More on Rushing

Thanks again for your coaching on this. If I lean into trust I feel curious to go deeper with it. I’m going to bear it in mind when goal setting through the autumn workshop, and then in terms of specific examples of the day to day rushing energy, they fall in to two categories. The first is where I’m activated by lack of physical order / completeness, i.e. the other humans in the house having ‘made a mess’, or an email coming in late in my work day, e.g.

C: Email received 4.30pm
T: I have to deal with this now (I find it hard to identify an actual thought here)
F: Panic / anxiety?
A: Open it immediately; deal with it in a rush; notice I’m activated and choose to stay there; think I’ll feel better when I’ve done it
R: I deal with it in urgency?

The other way it happens is when I’m in a stress response because of something else, or maybe experiencing a ‘negative’ emotion that I’m not noticing and processing. I find this much harder to model.

C: Life
T: ?
F: Anxious (maybe other emotions underneath?)
A: Go round the house and put things in order according to my system; tidy phone / inbox / planner; notice I’m activated and choose to stay there; think I’ll feel better when I’ve done it
R: ?

I’ve done some thinking around this over the summer while working on my goal focused on self-love. I’m aware that I use tidying up and ordering things as a way to create control and safety for myself, and while I can definitely offer that part of me love and compassion, I go between thinking that it’s a weakness that holds me back and wastes my time, and that it is a strength – a way to regulate myself. Maybe it’s not just one or the other and my work is identifying when it’s serving me by helping me to regulate, and when I’m using it to buffer?

 

Answer:

Let’s look at your first model first.

Model 1:

C: Email received 4.30pm
T: I have to deal with this now (I find it hard to identify an actual thought here)
F: Panic / anxiety?
A: Open it immediately; deal with it in a rush; notice I’m activated and choose to stay there; think I’ll feel better when I’ve done it
R: I deal with it in urgency? –> I would say that your R is that you don’t give yourself the option to deal with it in a different way and you believe that you HAVE to deal with it now.

Secondly, I love the self-awareness that you have about how tidying up and organizing can be both a strength and a weakness. I think you’re absolutely right. Many coping mechanisms have beneficial and productive sides to them. When you think about this duality being an option for you, how does that feel? What do you create space for when you’re able to see this tendency on a spectrum instead of thinking of it as only a weakness or a strength (and how does this relate to the R line of your model)? Again, wonderful self-awareness. Come back when you’re ready for more coaching with a submission titled, “Rushing pt. 2”.