The Joy of Holding Paradoxes

knowing when to rewire and when to accept the existing wiring, and then sometimes the magic happens anyway

Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

Before we get into the post, a few random resources that I feel compelled to share:

»This podcast episode on Escape Hatch Fantasies with depth psychologist Sheryl Paul. Are you intrigued just by the title? I was! I’m listening to it for the second time. The key to freedom is in the metaphor - so good!

»This book by integrative women’s health psychiatrist, Dr. Kelly Brogan, called A Mind of Your Own. It offers a science-based alternative perspective on depression as a symptom of brain inflammation rather than basing the issue on the theory of biochemical imbalances. It digs deep into the research of the connection between the gut and the brain and how our understanding of depression is evolving.

»This quote has really bouyed me lately as I grapple in all the best ways with self-trust:

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its wings.”

(Note: some attribute the quote to someone named Charlie Wardle and others to unknown - if you know and tell me, I will edit :)

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I’m in a ‘moment’ right now as the rub of a part of me wanting to return to my prior professional work as a physical therapist creates friction with the other parts of me that are afraid of the prior wiring that contributed in some ways to the ‘falling apart-together’ experience of the sudden chronic illness that I had last summer.

A big part of the question for me right now is: do I return to practicing physical therapy or do I continue towards this health coaching path, focusing on nervous system wellness and supporting people in recovery from the type of thing that I experienced last year.  I still feel passion for both of these things, and admittedly, I’m eternally grateful for some of the fantastic practitioners who have supported my recovery with the very manual therapy and other skills that I used to help others in my physical therapy private practice prior to last year.  

I don’t believe it has to truly be an ‘either-or’ situation, nor do I believe these are the only two options available to me.  It is often challenging though as a healthcare professional to consider what else I might have skills for outside of the work that I’ve done in this field for the past 20+ years.

For instance, I’ve also seriously considered and investigated becoming an arborist in the semi-recent past.  I dabbled in copyediting several months back.  I’ve considered going part-time at REI, the outdoor goods store here in the United States.  On and on…nothing seems to really capture my interest though enough to pursue.

As I contemplate the specifics of this desire around professional work, the deeper question for me becomes: what needs rewiring and what doesn’t.  Or asked a different way, what’s appropriate for nervous system rewiring and what isn’t?

It’s possible that my prior work as a physical therapist had a natural expiration date and it’s time to move on.  It’s also possible that I could return to loving that work again and holding it more loosely this time if I approach it in a different way.  Of course, forcing a ‘rewire’ on something that’s not meant for it is counterproductive.  Just the phrase, ‘forcing a rewire’ suggests the inappropriateness of such a behavior.   Nothing to force, young grasshopper…

So this is where the wiring story becomes more nuanced and maybe a little tricky.  I don’t have this figured out yet, friends, but it’s good material for me to be working with right now.  And, I bet you might have something like this going on for you at some point too.  Part of my brain wants to practice physical therapy again because I know how to do it.  Neuroscience tells us that our brains will choose the familiar over the unfamiliar every time, even if it’s not the best long-term option for us.  

Then there’s the psycho-emotional parts of me who are digging in their heels as I start to consider a return to PT because I’m doing inner work right now that is uncovering some of the deeper aspects of professional burnout and energy leak that got me here.  Admittedly, it really wasn’t the work itself, but some of the wiring I brought into it long before I entered the profession of physical therapy.

And I’m naming it for you to tame the shame around it for me.  Shame likes to be unspoken in the shadows.  Some of you reading this are my former patients and colleagues, I’m well aware, so this is particularly difficult for me to admit, but I must because that’s where I’m at today.  The following are some of the specific uncomfortable parts for me:

• Over-responsibility for my patients’ experiences and outcomes

• Fear of what patients and colleagues will think of me if I don’t know something or someone feels worse after a session

• When the treatment doesn’t work, fear of other people’s anger and disappointment

• When the treatment does work, fear that the patient expectation just became unbearably high for the next issue or for the friends and family they send to me as a result of their positive experience

• Performance anxiety and the expectation of knowing what to do on-the-spot in every situation, no matter how complicated

• Trying to know more than everyone else in my profession, because only then will I be good enough at my work

• Trying to be and do perfect sessions every single time (Another hint: perfection is an illusion)

• Ignoring my intuitive sense when someone needs something more outside the box because I feel ‘beholden’ to my scope of practice and what’s ‘OK’ according to the powers-that-be for me to do in my own practice

• Trying to fix people’s issues.  I know this one’s tricky - people do seek help to get fixed or fix themselves (which will be a forthcoming post in itself), but you can’t actually fix people, only things.  My academic training, and most areas of medical training, still rely on an out-dated and limiting model that primarily treats human beings like machines.  That’s the going metaphor that permeates the conventional medical model.  But instead, we are bio-intelligent, integrated, fluid, and dynamic systems-based beings that don’t take kindly to being ‘just’ a machine that needs fixing.  Some of you might not like that I said this (and sometimes I don’t like the truth of it myself!!), but I am wholeheartedly committed to a different model moving forward - again, stay tuned!

