When Self-Improvement IS the Trap

» ​On adaptation, the intelligence of the body, and the paradox of self-enquiry «

Am I Allowed to Remain?

There is a quiet imperative running through much of our contemporary understanding of what it means to live a good life—keep growing, keep learning, keep evolving. Become more resilient. More conscious. More emotionally regulated. More capable of meeting whatever life brings.

We are encouraged to adapt, to develop ourselves, to turn our difficulties into opportunities for growth. Even our suffering is recruited into the project. There is something to learn here. Something to integrate. Something to heal.

And much of this is genuinely helpful. I have devoted a considerable part of my life to understanding the ways we organise ourselves around our experiences, and how we might discover greater freedom within those organisations.

But something has been troubling me.

What if the very movement towards becoming better is also one of the ways we keep ourselves from simply being here?

What if our devotion to growth carries, somewhere beneath its good intentions, a quiet assumption that who we are, as we are, is not quite enough?

And what if we have become so accustomed to this assumption that we no longer recognise it as an assumption at all?

Entering the enquiry

This enquiry began, rather unexpectedly, with my joints. They're stiff, clanky and inflexible—increasingly so through perimenopause—exacerbating a sense of declining health.

I was curious about the possibility of a psychological correlate, interested in what might be discovered by bringing mindful curiosity to my mindbody experience. Was there some tension I needed to understand? Some holding pattern that might be ready to soften?

In the course of my journaling, I encountered a simple proposition:

There is no requirement to change.

Well.

That landed.

Immediately, as I penned those words, I felt it like a blow to my solar plexus. A sudden windedness. And from somewhere deep within came an immediate response:

Adapt or perish!

I hadn't gone looking for that.

And yet there it was. A fricken clear articulation of something I hadn't realised I was carrying.

Not; But I value being responsive to life, I'm good with change.

Nope. Something far more fundamental.

That word 'perish' got my attention; some part of me believes there's a LOT at stake here.

Okay, adult-self knows adaptation is a wonderful thing. It is one of the great intelligences of living systems. We are continually responding to our environments, learning, adjusting, finding new ways to participate in life.

What became apparent was a polarity within me. Different parts, with quite different relationships to adaptation. I began to wonder about the movement within myself, when adaptation is felt as a natural movement of life, or—like now—when adaptation is the imperative.

What happens when the capacity to adapt becomes a requirement? When the organism learns, somewhere along the way, that remaining as it is might not be safe? Or welcomed?When adaptation is no longer simply a response to life, but a way I might secure my place within it.

Ah yup, I can feel how subtly this movement had woven itself into my life.

I'm not a recovering A-type personality unburdening herself from all the striving to achieve more—to become more successful. I don't even celebrate achievement as inherently nourishing. But this movement, quiet in its operation, was now on my radar. My frame of awareness saw just how much adjusting, attending, understanding, refining, to become more aware, more capable, more integrated, that I do.

A perpetual little movement towards who I might yet become.

But beneath it, perhaps, a question I hadn't known I was asking.

Am I allowed to remain as I am?

When growth becomes a condition

I find this particularly interesting in the worlds of psychotherapy, spirituality and personal development. We are immersed in the language of becoming. We work on ourselves. We cultivate awareness. We identify our patterns. We explore our conditioning. We attend to our wounds. We expand our capacity.

And of course, there is tremendous value in all of this.

I love this work. I love the extraordinary intelligence of the human organism, the ways we have learned to protect ourselves, and the possibilities that emerge when those protective organisations are met with curiosity and compassion.

But I am beginning to wonder whether our sincere intentions can be quietly co-opted by something much older: the belief that we must keep changing in order to belong.

A subtle message that we are not quite there yet. That there is still more work to do—another pattern to understand, another limitation to overcome, another part of ourselves waiting to be integrated.

And because this movement is so culturally celebrated, it can be difficult to recognise the pressure it carries. We call it resilience. We call it growth. We call it doing the work.

But what if, sometimes, we are still trying to earn our place?

There is a rather uncomfortable possibility here.

Even healing can become another expression of the very organisation we are hoping to loosen.

Think about that for a moment.

If I have learned that I must continually adapt in order to be acceptable, safe, loved, or included, then the project of becoming a more conscious, integrated, emotionally regulated human being might fit rather neatly into that same organisation.

I am still adapting. Still improving. Still becoming somebody who will, perhaps, finally be allowed to rest.

Only now I am doing it with greater awareness :-> And with a more sophisticated vocabulary ;-p   

I find myself smiling at this, somewhat ruefully.

Because I can see it.

And I can also see how easily I might transmit this orientation to others, particularly in my work as a therapist.

You are welcome here. And we are going to help you become better.

What happens if we remove the second sentence?

What happens if we really mean the first?

And here was the strange thing. The possibility of welcoming me—as I am—didn't initially feel like permission. It felt like losing my bearings.

If I no longer needed to become somebody, what was left to orient myself around?

The unfamiliar territory

The prospect of no longer organising myself towards becoming, felt like a kind of existential vertigo where my familiar reference points would begin to disappear.

