Turn and Face the Strange
This past week, I arranged to turn in this then-unwritten column just under deadline, after returning from a long backpacking weekend. I was revisiting a beautiful and challenging trail I traversed during an important life transition last fall, which had been a deeply meaningful experience. Sure, I had ended up needing over a week of recuperation time when I’d returned, having once again over-exerted myself physically to meet a goal. But this time, I tweaked my plans. So what if I planned on hiking more miles per day? Now, I have better boots and the luxury of longer daylight hours. I looked forward to entering that special place of reverie that I only find in the woods, alone, in silence. I was sure that I could construct an interesting column while on the trail, write it up in my head, and type it up quickly for submission when I arrived home. It was all planned out, scheduled, and felt under control.
I’m writing this on what was supposed to be day three of my five-day hike. Around this time yesterday, I was debating whether or not to call my partner to come take me off the trail, having a familiar argument with myself about what I have previously thought of as “failure.” It went something like this: “Your body hurts, you may have sprained an ankle, this is not normal discomfort from exertion—call your people and get yourself out of further danger.” To which another part of my brain responded: “You’re being a baby, you’re just sore, keep going, stretch at the shelter, you’ll feel fine tomorrow.” And when I had successfully thwarted that particular thread of internal meanness, yet another arose: “You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re going to look stupid. You told everyone you were going to do this, and now you’re going to look pathetic.” Oof.
Readers, needless to say, I have a brutal inner critic who is not afraid to bully and shame me into doing things that are not in my best interest and may actually cause harm. Thankfully, the work that I have done to recognize and delegitimize this critical voice allowed me to interrupt the fruitless dialogue and call my partner for a rescue. My feet are iced and recovering. I was able to make the right choice. But why was this such a difficult decision to make, even in the face of physical pain and distress?
Clinical psychologists understand that there are generally two important elements of therapeutic work: insight (coming to understand more about our patterns, motivations, and behaviors), and what I want to talk about more today, working through (putting our new insights into action by practicing new behaviors or responses). Insight can be tough-won, for sure—most of us encounter certain things that we, consciously or unconsciously, are invested in not-knowing. For most of us, though, it is the working-through that is the really tough work of creating change.
In my case, insights about my pattern of pushing myself to extremes are old news. I have explored, analyzed and interpreted the causal factors, the negative consequences, and the tenacity of this habit. In other words, I have thought this pattern to death, and yet it hasn’t died. Change, particularly around longstanding behaviors, is hard-won, and usually takes a lot of time and practice. Let’s talk a little bit about why that is.
Practicing new things is awkward, clumsy, and hard. As adults, we assume a certain level of mastery around basic skills. If we take on new responsibilities—a new job, or learning a new instrument, for example—we trust we possess the cognitive tools needed to understand how to learn, understand that we can often be successful. Changing longstanding patterns, though, often takes us back to relearning things we have been doing since childhood. On the surface, making a decision to cut short a hike because of injury seems a simple choice. It gets more complicated when the choice is not just about the hike itself, but is really about asking for help, not meeting goals, and trying to avoid disappointment. As an adult, trying these types of “skills” in a different way can feel really infantilizing! I can admit that I was in full grown-up tantrum mode as I went back and forth with myself. I was literally battling my own internal child who just really wanted to do a “good job” and finish the hike. Feeling childish or clumsy in these ways can be a real deterrent in changing our habits.
Practicing new things is often not well-received by others. This truth needs its own column someday, but briefly: people in our lives often are unsettled when we choose to make changes, even if they are for our own growth and healing. There can be a lot of external pressure to “go back” to familiar patterns or uncomfortable questions about why you are doing things in a new way.
Practicing new things increases our chances of failure along the way. If we have been practicing one way of doing things, trying alternative ways is usually a matter of experimentation. We have a hypothesis that a different approach may yield better results, and we test that. What all researchers know is that most hypotheses fail, and this means that changing patterns will likely lead to a lot of dead ends before finding new ways that work well. This can be so discouraging, but is a real and often necessary part of the process of change.
Fellow humans, I invite you to think about your own experiences: where do you feel you have insight but still sprain your proverbial ankles rather than finding space for change? I assure you that the difficulties bridging these gaps are not matters of motivation or willpower alone, and encourage you to consider these habits through the lens of challenges-to-change (and give yourself some grace and compassion in the process). In the next column, I’ll be talking though antidotes to these challenges: what supports and champions change, and how we can support ourselves through the discomfort of it all. In the meantime, I offer you what I needed a little extra help giving to myself this week: permission to step away from what isn’t working and taking space to imagine what else might be possible. Until next time, friends.
