When You're Doing All The 'Right' Things... But Still Feel Stuck

You Are Not a Problem to Solve

Ever feel like your self-care and healing work is just another task on your to-do list?

There are a million things on our plates as grown humans: kids, households, work commitments, family expectations, cultural and community responsibilities. Who wants to add healing yourself to that list?

It’s like we’ve been told that if we could just optimize everything (our diet, our sleep hygiene, our exercise routine, our superfoods, and of course our nervous system regulation) we’d finally arrive somewhere whole.

Somewhere under all this, there’s a quiet cultural message: a perfect human exists. (They’re super fit, rich AF, never yell at their mother... and they meditate.)

And if we just healed hard enough, maybe we could become them.

This idea creates pain. It sets us up for chronic self-comparison. And it quietly frames our very selves (our feelings, our impulses, our stuckness) as the thing in the way.

So when people come into somatic work, they’re often surprised at one of the foundational assumptions:

You are not a problem to solve.

Many people arrive expecting therapy to feel like diagnostic work:
"Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what to do. I’ll fix it."

But the truth is: healing isn’t linear... your body isn’t a machine... and you aren’t broken.

You’re a multi-dimensional being in constant relationship: with other people, with culture, with your lineage, with the land, and with something larger than all of us.

So "the work" isn’t to fix you.
The work is to come back into relationship with yourself as you actually are.

And when people learn how to do this, they start to move through the world in a whole new way.

Where We Learned to Distrust Ourselves

One of the most painful things I see in my office is how often people override their own experience. And not just override it... they distrust it.

Many of us carry an unconscious loop that goes something like this:
“I can’t trust what I’m feeling” → “I must be doing it wrong” → “Let me try harder.”

That’s not stubbornness. That’s survival strategy.

We live in a culture that teaches output, optimization, and solutions... not presence, curiosity, or emotional fluency.
Nobody ever taught us how to process emotions, complete survival responses, or relate to our internal experience without judgment.

So we learn to see ourselves from the outside in.
We were taught how to fix, not how to feel.

The Checklist Trap

We often unconsciously approach our process like this:

“Figure out what’s wrong → Apply the correct fix → Be better.”

And this works beautifully for mechanical systems. But your body? Your nervous system? Your emotional life?

These aren’t puzzles to solve. They are living systems.
They’re relational, dynamic, and responsive.

And they don’t respond to checklists.
They respond to contact, safety, and relationship.

So if you’ve been efforting your way through your own inner world... if you’re trying really hard to be better, calmer, more self-aware, more healed... it makes perfect sense.

But that orientation (even when it’s well-intentioned) can keep you trapped in the idea that you are not okay until you finish your self improvement project.

What the Shift Looks Like

Here’s what this actually looks like in practice.

A small but powerful example I see all the time in my office:

Someone notices tension in their shoulders. Maybe they realize they’ve been holding themselves tight... shoulders up near their ears. And then immediately... they try to relax.

Because they think relaxed shoulders are better.

This is often unconscious; it’s just a reflex.
It sounds like: “Okay, body... I noticed you. Now please stop doing that.”

But here’s the thing: that impulse is still treating the body like a problem to fix. It misses the whole message that your body is sharing with you.

When approached with a curious lens — when we let it be as it is, and stay in contact with the sensation rather than trying to override it — something starts to shift.
The system begins to regulate... not because we forced it to, but because it finally felt safe enough to move.

So instead of:
“I noticed you... now go away.”

We move toward:
“I noticed you... and I’m staying with you.”

Ps: when I tell people this in session.... they're like 'ohhhhhh....' This is the thing that quietly changes everything about our process.

That’s the shift.
Not fixing... but relating.
Not compliance... but contact.
Not solutions... but presence.

Where This Pattern Shows Up Most

One of the clearest places I see this fixing orientation is in people who are in functional freeze.

Functional freeze is a nervous system state where it feels like your body is pressing both the gas and the brake at the same time.
One part of you is trying to move forward: to get things done, take action, show up, while another part of you is applying the brakes to keep you safe and conserve energy.

This can feel like:

• Low motivation but constant mental noise

• Wanting to do things but not being able to start

• Feeling “lazy” or “undisciplined” despite nonstop inner pressure

  People often interpret this as a character flaw:
  
  “I just need to try harder.”

  But it’s not a motivation problem... it’s a nervous system pattern.

This is where the fixing mindset can become especially painful. Because the more effort you apply to override a freeze state, the more stuck and dysregulated you can feel.

And Also... The Paradox

Just to name it clearly:

Effort isn’t the enemy.

There is a time for effort.
There is a place for to-do lists.
There are moments when we stretch our capacity, push through resistance, and act before we feel “ready.”

But effort alone doesn’t create healing.
And healing sometimes requires effort... but it also requires that you don’t override yourself.

The paradox is this:
Your body isn’t against you.
It’s trying to keep you safe... in the best way it knows how.

This is one of the quiet foundations beneath the work we do together both in person and online. It’s not always loud, but it changes everything.

For those exploring:
nervous system healing, trauma recovery, somatic therapy, emotional processing, inner work, non-linear healing, self-trust, relationship to self

Watch the short video (2 mins): Why Trying Harder at Healing Doesn't Work

This post is for entertainment purposes only and is not intended as therapeutic advice or treatment.