Good Ol’ discomfort.
How many of us know what that feels like? It’a what we all collectively avoid the most. In our relationships, families, even in the workplace.
In the essay I wrote we discussed the commute calibration. How on our commute to situations we mentally rehearse the scene before even entering the field. You can find that essay below.
These days specially lately, I see our dopamine nation and the nervous systems within it. You see, even with myself right now I am full of discomfort. I want to give up, not do anything, just sleep and do nothing. Anyone else feel that way?
This past month has been a lot for many of us. The discomfort that lives in what is rough to deal with.
We are living in a collective state of preemptive embodiment and since it’s the base line for functioning for many of us. It’s almost normalized at this point. It’s a nervous system loop where we carry the storm into the room before we’ve even turned the knob and walked in. We could be rehearsing it in bed the night before, on the way to work, predicting what the outcome will be so we can “stay ready.” Whether it’s a political argument on the timeline, a walk down the hallway to speak to your teen, or a partner longing for connection, we are witnessing a massive, multi-generational failure to metabolize discomfort. This then creates a leakage and you see this avoidance of discomfort show up in many environments.
When we don’t have the skills to process our own guilt or shame, we displace it. We outsource it to our children, our partners, and our algorithms. This is the skipped highway exit of emotional development, and it’s why we keep reliving the same chaos. I am convinced, that many have experienced arrested development in a lot of areas. Due to the messaging and modeling growing up as well as the internalized beliefs we refuse to let go of. Let’s zoom out— When I reflect on arrested development I think of what Dr. Amen stated “ parents unconsciously rob their child of self-esteem to build their own.” lately this has been very true. Not out of malice but out of the desire to not “feel bad.” When you avoid feeling bad at the cost of your parenting, the cost of your professionalism, and your own self-respect. We end up creating a new version of the same issue many of us grew up in or even survived.
How Our Systems Get Hijacked
To really get why we’re feeling so full of discomfort, we have to look at how our biology is actually being hijacked by the world we live in. It’s not just “in our heads”—it’s a physiological response to a few key things happening in our bodies and our histories. We are physically exhausted from “staying ready” which is the hypervigilence that gives us a false sense of safety. What I call “carrying the storm into the room” this is what neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) calls Predictive Interoception Coding. Our brains aren’t just living in the present; they are constantly guessing what’s next based on every past stressor we’ve ever faced. When we live in that loop of predicting the worst to protect ourselves, we rack up a high Allostatic Load. This is the literal wear and tear on our brains and bodies from chronic stress. We aren’t just “tired” or “exhausted” our systems are physically depleted from trying to solve problems that haven’t even happened yet(McEwen, 2005).
Our “dopamine nation” has lowered our tolerance for the hard stuff. We’ve become so used to outsourcing our feelings to algorithms and quick fixes that we are losing our affect tolerance, which is our actual ability to sit with a hard emotion. As Dr. Anna Lembke (2021) explains in her research on the pleasure-pain balance, when we over-indulge in high-dopamine distractions to avoid feeling bad, our brain counter-regulates by tipping us further toward the “pain” side. This lowers our affect tolerance, making everyday stressors feel unbearable.
The “leakage” is a family legacy. That “leakage” I mentioned where we displace our shame onto our kids or partners—is a core part of Family Systems Theory. When we haven’t reached a high level of Differentiation of Self, we can’t regulate our own internal anxiety. So, we engage in a Family Projection Process: we take our unmetabolized discomfort and unconsciously hand it over to the people we love. (nitpicking, complaining, hovering, trying to “help”, etc) This creates a multigenerational loop where the next generation inherits a nervous system that is already primed for a storm they didn’t even start.
Let’s go on a journey through examples of how we displace the discomfort and how that becomes a cycle.
🛺💨
The Parent Glitch: Discomfort as Tradition
A boundary is not a threat, but to a parent without emotional endurance and a severe level of enmeshment, the narcissistic need to be needed, or simply the inability to curate their own life outside of the kids. Boundaries feel like an existential rejection. They haven’t finished the “highway” of their own development, so when they hit a boundary, they glitch.
“I guess I won’t call anymore,”
Ever felt the heat of those guilt trips, weaponized incompetence, or forms of learned helplessness before? Yup, these are strategies — often unconscious— that gives us the exit to displace the hot potato of discomfort. All while avoiding the vulnerability necessary to ask for what we need.
“I feel___ and am afraid of losing you, or losing access to you, or afraid you will outgrow me and never need me”—
Could you imagine what it would feel like for you to be on the receiving end of vulnerability like this?
