ROR: Permission To play

How urgency, learned helplessness, and self-sacrifice quietly steal our joy.

Data collectors, how has the year been treating you? I can’t believe we are already almost in July!! Goodness me—time is moving. I will be turning 35 this Friday, and I don’t know about any of y’all, but I tend to get the birthday blues rather than feel celebratory.

This month, at least for me, has felt heavy—very dragged.

I’ve had no energy, no motivation, and I’ve been in an overall slump. It’s hard when you are in the human service field. For some of us, this work really does fill us up, but in seasons when we are down in our own lives, it can be difficult to show up for others when you can barely show up for yourself. Those of you with kids, where you at? How you doing back there?

I find myself wanting to unplug and give up on the whole public content educator business. I’m currently building a learning space, but I also have the desire to host workshops where we can all learn in one space together while also gaining supervision status and providing clinical supervision. You ever have all these ideas that just keep popping up, but the basket is getting fuller and fuller? Laughs in ADHD. 🤭 We drown in the distraction of idea-making and brainstorming so that we avoid the actual creation of it all. This is what happens when our nervous systems are activated, and at least for me, my body can tell when I am trying to bypass by being “busy.”

As July creeps in this week... Cancer season. Sigh.

I’m in my moody season, but this moodiness comes from the weight of the collective ache. It’s not just me feeling it; many of us are. We are torn, indecisive, and afraid to move or jump into the unknown. We bypass our whole lives because we are afraid of the “what ifs.”

Many of us are comfortable with where we are: our routines, our careers, all of it. Even the pain that comes with life. Holding that ache for clients is rewarding, but without proper emotional hygiene, you risk absorbing what is not yours. We know leaving means working more than we do now or even leaving a lifestyle we currently have. Some of us are not willing to lose those things. Some of us are aware of the cost that walking away from something can bring; it’s a risk.

The algorithm tells you the universe has your back—just believe—and authors before us have written about this. But what does that actually look like? I mean, concretely. Can anyone describe it?

I notice humans reach for therapists as guides to hand our panic child over, not realizing that handing over the very child we continue to abandon with our own habits, just to give it to someone else, risks secondary injury.

Why do you think that is?

My theory—expectation.

I have been feeling a molasses-type sensation in my body.

S L O W W W W W....

I can admit to the neglect of my physical health through my workout routine and the complete disappearance of my meditation practice. As a result, I have been feeling the noise in my mind a lot lately. It has been throwing me off balance, right into avoidance, executive freeze, and straight-up drifting mode. I’ve been swirling in creative ideas, downloads, and existential reflective inquiries—corridors many don’t explore, though their peacocking leads you to believe they do.

The world is so full of it that those of us with the depth—the metabolic need for it, not to sound dramatic—get labeled as crazy. I am rambling, but this month has been a heavy lesson. I am seeing the pattern not only in myself and my own personal relationships but also with each other systemically. When we refuse to see the pattern, we create a prison that is a repeat of what we watched growing up. That’s why I am so intrigued by cancel culture. Who said we should care about them? Who are they to our lives? Do they pay your bills?

Many people are stuck because the “villains” in their lives may provide for them financially. This is where we are rooted in our comfort. I think about young ones transitioning from high school to college or young adults finally learning that they will have to take over their phone and car bills as a means to escape the control of their parents. Leaving these systems requires a total identity flip. Your life can go from being a suburban housewife and stay-at-home mom to being single and living in an apartment with your dog or cat.

Many of us say we are staying for the kids, but we are staying for the comfort of the living situation or because of the economy. Now, if it were truly that bad, we would do whatever it took to leave. That is humanity, and we don’t want to be honest about that. We have willpower, but we want to claim that we don’t. Insert free will here....

This learned helplessness is poisoning us and causing a rift because nuance exists, but we are being conditioned to bypass that ability. We use the discomfort that nuance creates to signal to us that it is “wrong” and that we should avoid it at any capacity. We use whatever it takes—the weight of this world we are all carrying—and we are normalizing that.

I recently read that the only time animals stay still is if they are sick or dying. I revisit this because the lack of motivation is the body’s mechanism shutting down because it’s not being used. Over time, the body essentially believes it is dying due to a lack of movement. That explains how sluggish we feel: the lack of motivation and drive, the cravings or overeating, the binging, all in the undisclosed name of avoidance. All of it weighs us down energetically, and it’s hard to find the energy to move through it into a walk, a workout, breathwork, or a journal session. It’s bloody hard, but that does not mean it’s impossible.

When we remove inquiry and normalize labels as conversation enders, we condition ourselves away from repair and into reinforced reactivity. This is psychologically alarming and concerning. We do not have the mental capacity to sit with this because we are too busy being conditioned to carry the weight of the world and being righteous in our political sides. This is all a distraction. But when we are tribal to it, we cannot see how it is the “devil energy” pulling us into drifting.

