Feeling Stuck?
When you feel stuck you believe that nothing will change. Bad things repeat and the future looks bleak. Other people tell you life will improve but you don’t believe them. You can’t, however much you wish you could.
These pages are about how to get unstuck by doing things differently. Being stuck governs what you believe. Painful, contrary, invalidating feelings rule your mind and lead you to do all kinds of thing to try and get unstuck.
Moving jobs, having an affair, getting drunk, eating too much, being nice or being cruel are all common ways of trying to get unstuck. They won’t help because once you’ve started to hate your new job, slept with whoever, sobered up, felt sick, been humiliated or loathed you will still be the same person as before.
You need to be somebody else.
The way that you do it
The way that you did life when you were a child decided the way that you do things now. How you do things is everything. The Fun Boy Three and Bananarama knew what to do with Sy Oliver and Trummy Young’s song about this. Have a listen.
Your tactics for keeping afloat in the world, for negotiating conflict and feeling in control, have become stuck. You’re trying to live life now trying not to feel bad. I’m afraid you feel bad because what you expect is not going to come your way now that as an adult you’ve got to take charge of your life.
Don’t be a stuck record. Even the best tunes will drive you crazy if they get stuck repeating. Life isn’t a shuffle. These pages are about setting your sounds to RANDOM and getting ready for whatever comes next.
The science of all this
The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp described something like instincts or drives we are all born with and experience emotionally. These help us stay alive. Mark Solms writes about this (here, for example). Emotions regulate our responses so we do our best to get what we need; we feel our way towards security and happiness.
Or so we think. Your instincts might drive you to do strange things so your life feels survivable: to get angry and not be a problem; to play and not cause a fuss. This is how we get stuck. Life is full of conflicts, forks in the road, and depending on which way you go you move on or you get stuck.
Tune into what you feel
Panksepp’s basic instincts (which he wrote down using capital letters to avoid any confusion with a word’s everyday sense) are: FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PANIC and PLAY. After listening to many, many people describe how they feel stuck I think it’s possible to suggest some common forms of feeling stuck.
Each one has the stamp of too little or too much of one or more of these emotional drives. If it’s FEAR your ‘stuck’ may be rooted in feelings of INEXPERIENCE. If it’s RAGE it could be HELPLESSNESS. If it’s SEEKING you’ll likely be stuck in MONOTONY. If it’s LUST you’ll probably be used to DESOLATION. If it’s CARE you’ll be no stranger to FRUSTRATION. If it’s PANIC you’ll probably be used to feeling HESITATION. If it’s PLAY you’ll know what ALIENATION is like. Within each of these states there will be all kinds of painful feelings.
Your kind of stuck
What’s your kind of stuck? INEXPERIENCE, HELPLESSNESS, MONOTONY, DESOLATION, FRUSTRATION, HESITATION or ALIENATION? Pick one (Use the menu on this page) which seems connected to the kind of stuck you feel you’ve lived. There will be a little or a lot of these in every life. If you start with whatever feels worst you could soon be doing the unstuck.
Forms of stuck
The kinds of stuck described below are what need unsticking from. The suggestions I make (available from the drop-down menu) are not psychotherapy. They aren’t really advice. Most of the time they are descriptions of what I have seen move somebody on after the ‘I feel stuck’ thing has driven them to find help. They’ve become somebody else who is open to the future.
The ways in which you have adapted to feel (or not feel) fear, perhaps becoming over-cautious, maybe to take too many risks, will affect how experienced you feel. Being unable to find safety easily, something so simple as not being able to ask for help, can leave you alone and unable to benefit from other people’s experience of how to do life. You may become reactive, an autodidact, a genius, very sensitive, or the opposite of these. In all cases, whether you feel like an impostor (imposter syndrome is a common ailment for the INEXPERIENCED) or are actually a fraud you should be able to notice a certain sense of INEXPERIENCE haunting your life.
The RAGE instinct exists to help us get things out of the way if they’re blocking us from what we need. We feel it as anger: a crucial force to feel comfortable with – certainly not a negative emotion. It exists in forms ranging all the way from mild irritation and being bored to wanting to kick a door off its hinges. It’s tricky, like being responsible for a prickly cat.
Whether you lack the enthusiasm that underpins motivation or have so much of it that you can’t stop looking – or you always look in the same way for something that disappoints you, noticing the MONOTONY in your life will be the first step in getting things going, or getting things going differently.
This feeling of utter emptiness or of total destruction, of utter unhappiness or loneliness troubles people whose instinct for sex and love has been compromised. Lack of libido or compulsive sexual habits will all lead to the same place: DESOLATION.
People who don’t understand caring are liable to FRUSTRATION. What often gets called co-dependence is a CARE problem. Caring for the wrong person or in the wrong way, or too much, or not at all – being coercive or remaining distant. Each of these experiences generates FRUSTRATION like a fire gives heat. After FRUSTRATION there’s often disappointment and blame. Who didn’t care enough, so that something failed to happen? Who let everybody down, or asked for too much, or too little?
Your important relationships are protected by an potential feeling of PANIC: an incentive to stay close. It arrives if you suffer some sort of loss or separation. In early life if you become separated from someone or something on whom everything depends you will feel it painfully. People are unable to survive on their own and if they don’t find a regular, secure source of CARE, someone on whom they can depend, they are likely to feel a mounting sense of PANIC throughout their life whenever they are separated from someone; or deep grief, if someone leaves them. A caregiver might be also be around too often, smothering someone and not letting them be themselves.
A feeling of not being able to join in, of not knowing the rules or how everything works: these are the signs of a compromised instinct for PLAY. PLAY is how we learn about power. It’s the way children come to understand how to take turns and to respect authority. They learn about fairness. Like each of the other instincts ALIENATION is a feeling that can come upon someone at any point in their life, in this case depending on how they negotiate groups – and how groups regard them.