When we understand much of this behavior isn’t malicious and realize it is just a lack of skills—those pesky crayons some of us never got—we can see the cycle more clearly. They reach for the only crayons they have to color that life experience with: passive-aggression, silent treatments, and coercive manipulation disguised as “family loyalty.” This is nervous system activation hiding under the umbrella of tradition, culture, and even faith. When a parent cannot bridge the repair because their ego refuses the shame of acknowledgment, they dodge accountability and hand the emotional burden to their child instead.
This process, often described as a failure of interactive repair, forces the child to adopt compensatory strategies to maintain the attachment bond (Schore, 2012). That’s why many of us become people pleasers, or develop dismissive and avoidant attachment styles. This child grows up as an adult who eventually refuses to hold the weight any longer. In family work, this is where emotional cutoff occurs. According to Bowen (1978), emotional cutoff is a common way individuals manage unresolved emotional attachments to their family of origin by physically or emotionally distancing themselves. For many family systems that live off the fear of “what will people think,” this is the last thing the system needs because it draws external attention to the internal dysfunction.
Again, many of us are stuck in egocentric loops where we think everyone is watching and judging us, when it’s really just us hyper-analyzing ourselves. This heightened self-consciousness is often a byproduct of hypervigilance, a state where the nervous system is constantly scanning for social threats to maintain safety (Porges, 2011). The family system is often built on the individual holding what many other family members refuse to hold; that is how the discomfort gets displaced. It’s easier to pass it like a hot potato using covert means that can look like love, care, or inquiry to the naked eye. For those of us attuned to these dynamics, we see it for what it is: control. We would rather pass the heat of discomfort elsewhere than sit and process through it.
Emotional Displacement and the Software of Shame
Unresolved trauma, sibling wounds, and cultural pressures don’t disappear they get displaced. Parents who never dealt with their own abandonment will project those pieces onto their adult kids. Now— get this… For those parents who are so worried about becoming like their parents. Be careful now, you may end up creating a new version of the same problem like I said before simply because you are more concerned with being liked, seen as good, and you don’t want to feel the discomfort of being “mean, assertive, or “like my parents”, etc.
When I say this I say this with love mommas…
TOUGH. LOVE. SAVES. LIVES!!!
It is a bit selfish to prioritize your own discomfort over the need to parent your children. You don’t want to feel bad, so you don’t demand the respect from your children by implementing consequences, following through with what you say and being consistent. Being a yes parent only conditions the child that everyone outside of you will say yes and that there are never natural consequences to their actions. That is not setting your kid, teen, etc up for success. It’s setting you up for comfort.
See what Dr. Amen means when he says that this is where parents rob their children of self-esteem to build their own?
Many moms who overfunction only do so out of their activated survival self (ASS)—a set of behaviors learned as a child that they never unlearned. Now, many moms overdo it out of their own need to soothe feelings of guilt or shame. We often don’t want to feel the discomfort of our own unresolved behaviors or past decisions. You may simply be learning how to be yourself outside of being a mother, wife, father, or husband, but every time you feel guilt for going to the gym, going out, or going on vacation—doing something where you aren’t just prioritizing the kids—you feel bad. That discomfort is an intensity many couples do not want to face, so where do you think it gets displaced? You guessed it: the partner.
When we zoom in on conditioning, we have to look at the internalized patriarchy within the very women we try to measure up to. This internalized patriarchy is also what raised many of our husbands. In clinical terms, this is often linked to gendered socialization and the internal locus of control; while women are often socialized toward communal overfunctioning, men are often conditioned toward agency and compartmentalization (Helgeson, 1994). Many men have the mechanism to prioritize themselves and compartmentalize effectively. Consequently, women who overfunction often meet men they deem as underfunctioning. Boys are mothered in ways girls are not. If you scan your upbringing, you may see that many mothers do not feel they have the same safety to raise their sons with the same emotional expectations, often due to the influence of their own mothers or mother-in-law’s who overshadow their parenting with their sons. In my work with men and couples, the data shows that many men have no problem prioritizing their needs—not necessarily in a selfish way, but through a capacity for compartmentalization. This is a skill many women could learn to adopt, but instead, many activate an external locus of control. Due to the fear that if they actually did compartmentalize they will be “judged".”
This is where women may start demanding, expecting, or even engaging in covert forms of coerciveness to get their needs met. They want their husband to father or husband exactly the way they seem fit. In psychology, an external locus of control is a major clue that nervous system activation is present (Rotter, 1966). Control is the biggest illusion of safety. Women were conditioned to overfunction, especially for men—to cook, clean, and do it all. Many men were never required to provide reciprocity in emotional availability because their mothers were in a state of survival. For those mothers, doing was what dissociated them from their shadows, grief, and trauma.
