The Why Doesn't Always Matter
One of my favorite concepts is curiosity. I fully and wholeheartedly believe the world doesn't have enough curiosity about behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and other people. We are too filled with judgment, shame, or guilt, and we miss the essential element of just being curious. Curiosity is an amazingly freeing concept.
HOWEVER, and this is where I am branching a bit. Sometimes rather than being a freeing concept, curiosity can become a practice of justifying and judgment. I notice it a lot with myself and my clients, who have the habit of justifying their stress.
Let's take Mindy.
Mindy wakes up feeling stressed, and she immediately gets curious--why am I feeling this way today. And she precedes to list of all the possible contributors:
I have a big meeting tomorrow, and I am worried about it;
my husband and I argued last night;
I wasn't as present to the kids as I should have been;
lately, I have done a lousy job of work-life balance.
Mindy does an excellent job of being curious. Obviously, Mindy has a lot of reasons to be stressed. It is in the next phase that things get sticky. Mindy does one of two things.
She starts beating herself up because she doesn't have that much on her plate. She has 'privilege people problems,' and she should be more grateful. OR
She takes the worry about her work meeting and her shame in being a lousy wife and mother and heads out the door feeling worse than she did when she woke up.
The critical part missing in Mindy's curiosity about her stress is her curiosity about giving back to herself. The curiosity around the question "why am I stressed?" is an exercise not of justification but awareness. It isn't a test to see "is my life worthy of this feeling" but rather an acknowledgment of the feeling and the factors that might be contributing to it. Mindy missed the critical part of following her stress litany with a pause, a few deep breaths, and then getting curious about what might help her ease her stress—asking herself what can I add into my life today that will give me some self-love, that will fill up my bucket again. No judgment, no shame, just acceptance.
The second step gets missed quite frequently (I am guilty of it myself). So last week, I decided to practice skipping the first step, skipping the why. I woke up and felt stressed, and I didn't go into my standard litany (similar to Mindy's). I didn't have any curiosity about what was behind the stress. I just noticed the stress. I took a couple of deep breaths, put my hands on my heart, and kept repeating to myself, "You are ok right where you are." Then after a few moments, I thought, what can I do to ease the stress? Make a cup of tea, go for a walk, call a friend, etc.
I practiced giving myself acceptance where I was and curiosity if there was an action I could take. And I felt better. It was amazingly freeing not to get stuck in justification to not go through the why.
So if you are someone who knows, you get stuck in the why, and rather than experiencing freedom, you are experiencing shame or guilt. Try skipping the why and moving right to acceptance.