That’s why it’s easy to walk away, divorce, or cut someone off. It doesn’t require us to learn the skills necessary to communicate with people even when we’re upset. We lose friends over it due to heightened emotional states and a lack of willingness to hold onto our own views while listening to others. Somewhere along the line, we mistook nuance as a form of control. Nuance just means multiple things can be true, and for some reason, that angers people. I truly believe it’s because humans can’t stand when their power is given back to them, staring them right in the face.

Now, my hunch also is that people can’t stand when the world around them does not center their pain as if that’s the only pain that exists today.

You see this in marriage, where one partner learns helplessness. We make “should” comments due to the expectation that because they are an adult, they should know better. The more I work with humans, the more I realize many of us are just abandoned children who got bigger. We can navigate life and keep ourselves fed and housed, but when it comes to relationships, we flinch at the thought of leaving the sink full of dishes or staying on the couch when a husband comes home. We project the schema lens of our younger selves onto our current reality, and we live that out in our homes and at work.

We are exhausted. So exhausted. I feel it.

Soooo....

How do we give ourselves permission to rest and lean into that without guilt? What if that’s the muscle we must learn to practice?

We must stop allowing the stories the mind whispers to us to cloud our perception of reality that we later project onto our kids, partner, or whoever at work.

Ladies, something I have been discovering within myself as we go through the Rewiring Out of Resentment series. Much of the resentment I have toward my husband—and I have worked with many women and have women in my life who struggle with the same thing—is watching a man prioritize himself, his happiness, and his hobbies. Really pisses us off. I had to reflect as to why...

I believe it’s because women have been socially conditioned to self-sacrifice in the name of “love.” The women before us often fed everyone else except themselves or fed themselves last. They never rested as a means to take care of the home. Now, I don’t think this is healthy at all. Just look at the wellness of the women in our lives. Many have such hormonal imbalances simply because they operate with the belief that you are selfish to nurture yourself and rest. I disagree with this.

Yet, for those of us with these women actively in our lives, how do you learn the skills to bypass the undercurrents of that energy and choose to give yourself rest—not the overindulgent type of rest either? Our society today labels self-indulgences as self-care, and that is not the kind I am referring to.

For me, I live with a constant state of urgency in my body, as if I am late to be somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere is nowhere. I have had to really reflect on why, despite being an adult now, it is so hard for me to guide my body out of that automatic response. It’s almost as if my fascia has muscle memory to stay in urgency, and part of my mission is to rewire out of that.

Now, resentment in the body does not help. Being online and constantly reminding yourself of the ache in this world does not help either. So it really does fall on us individually to be intentional.

I am back in my home state of California, and I must say—I miss home so much. The air just feels better here.

While I am here, part of my intention is to incorporate joy and play back into my life regardless of the endless to-do list of tasks I feel I must all-or-nothing get done. The key here is to enjoy. Part of my mission, as someone with a very rigid schedule and routine, is to challenge that. I live in this “not on a school night” mentality, which is odd because I have been out of school for quite some time now. So work has replaced school, and the script just keeps replacing itself.

I want to teach my body that play and joy can, in fact, live on the days where work also lives. Meaning, I can do something fun (paddle boarding) right after my last client. I don’t have to go to the mundane routine of the “work week.” I can train my body to understand that work and play can coexist on days that are not just the weekend.

This feels sweat-inducing for me. 🫣 I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Nothing.

So maybe that is the lesson here.

What can you do this week, despite work, that will fill your cup with joy and laughter? Is it meeting with a friend for a meal or a walk? Is it going on a hike or getting outside in nature? What does that look like for you?

For me, it looks like taking advantage of being back home and having that paddle board ready to go and hit the water. It looks like going on a lot more walks and even taking drives to the Bay Area to get a change in scenery and enjoy the ocean, even if I have work tomorrow.

It looks like slowing down and not all-or-nothing-ing everything on my list of a million things. It looks like developing systems for my brain to minimize urgency energy because my brain can understand that I have things written down—pen and paper—and my brain does not have to flip out wondering where that note I jotted down is.

Let me know what that looks like for you.

As we chase our milligrams by bringing joy in, I hope you share what that looks like for you! I have put some reflection questions down below for you.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your life are you staying—not because you truly want to, but because the familiar feels safer than the unknown?

2. When you imagine giving yourself permission to rest or experience joy without first earning it, what stories or sensations immediately arise in your body?

3. If your nervous system truly believed that work and play could coexist, what is one small act of joy you would allow yourself this week?

—Till next time, Data Collectors.