This overfunctioning provided a loophole for men to simply wait for the woman to lead. Think about how often women meet for brunch or talk in group chats about how unhappy they are and how their husbands don’t do xyz. Yet, when I ask what they want, many just say “effort.” If you cannot pinpoint what effort looks like concretely, you are setting a boobytrap. According to research on adult attachment and communication, vague expectations often lead to a demand-withdraw pattern, leaving the partner in a state of executive freeze because they feel like no matter what they do, they will fail (Gottman, 1994). Ladies, think about your mothers. How often did you feel that nothing you did was good enough? Is it possible you have created that same hurdle for your partner and your children?
What is effort when you don’t even give yourself effort by your daily habits and routines?
See how focusing on what our partners, coworkers, bosses, kids, or family are NOT doing frees us from the necessity of actually facing the discomfort of doing it, learning it, asking for it, or initiating it—whatever that “it” is. Pointing outward frees us from looking within at what we choose to neglect in ourselves.
Let’s do a quick example for “funzies,” and this is a very common one. Let’s say you had goals, dreams, and aspirations for your career, but kids, marriage, and life diverted you off that path. Years later, you never actually started. Where do you think the buildup of that grief goes? It is often channeled into an undercurrent directed at your partner. It’s easier now to get on them for every little thing, giving a nervous system that is addicted to being “bothered” something to feast on—all so you don’t actually have to face the ache of a choice. We have the free will to change our lives in a snap, and that fact alone is daunting. That thought puts the power back in our hands, and that power is the “hot potato” of discomfort we would rather displace.
This dynamic is often described in clinical literature as emotional reactivity within a system. When we cannot manage our own internal distress or “unfinished business,” we engage in what is known as a functional shift, focusing on the perceived inadequacies of others to regulate our own sense of self (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).
One of my favorite challenges is one I often have to use on myself, too. When I want to hyper-focus on my husband and the enmeshed dynamic he has with his mother—feeling the frustration and emotional intensity that comes with a MIL who weaponizes religion, softness, and “doing” to mask manipulation—it’s easy for me to be righteous in my psychological knowledge. But look at the very boundaries we ladies demand our husbands have with their mothers. Look at the relationship with your own parents. Do you talk? Can you communicate boundaries or tell them no? Can you let them know when they are overstepping, or do you ask to get out of things through avoidance and people-pleasing? If the answer is no, you are being a hypocrite, my dear.
I had to look deep into this mirror myself. Our situation is a bit unique since my MIL moved in with us over two years ago, making boundaries very necessary. But when we are caught in our own web of codependency or enmeshment, the inability to say no comes with the very discomfort we do not want to face. We displace it by focusing on what our partner is failing to do as a way to manage our anxiety through an external locus of control.
From a neuroscience perspective, this is a matter of Hebbian plasticity—the principle that “cells that fire together, wire together.” When we consistently fire and wire the neural pathways that focus on lack and external blame, we effectively prune away our ability to perceive agency or gratitude (Hebb, 1949). This displacement cycle becomes a physiological habit; we are conditioning our brains to scan for deficits instead of blessings, reinforcing a state of survival rather than one of growth.
Biology vs. Betrayal
The “half-assed hug” debate is something I notice in many systems, but it also serves as a metaphor for whatever action you want to replace “hugging” with. Let’s look at the emotional authenticity of hugs within families and how a system navigates when someone says no to physical touch. As always, put your gloves on here—it’s time to bring nuance into this discussion. In some families, due to culture, religious beliefs, messaging, and modeling, the idea of affection is seen as a sign of respect.
However, we also live in a society that is conditioning entitlement, and we have to name this. We often think that just because of what we feel, we are entitled to be rude or disrespectful. In reality, agency and body-protective measures have nothing to do with a lack of respect. Respect is becoming a dying art, so let’s just name that.
This is a biological reality. When the nervous system is activated, our perceptual range narrows, and we often interpret neutral cues as hostile. We cannot force a connection when the body is organized for conflict. This state of “neuroception”—the internal process of scanning for safety or threat—dictates whether we are even capable of social engagement (Porges, 2011). With that being said, we also have to acknowledge that many generations before us were conditioned to “grin and bear it,” forcing children to engage with family members who were behaving inappropriately.
The family might even know about the behavior and still force the child to engage because they don’t want to “look bad, feel bad, or make a scene.” What parents do not realize when they engage in this level of dismissive avoidance is the wound they unconsciously create. By protecting yourself from scrutiny, you create a breach of trust between you and the child. Over time, research shows that this lack of “attunement” and “rupture without repair” leads to insecure attachment patterns (Siegel & Hartzell, 2003). This child grows into an adult who may eventually stop engaging with you entirely due to what you refuse to acknowledge.