If I am not moving towards becoming somebody, what am I doing?! Who am I?!

And what would it be like to look out of my own eyes from that place?

I genuinely didn't know.

No forward pull. No improvement arc. No internal supervisor quietly assessing how well I am doing at being me.

Self Improvement was functioning as a kind of ground. It's great—it gives me orientation. Purpose. Worth. Continuity. It tells me who I am, and where I am going.

And now, I am entertaining the possibility of stepping out of it. Or perhaps, more accurately, discovering that I don't have to keep perpetuating it.

What would remain?

Listening to the body (and trusting her intelligence)

Here is where the enquiry took an unexpected turn.

I had begun by wondering about the stiffness in my joints.  But now, sitting with the words adapt or perish, another possibility began to emerge.

What if the holding wasn't simply an expression of my difficulty to adapt?

What if it was an intelligent response to the relentless requirement to adapt?

I had been approaching my body with the familiar orientation of self-enquiry—something is happening here. Let me understand it. Perhaps there is something I need to recognise, release, integrate.

But what if the bodymind had already begun moving in a different direction?

What if the stiffness—rather than signalling a failure to adapt—was expressing something of a refusal to keep adapting?

I don't want to keep bending.

I don't want to keep adjusting.

I want to stay here.

I had been bringing my conscious mind into the game—How can I understand this so that something might change?

And the bodymind responded—I don't want to keep changing!

Oh. What a collision.

Crikens! That turned my enquiry upside down.

Because suddenly the holding wasn't something I had to fix, attend to, work out or manage.

My body was just wanting to be listened to.

Something in my organism was faithfully holding to a direction that my conscious mind had not yet recognised. This organism—me—is not refusing life, is not failing in flexibility, is not even 'stuck'.

Just faithful. Faithful to the deeper fidelity to myself.

I want to be careful here. I am not suggesting that perimenopausal joint stiffness is caused solely by psychological holding, or that the body is literally communicating a particular belief through its joints. There are very real physiological processes involved.

But as a phenomenological enquiry, something important has opened. The meaning I was making of my experience has changed.

I had been asking, What am I holding on to, and how might I let it go?

Now I find myself asking:

  What is this holding in service of?

And perhaps, even more tenderly:

  What if this is not something I need to release, but something I need to respect?

Here I am, in the paradox (actually I love arriving here - it's closer to 'truth' than my rational mind permits). One part of me learnt to adapt in order to remain. But today, something else in me is asking whether I might remain without having to adapt.

No wonder it felt less like liberation and more like danger.

Which brings me back to the question that had emerged earlier.

  Am I allowed to remain?

What strikes me now is that the question is not really asking whether I can remain.

Of course I can.

It is asking whether I am allowed.

There is something relational in that word.

Allowed by whom?

By the people around me? By the world? By some internalised authority that has been quietly evaluating my worthiness for as long as I can remember?

Or perhaps by the part of me that learned, long ago, that adaptation was necessary: Adapt or perish!

Willingness to be in the wobble.

I find myself returning here to Pema Chödrön's writing on groundlessness, and to the echo of my recent enquiry into Becoming Nobody Special.

There is something profoundly unsettling about relinquishing the project of becoming somebody. Even when that somebody is a wiser, kinder, more conscious version of ourselves. Perhaps especially then.

Because we can become very attached to the person we are becoming. And the promise that, one day, we might finally arrive.

But what if there is nowhere we need to arrive? It's cliche I know, but, arriving here, this position has underscored so much of my energy output.

I monitor my responses. Make sense of my feelings. Adjust my behaviour. Check whether I am acting from my values. And then noticing where I have become reactive, defended, contracted, unavailable.

I don't think I'm alone here. For those of us who have devoted ourselves to practices of self-awareness, this can become an extraordinarily subtle occupation.

We can be very good at it. We can observe ourselves observing ourselves. We can recognise our strategies, name our protective parts, track our nervous systems, and bring compassionate awareness to our experience.

Yup, all wonderful capacities.

But I wonder whether there is a point at which even our awareness becomes another instrument of management—another way of keeping ourselves under observation. Another way of ensuring that we remain on the path.

I recognise this in myself.

And I am beginning to wonder what it might be like to simply have an experience without immediately recruiting it into the project of understanding myself.

To feel sadness without needing to locate its origins. To notice tension without requiring it to soften. To encounter uncertainty without searching for the next orientation. Or even to allow an experience to remain incomplete.

What would that be like?

Certainly a little less commentary on my part ;-p

Being with!

There is another lovely paradox in all of this for me.

My therapeutic practice is grounded in the principle of being with.

Meeting experience with curiosity, compassion and respect, rather than attempting to change it.

In Hakomi, we are interested in what becomes possible when a person's experience is met without judgement, without pressure, without the demand that it become something else.

And yet I can see how readily I might offer this quality of presence to another person while quietly maintaining a different set of expectations for myself.

This enquiry is bringing me into a more intimate relationship with the very principle I hold so dear.

Being with.

Not being with in order to...

Not being with as a strategy for transformation...

Just being with.