The collective weight of these fears became crushing for me.  And I tried ‘all the things’ to get rid of them, to put on my game face for my patients, to offer confidence and trust.  And it’s not that I’m also not competent, smart, innovative, and discerning, but the cumulative voice of these other parts became so loud and so strong that I could barely hear myself think at times.

Again, I do not believe this is the reason for falling apart-together last year, but I do believe it was a part of it.

So many of these issues can be summed up in a core wound for me of feeling inadequate.  So many of the circuits within me have been tied into shoring up my sense of feeling not-enough since I was very young.

You might identify with some of the issues above or not.  I am getting specific though because I need to for my own recovery process.  

The antidote for me right now is two-fold: 

1. Recovering my sense of essential worthiness, or enoughness, as a human being that has nothing to do with my professional life.  Being over doing.

2. Owning the part of me that is focused on learning an appropriate sense of Self-Responsibility  

Yes, I know this feels pretty random, but I assure you that it isn’t, at least for me.  I’m not going to suggest that anyone else needs to apply this to themselves either. Your journey is your own.  Mine is mine.  If mine can help yours, great, and vice versa, but it’s not an imperative.

This antidote is my rewiring my deeper orientation to ‘work’ at this point as I reflect on the deeper issues that came up for me above.  And as I work with these two parts daily - the enoughness and the self-responsibility - I find myself in particular moments that bring me back to the original point of this post:

How do I know when rewiring is called for and how do I know when accepting the wiring I have is necessary, not trying to change it?

Let’s zoom back out to the professional work conundrum.  Will it be possible, given the list of cumulative internal energies and challenges that I was facing at the time that I stopped practicing physical therapy, to rewire it all and turn it around so that I can go back and enjoy that same work in a different way, without the weight of all these issues resuming the energy leaking process that I was experiencing daily?  I’m not sure yet.  

Given what I believe to be true about my own ability to heal my body, mind, and soul in the face of being labeled with medical diagnoses that supposedly have no truly effective treatments, I have to believe it’s possible.  

Is it time to move on and do something different instead, not trying to take on the hefty rewiring of the above issues in the context that I was functioning as a physical therapist?  Maybe so.

Again, this is where the paradox of rewiring lies for me: I will take my wiring with me wherever I go.  So even if I don’t go back to physical therapy, these issues will still need attention or they’ll pervade whatever else I choose to do with my professional life.  At the same time, accepting the wiring I have and avoiding the very ‘fixing mentality’ that I railed against above is also called for.  

Rewiring and not rewiring at the same time…it’s confusing, I know, and I’m not sure if I’m landing this one.  Binary thinking is so much easier…but so much more dangerous and vulnerable to missing the point.

Can a sort of ‘intermediate’ professional move, provide just the right amount of  what I might call ‘healthy friction’ to help me work on these issues to ultimately grow and expand without going into full-on overwhelmed states?  Absolutely.  And as I continue to practice my inner skills and heal the inner wounds, might it be possible that my capacity expands for holding more of the above without energy leaks, or for holding it differently, in a not so clench-fisted way, but more of a holding loosely?  For sure it’s possible.

It’s like working with my symptoms.  The frustratingly true secret that I’ve learned about working with illness symptoms is to avoid focusing on the symptoms themselves in a persistent manner.  We’ve talked about this before, as it is not about ignoring my symptoms, but at the same time, focusing on what I do want in my life; what values I want to live out and be connected to in my actions.  Now that’s nervous system retraining in a nutshell, and I’m grossly oversimplifying the process.  

The parallel I’m trying to draw though is that by being with the uncomfortable emotions and energies of the core wounds and the collective professional challenges that wore me down, in much  smaller doses and exposures, and by focusing on what I really want in my work, including the values I really want to embody, somehow might the issues start to unravel and work themselves out?  It’s not that I’m not putting in some effort, but the focus is on what I want, rather than what I don’t want.  This is not easy, but I trust that it’s a major factor in the way forward for me.

So, if you’re wondering what I’m going to be up to, you’ll have to keep holding your breath on some level as far as the physical therapy part is concerned. The nervous system wellness coaching part is moving forward with much joy and anticipation and that, for me, is the way through and forward professionally for now.  

I’m sorting it all out, as you can tell…but I’m trusting that this is the best path to traverse in re-discovering the meaningfulness in my work that I deeply value and the desire to help others along the path.  

For the record, in reference to my subtitle for this post, I’m still waiting for the magic part to maybe happen here, and I’m trusting it will in some way…

I’d love to hear if this made any sense to you and if you have appreciated similar nuances of experience to my own.