This is the discomforting consequence of dismissive avoidance in parenting. We are so focused on immediate relief in the now that we don’t think about the long-term future. When our selfish need for comfort overshadows the needs of those we love, we enter the territory of narcissism—a topic I know everyone loves to talk about. In clinical terms, this is often a form of “narcissistic parentification,” where the child is expected to regulate the parent’s ego and social standing at the expense of their own bodily autonomy (Miller, 1981).
The Rupture of Growth
One of the hardest truths to swallow is that development is not a duet; it’s a relay. Just because you have evolved doesn’t mean your partner, parents, or coworkers automatically will. When we deem ourselves morally righteous in what we have learned and demand that the environment meet us there, we slip into a form of narcissism. Demanding that the world change to accommodate our new awareness is not an act of embodiment; it is a retreat into an external locus of control. Where the illusion of safety lives. An internal locus of control, by contrast, is enforced through boundaries: saying no to your kids and providing consequences without trying to soften the sting by picking up their favorite food just because you can’t sit with their anger. In romantic relationships, an internal locus of control means finally doing something for yourself without scanning the environment—the kids, the partner, the “moods”—to find a loophole that lets you out of choosing yourself. Avoiding that choice only leaves you in resentment because you are still trying to outrun discomfort.
For overfunctioning mothers, I truly ask: how altruistic is your care for others if you do not prioritize self-care? Research into family dynamics suggests that chronic overfunctioning is often a compensatory mechanism for high systemic anxiety (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). People-pleasing is actually a form of manipulation because it creates gridlock, triangulation, and unintentional mess due to not being honest with ourselves. It’s the adult equivalent of saying, “Let me ask my mom... sorry, she said no,” when you never actually asked, but you’re also an adult. We throw others into the line of fire to avoid a perceived backlash that we inevitably face anyway. We are so uncomfortable with the truth that we don’t see the ways the mind takes the long way through avoidance and the externalization of blame.
Ladies, zoom in on yourselves for a moment. Do you do for your daughter what you do for your sons? Do you offer your husband the same grace you offer your children? Some of you tolerate disrespect and a lack of responsibility from your children—giving them miles of leash—yet hold your husband to a standard you don’t even hold for yourself. This is the classic discomfort displacement cycle. We tolerate disrespect in one area and toss that “hot potato” of frustration onto our partners because it is easier than facing the aspects of ourselves that feel powerless. Many couples hit what clinical researcher John Gottman (1994) calls “gridlock,” often because they assume their growth should be synchronous. But forcing a partner to behave beyond their current level of emotional development is its own form of control. Real development may require you to walk away from what creates discomfort, or—and this is a big “or”—it may require you to finally face the heat. Instead of running to avoidance, emotional cutoff, or ending a relationship, we can choose to face the urge to overfunction, scan, and overanalyze.
In my work with couples and families, I see how emotional cutoffs have become avoidance loops. It has become easier to avoid than to face the discomfort of being around another human who is messy and unregulated. This is the cycle many relationships are weathering right now, and it continues until someone makes the active choice to step out of the loop. It’s that easy, but it requires a conscious, daily decision to stay in the chair when things get hot.
The “Emotional Stew” and the Narrative Prison
When we can’t sit in our own emotional stew where the muck of shadow, shame, and embarrassment live. We grasp for narratives that make us the righteous victim so we don’t have to face our own agency. The nervous system is a pesky thing; it will have us grasping for God, the kids, or even therapists to validate a version of the story where we are the only one “drowning,” while failing to see that our partner is also self-medicating and imploding.This “righteous narcissism” prevents us from seeing the relational field as it is. True agency is realizing that you don’t need a narrative to justify leaving a dead marriage; the fact that it isn’t working is enough to start inquiring and assessing.Is it me? Is it the patterns of avoiding discomfort that have gotten us here? It takes two to maintain a cyclical dynamic in a relationship. Many cycles occur because, deep down, we benefit from them; they free us from a discomfort hiding somewhere else. This same displacement cycle is happening at the macro level. The internet has become a nervous system exposure lab where people project their parental wounds onto truth-tellers because they are too lazy to do the work of reclaiming their own power.
They bypass and deflect. They attack the mirror instead of looking in it. They demand comfort instead of self-reflection.
