Getting Unstuck

I was watching the new You Can Heal Your Life movie, the edition with the bonus interviews. (Offer up some personal stories, and I'm there!) Christiane Northrup, the rock star of women's health, tells a story about her perfectionism in college when she couldn't figure out what her professor wanted so that she could get an A on a paper. She got so upset and frustrated that she momentarily contemplated throwing herself in front of a moving car. Then she called her parents and told them that she hated college. Her father said, "So quit. Come home." The moment that she realized she had options, her thinking changed completely. She didn't quit, but knowing that she could gave her the perspective she needed to continue.

A couple of days after I heard this story, one of my clients had a similar epiphany. She has been struggling with a particularly demanding and difficult client. She had told me that she is contractually obligated to work with this client until the end of the year. She felt she was stuck in a bad situation. At a time when she was feeling overwhelmed and overworked and was facing a number of deadlines, she had promised to take a weekend off. Before going away, she thought the trip was poorly timed; she was far too busy to take time off! We reframed that, and she suggested to herself that, despite appearances to the contrary, the weekend away would now provide her with exactly what she needed for her work and her life. (I recommend this for any event you don't want to participate in but can't get out of: Tell yourself that for reasons that will be clear later, this is exactly what you need to do now and that synchronicities and magic await you.) Sure enough, while away, my client had several experiences that provided breakthroughs in her thinking. One of them was the realization that, despite the contract, if she really wanted to, she could find a way out of her obligation to work with the difficult client. And you know what? As soon as she realized this, the client suddenly became much more cooperative.

Both these stories remind me of something important that happened to me when I was 22, in the summer of 1976. In the middle of one of the toughest times of my life, I had a dream. (Well, maybe it wasn't a dream, but it was some kind of experience during sleep.) I dreamed that I woke up in my apartment and there was a man sitting on the side of my bed. I wasn't scared. I just had the sense that I should listen politely. He said, "No matter how bad things get, you can always get out of it. I told my son when he went into the Australian army, if you have to crawl out on your hands and knees, you can get out of it." I nodded and went back to sleep (in the dream). Besides the odd detail about the Australian army, the message was pretty clear. When I woke up, I felt immense relief that I was not stuck in my circumstances, that I had a choice. Eventually, I got myself right out of a toxic relationship and depression and moved forward.

See those little boats in the picture? Sometimes you have to climb in one and sail away from a situation; other times just imagining that you could is enough to cause the necessary inner shift.

Being stuck is just a state of mind, and you already know how to change your mind, don't you? Of course you do.