How Tense Do YOU Need to Be to Get Things Done?

Lindsay said, “I’m a wreck.” She rattled off a list of issues and symptoms she was experiencing, saying that it all added up to her conclusion, “I’m stressed and I’m tense and I can’t sleep and I can’t seem to get anything done.”

As I listened, I couldn’t find the cause of her tension. Something seemed to be missing.

Then she said, “My husband works for himself and he can’t seem to leave the house until he’s angry about something. It’s like a subcontractor has to mess up and that lets him get mad about that or a client hasn’t paid their invoice. It seems like it’s getting worse,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s mad all the time.”

She paused. “I’m worried that there’s something else going on.”

That was the missing clue. It was his tension and anxiety that was flooding their home. And Lindsay, highly sensitive and empathic, was absorbing it—and adding her own fear and tension to the mix.

I was able to explain that as we grow up, we are developing our ability to function in the world. When we have to develop our functionality before we are mature enough to come from capacity, we then come from tension.

Lindsay told me that when she was six or seven years old her mother would sometimes not come home when she said she would. Lindsay wasn’t tall enough to reach the light switch so, the first few times this happened, she waited, frightened and frustrated, worried and angry, sitting in the dark until her mother, at last, came home. After awhile, she learned to grab books and stack them against the wall so she could stand on them to reach the switch.

Fear and tension

I suggested that Lindsay had learned to solve the problem but she learned to do that by motivating herself through fear and tension.

Her husband may have learned to solve problems by getting angry and goosing his nervous system into confronting problems through a sense of being wronged.

In other words, tension in their bodies—and ?fear and anger—were giving them false strength and the illusion of support.

Together, we discovered that Lindsay and her husband had created a functional life that, unfortunately, was based on fear and anger and tension. ?And while that had worked for awhile, this unconscious “method” was taking too much of a toll on their bodies—and their marriage.

Lindsay discovers her empathic nature

We began by Lindsay simply becoming aware of her own empathic nature. She came to the realization that when her husband got angry, she felt pressure to get involved. She tried to make things better but, she further realized, her husband was actually needing things to go wrong. Because that was his source of motivation.

So she learned to notice the pattern of his behavior. “It’s that third cup of coffee that does it,” she joked. But she actually was right. At a certain point in the morning, right around his third cup of coffee, he began working himself up.

And she saw that she was contributing to the problem first, by normalizing his anger, agreeing with whatever seemed wrong, and secondly, by trying to make things better, he had to oppose her argument and see things increasingly through that lens of anger.

She takes a neutral role

She learned to step back and take a more neutral role. It worked for a few days—he wasn’t getting as angry and she wasn’t getting as reactive to his anger—but then he accused her of not caring.

She explained that she cared but that she had begun to notice that her involvement wasn’t actually helping.

As Lindsay and I worked together, she developed her own morning pattern. And that was to go to her home office sooner, be busy, and allow her husband to have his pattern.? His anger escalated—he burst through her office door one morning, determined to pull her in.

Anxiety?

At that point, I suggested that he might need to speak with a therapist. That, in my experience, his anger might be a reaction to anxiety.

When I suggested that, she had an insight: things had gotten worse ever since her husband had taken on more work—and more subcontractors. As he did his own work with a therapist—and agreed to try an antidepressant with an anti-anxiety component, he was able to make a new business plan and step back from some of the expansion he had attempted.

Lindsay began to see how often she got things done with tension and fear and anger.

That that was what motivated her when she couldn’t get herself to do what she called “busy work,” all those adult chores that we all have to attend to.

Through our work together she learned that she could develop new capacity, that she didn’t have to come from the place of tension she had first learned to rely on when she was six and seven. She still hated the busy work but she began to plan for it, not wait until the last minute and run around like a crazy person, inadvertently using an unhealthy shot of fear to get things done but get things done simply because they needed to be done.

What about you? Do you ever use tension from fear or anger or both, to face those challenging tasks and difficult conversations? What if you could begin to notice how much of your day finds you acting from capacity rather than tension?

And could you begin to set aside the narrative that you may have built in the past around things being frightening or wrong and, instead, simply embrace the irritating difficulties without getting wound up in them, and plow ahead, getting things done, because you can and because you must and because, really, you can rely on yourself to do what needs to be done?

Would you like to chat about your situation? And how you could cultivate a more relaxed, self-confident, capacity, rather than coming from tension in various areas of your life? I'm here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/frangallaher/