In a nation of dopamine addicts, we all get itchy for love-bombing, political movements, and ideologies because they provide relief from discomfort while simultaneously creating an “end of conversation” dismissiveness. In return, the amygdala which has no eyes—categorizes this chaos as home because it is so familiar. We are comfortable in the chaos because it’s what we were born into. Remember the waves I’ve talked about? Many of us were born in the chaos waves of life. We get so used to riding those waves that when we finally get to the calm of the lake, we’re bored.
This tendency to outsource our emotional state to others is often a byproduct of what researchers call emotional contagion, where our nervous systems unconsciously mimic the distress of those around us instead of maintaining an internal baseline (Hatfield et al., 1993). When we seek righteous victimhood, we are often operating from a state of defensive attribution, a cognitive bias where we attribute our failures to external factors to protect our self-esteem from the stew of shame (Shaver, 1970). Furthermore, the “boredom” we feel in the calm of the lake is a physiological reality for those raised in high-stress environments. Clinical studies on the repetition compulsion suggest that the brain may subconsciously seek out familiar chaotic patterns because the neurochemical spike of conflict feels more like vitality than the unfamiliar stillness of safety (Levy, 1998). Commute Calibration serves as a form of top-down regulation, where we use the prefrontal cortex to provide the mental rehearsal necessary to inhibit the amygdala’s reflexive survival responses (Schore, 2012).
Much of this work requires an awareness of that discomfort. It requires Commute Calibration—the art of the practice.This involves practicing calm through mental rehearsal so that when we arrive, we can embody safety. You stop waiting for the other person to change and you become the baseline for yourself, which is true freedom. You stop letting the past write the emotional code. You don’t just manage your emotions; you lead with them.
That was the goal all along right?
Till next time data collector.
Key Points for Integration
Predictive Processing: The nervous system doesn’t just react to the present; it creates a “mental rehearsal” of the future based on past trauma. This leads to a high allostatic load, where the body stays in a state of “functional freeze” or hypervigilance.
The Dopamine-Discomfort Loop: Constant engagement with high-reward stimuli (social media, “outsourcing” feelings) lowers our affect tolerance. This makes ordinary life feel physically painful, causing us to avoid necessary developmental growth.
Family Projection Process: When we cannot regulate our own shame or anxiety, we unconsciously “leak” it onto our partners or children. This is a primary driver of multigenerational trauma.
External vs. Internal Locus of Control: Real healing requires moving from an external focus (blaming others, demanding they change) to an internal focus (holding boundaries, choosing yourself, and sitting in the “heat” of the moment).
The Chaos-Homeostasis Connection: For those raised in high-stress systems, the “lake” (safety) feels boring. We may subconsciously sabotage peace because our nervous systems are wired to perceive chaos as “vitality.”
Extended Reading List
For the Neurobiology Enthusiast
“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk: A foundational text on how trauma is physically stored in the body and nervous system.
“Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett: A shorter, accessible look at how the brain “predicts” your reality rather than just reacting to it.
For the Family Systems Seeker
“Extraordinary Relationships” by Roberta Gilbert: An excellent introduction to Bowen Family Systems Theory, focusing specifically on differentiation and triangles.
“The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller: A deep dive into how children adapt to their parents’ unmet emotional needs, often leading to the “overfunctioning” discussed in the essay.
For the “Dopamine Nation” Context
“Dopamine Nation” by Dr. Anna Lembke: Crucial for understanding why we are collectively losing the ability to tolerate boredom or emotional pain.
“The Joy of Missing Out” by Tanya Dalton: A practical look at re-centering your life around your own values rather than the “external scan” of productivity and social pressure.
For the Boundary & Self-Work Journey
“Parenting from the Inside Out” by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell: Focuses on how our own childhood histories affect our parenting and how to break the cycle through self-understanding.
“The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” by John Gottman: Offers data-driven insights into the “gridlock” and communication patterns that happen when couples stop growing together.
Reflective Question
As you move from reading to practicing, which area of your life currently feels like the “hottest potato” the place where you are most tempted to focus on others’ failures rather than your own capacity for choice?
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.
Gottman, J. M. (1994). What Predicts Divorce? The Relationship Between Marital Processes and Marital Outcomes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–100.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. Wiley.
Helgeson, V. S. (1994). Relation of agency and communion to well-being: Evidence and explanations. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3), 412–428.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.
Levy, M. S. (1998). A conceptualization of the repetition compulsion. Psychiatry, 61(1), 45–53.
McEwen, B. S. (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, 30(5), 315–318.
Miller, A. (1981). The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Basic Books.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Shaver, K. G. (1970). Defensive attribution: Effects of severity and relevance on the responsibility assigned for an accident. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 14(2), 101–113.
Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. TarcherPerigee.