How are you doing this Wednesday morning?

It's finally starting to feel like spring here in Tucson. Spring is an interesting season in the desert. In D.C., springtime always felt like a dynamic event: the melting, the sprouting, the color, the clearing away! Here, it's a bit more subtle, gentle, imperceptible, a slow beaming in. Even my allergies here are more subtle. (Which I'm grateful for!).

As always this earthy shift is a reminder to me that just as nature is constantly shifting, we as humans — as beings of nature — are also always shifting.

But it doesn't always feel that way.

Sometimes it can feel like we are trapped right where we are.

If you google "emotions" (anyone else do this ever?) you'll find hundreds of maps and psychological theories around the human emotional landscape, but there are at least three emotions that most researchers tend to agree are common among us: sadness, anger and fear.

(There are other emotions of course, such as joy and disgust, but it hasn't been my experience that those emotions gravitate us toward feeling stuck. Joy tends to be a more vibrant emotion, and therefore ethereal and fleeting. Further, if you're in a joy-heavy emotional spiral, you probably wouldn't think, "I'm stuck!!" you'd just be like, "I'm in love!!!" In which case, I'll have what you're having.)

Often, we can feel stuck without understanding that there is anything below the physical surface. Here are some experiences where someone might feel stuck:

The thing is, these things are the symptom of stuckness, not the root of it. And stuckness is just a placeholder for what we feel when we're ready to peel back the emotions that lurk beneath the surface. I have a working theory that when we start to feel stuck is when we have essentially internalized our root emotion, rather than processed it. In the stuck place, we spiral.

The alternative when we encounter a challenge is to numb away the difficult emotion (with substances, spiritual bypassing, or any number of numbing mechanisms), which is not so helpful and in my experience only causes more suffering. So the good news is, if you feel stuck, that's actually a sign of strength. You have chosen not to numb or circumvent, and that's quite brave.

So let's for the sake of experiment look at three emotional root causes of stuckness: sadness, anger and fear.

What's a possible root emotion of being stuck at a job? Anger jumps to mind — as someone who has been there before.

For anger, an external manifestation would look something like frustration or irritation ("Why am I not getting the recognition I deserve from others?") whereas once it's internalized for too long, it can start to feel like self-criticism or self-flagellation (e.g., "I'm just going to sit out of this meeting because my opinion doesn't seem to matter here" or "I'm not good at networking.") It can also start to feel like resentment toward others if you project that anger in other directions.

In other words, when you don't process your anger, you just end up taking it out on yourself. When you do that, you are likely to make the original challenge worse, thereby piling onto your anger. Andddd...that's how ya get stuck.

Looking at the next example, what's perhaps lurking beneath for someone who's depressed about their living situation? Let's assume it's despair ("How will I ever find a place where I can feel happy?"). When you're sad, it's a very slippery slope to self-pity which sounds more like "why me?" or "why do I always find myself in these terrible living situations?"

I think in my past, self-pity has started to take over when I've convinced myself too many times that I'm not allowed to or supposed to feel sad about my circumstances. Somehow, I get the message that my sadness isn't OK or appropriate, so I swallow it up where the only person who can feel sorry for me is myself. That is when I start to feel stuck, because self-pity is a very non-dynamic place to be.

As potentially unpleasant as the emotion of despair is, there is at least some information it provides us. Whereas, it's hard to know where to go with self-pity, which is inherently limiting and really reduces us and makes us feel small. Small and stuck.

Can anyone else relate?

The last example is perhaps the heaviest: relationship woes. Yet, this is a pretty common experience and one that probably we will all have. When I really sit with this in the context of my own life, the dominant emotion beneath the surface is anxiety. I'm anxious for the unknown of starting over. While anxiety can feel more like the question, "how do I trust someone again?" it's a fine line between that and spiraling toward self-doubt which has at the heart of it: "How can I trust myself?"

Self-doubt is so hard! Of the three examples here, it's probably the one that I've experienced most in my life in various contexts. But recognizing that it's there is a powerful gateway.

So, if you have felt this sense of stuckness lately, are you able to see any connection between the "what's going on" and "what's happening on an emotional level"?

In my view, stuckness can be powerful because as much as it sucks to feel it, it's an indication that we have turned inward. Turning inward means we have the capacity to see how the unpleasantness we are feeling is all of our own creation. And therefore, it is ours for the shifting, too.

But just like the seasonal shifts of the desert, the unsticking can be subtle and without much ado. We don't always have to perform some grand gesture to break through. It can be much simpler, or even a small tweak in a daily ritual. I've included a few thought-starters below 😊

Below are three exercises that have worked for me for the aforementioned self-pity, self-criticism and self-doubt. The antidotes are basically like internal resources—or values made actionable. The examples here are mine, but you might have others. The examples here are meant to provide a system that inspires your own reflection :)