Sharing My Goals And Struggles

Something that has happened during the process of a lot of my goal setting is that I have limited time where I am well enough to push myself completely by myself to do hard things. I know from experience that is much easier when you are in an environment with other people doing similar things but I struggle reaching out and sharing what I am doing even in the simplest way like telling a friend, posting in the community, or raising my hand for coaching. My brain always comes up with plenty of reasons why I can’t and then before I can work through them all sth else comes up, it gets benched and the cycle repeats itself.

I should post in the community – why – for accountability and support – I am not good at phrasing things in a way that makes sense or gets noticed so no one will probably read or interact with it anyway – even if someone does I will be too stressed out about it/overthinking how I phrased things that it won’t help so in conclusion I can just save myself the trouble

I should talk to my friend about it – it’s too long for texting and we don’t usually talk on the phone so it will be awkward- ok I could use the dictation function, but I don’t feel well today so maybe tomorrow – I won’t find the right words – I don’t want to talk about this because it’s uncomfortable and then I will have someone on my back asking whether I did it which will create pressure and lead to me not wanting to do it anymore – so maybe I don’t really need accountability or support afterall

I can see that most of the thoughts in those recent examples are blatant thought errors, unknowable or even not true but they feel true enough to keep me from acting or force me to act in a forced pushed kind of way that is unpleasant and leads me to retreat for the next 6 month because it seemed so strenuous even though I just put my hand up for coaching and nothing else. I have been trying to imagine ways to make it easy or fun, but I can’t come up with anything convincing. It kind of feels like the copouts are just too convenient for my brain to want to give them up and I can only see why I started to want to do these things when I have enough distance to actually doing them.

 

Answer:

 

This is something that other people have actually written into AAC about, so you are not alone in this freeze response when it comes to being vulnerable or sharing yourself with others! And you are SO RIGHT. Your brain is offering up stories so it can keep you safe.

When I read your reasons why you don’t want to publish a post in the community, my brain went to asking this question: so what? So what if nobody reads or interacts with your post, or if it’s not worded perfectly, or if you don’t get the most help from it because your brain is freaking out about whether you did it right? What would happen in those scenarios and how would you handle it? Play it out in your mind or on paper. Now let’s flip the script…what’s the best thing that could come from you posting?

The stories feel true because your nervous system is saying: PROTECT YOURSELF, PROTECT YOURSELF, PROTECT YOURSELF, but the threat you are feeling is not a threat to life and limb. It’s your brain doing an ancient thing in a modern time (and it’s totally normal, it’s just not helpful in this case). If another story could be just as true in this scenario, what might it be?