I start and can't keep it up?

Sometimes nothing particularly interesting happens, which is useful information too.

In IFS, we might become curious about what a reluctant or protective part expects would happen if we went ahead. Its answer may sound disproportionate to the present situation, but protective responses aren't always organized according to the current date. Something learned decades ago can continue to shape what feels permissible long after the circumstances that taught it have changed.

Curiousity does not mean handing over the steering wheel.

Understanding why the brakes are on doesn't require us to agree that we should never move. It gives us a chance to respond to what is actually creating the resistance rather than attempting to drag ourselves through it.

Sometimes the next step needs to become smaller. Not because we are incapable of more, but because “finish the project” is not an action. Opening the document is. Gathering information is different from deciding the rest of our lives. Noticing the next automatic yes that is really a no is different from trying to become, once and for all, A Person With Boundaries.

Small actions also give us something thinking alone cannot: new evidence.

We discover that we can begin without knowing how the whole thing will unfold. That somebody can be disappointed and the relationship may survive. That discomfort rises and falls. That an imperfect piece of work can leave our hands without civilization collapsing.

The system gets to experience something it could previously only be told.

And sometimes listening inwardly reveals that we genuinely do need rest, help, more information, fewer demands or a different plan. This matters. Becoming exquisitely attuned to ourselves only so that we can extract more productivity would rather defeat the purpose.

When your insight is ahead of you

There is enormous value in understanding ourselves. I would hardly do the work I do if I believed otherwise.

But highly reflective people can turn insight into another standard against which to measure themselves. I know where this comes from. We've dealt with this. Why am I still doing it?

Because recognizing a pattern and having a different experience when that pattern is activated are not the same achievement.

You may understand exactly why you learned to keep everybody happy and still feel sick the first few times you disappoint someone. You may know that visibility is not dangerous and still want to retreat when attention arrives. You may have traced perfectionism all the way back to its origins and still find yourself changing one inconsequential sentence for the fourteenth time.

The understanding is real. It hasn't failed.

It may simply have travelled further than your embodied sense of what is safe, possible or sustainable.

At that point, I don't think the answer is necessarily more analysis. There is only so much benefit in explaining ourselves to ourselves.

We may need to spend more time at the threshold where knowing becomes doing: noticing what appears, making enough room to hear it, and then having experiences that gradually give the old expectation something new to contend with.

Eventually, what we know intellectually can become something we trust more completely.

Not because we finally managed to win an argument with ourselves, but because enough of us has discovered what happens when we live differently.