Emotional Stuckness

Let's talk about being stuck. I made a video in the past on this topic, and I want to revisit it because there's a lot that goes on in this world of feeling stuck. My name is Eric. I'm a clinical mental health counselor, here to provide tools and resources for you to hopefully engage some of these topics that often get swept under the covers and not addressed. This idea of being stuck comes up a lot in the world of mental health, and in fact, rings very closely true to what it feels like to be mentally unhealthy.

We end up in these points of feeling like either direction we go is going to end in a certain catastrophe. Or maybe like we've locked ourselves in a place where our only option to get out isn't a pretty one. And so we feel stuck. Well, one aspect to what contributes to us feeling stuck that I think we often overlook and in some senses is quite simple, which is our avoidance, resistance to experiencing our emotions. Now, when I say that, I'm sure a lot of things flood your mind, ideas, relationships to what emotions are.

But let's talk about that for a minute. What is an emotion? I stub my toe and I feel pain. While I know that that pain indicates that I stub my toe, I have a friend reject me, and that pain is almost as physical as my toe slamming against the corner of a desk. And yet this pain is a little bit more abstract. It's something that we can choose to focus on, or unlike the pain of stepping our toe, we have options to numb, to avoid, to think otherwise, and pretend as if it wasn't hurting us the way it is.

Our emotions are sources of information, reactionary points within ourselves that indicate something is off or not, that reinforce what we seek and what we avoid. When our judgment gets into emotions, we start giving categories to what we allow ourselves to and not to feel. And in this brick by brick, we start to build a dam. And if you can picture a river flowing freely through a forest, and somebody comes along and diverts that river briefly, so you can start building up a dam and have a little bit more control over the flow of what goes on there, and in that creating a relationship to it that contributes to our stuckness.

Just like the water behind the dam, sometimes we're afraid to let some of that water flow the direction that it needs to. If we start to take that dam down, it's scary to see what we might find. And although an immediate point of pressure, the release of that opens the door for what is next, letting ourselves lose what's been lost and have gratitude for what hasn't and create space for what is yet to come. Our emotions, like a river, exist, and by creating a dam, we don't get rid of it, we just make them run deeper and more forcefully.

When that dam breaks open, what things stop us from feeling? What things get in the way of our emotions having a place in our life? Can we reconsider the role we allow emotions to exist and play within ourselves and our lives? Let me know. Leave a comment tell me what you think. What role do emotions play in your life and what ways have they maybe contributed to feeling stuck.