Why Am I Stuck?

What It Looks Like From Inside

• You can describe the next step exactly. Taking it feels like pushing on a locked door.
• Everything around the thing gets done: the research, the tidying, the reading about how to do it.
• You are not lazy, and you know it, which makes the stuckness harder to explain and easier to hide.
• When you do start, something happens near the finish: you lose interest, find a flaw, or let it sit one day too long.
• Other people seem to decide things. You seem to orbit them.
• Underneath the frustration there is, sometimes, a relief you would rather not look at.

What Might Be Going On

Stuckness looks like nothing happening. It is more often a great deal happening in opposite directions. Several of these may be true at once; which ones is yours to say.

Two wants are pulling against each other.

Deborah Cabaniss and her colleagues, in the manual psychiatry residents learn from, call “I’m stuck” one of the clearest signs that something is going on out of awareness, and their picture of it is a cart with horses hitched at both ends (Cabaniss, Cherry, Douglas, & Schwartz, 2011). There is plenty of force. It cancels. A writer wants the second book and equally wants never to be reviewed again; a person wants to propose and equally wants to go on being the one their mother leans on. From inside, the two wants rarely both show. Only the stasis does. See pathogenic beliefs for the convictions that often sit on one side of the rope.

Finishing would mean being judged.

Unfinished work cannot fail. A thesis that is always almost done, a portfolio that is never quite ready to send, a conversation always scheduled for next week: each keeps a question open that an ending would answer. If your sense of worth rides on the answer, staying stuck is a way of staying safe. Heinz Kohut and the self-psychologists wrote about how exposed a fragile sense of self feels to evaluation; see why criticism wrecks you for days.

Succeeding would cost someone.

Some people stall at exactly the point where moving forward would mean surpassing a parent, a sibling, or a partner who did not get the same chance. Cabaniss’s example is a man who sabotages himself at work because his two siblings will never be independent; getting ahead would mean facing how he feels about that. Control-mastery theory calls this survivor guilt, and considers it one of the commonest reasons capable people hold themselves back (Weiss, 1993).

Moving would mean leaving something.

Every change ends an arrangement that was giving you something, even a bad one. The job you cannot leave still lets you be the one who is owed better. The relationship you cannot end still spares you the question of what you would choose. Cabaniss lists loss alongside fear, guilt and shame as the reasons people resist their own change, and notes that the loss is sometimes real. See mourning and loss.

The capacity is there and something is blocking it.

A question Cabaniss teaches is whether the stuckness is everywhere or only here. If you organize other people’s projects easily and cannot organize your own, if you decide quickly at work and not at all at home, then the ability is intact and something specific is in its way. That is a different situation from never having had the capacity, and it calls for a different kind of help. See mental capacities.

Being stuck is itself doing a job.

Paul Wachtel would ask what the stuckness produces around you. Perhaps people step in. Perhaps nobody can expect much of someone who is stuck. Perhaps the standoff keeps a relationship in a familiar shape. If the stalled state is quietly working for you, it will be hard to leave until you know what it is for. See vicious circles.

The Exceptions

Nobody is stuck at everything. Somewhere in your life you decide and act without ceremony, and the difference between that place and the stuck one is the most useful fact you have. What is at stake there that is not at stake here? Who is watching in one case and not the other? There is also, almost always, a time you did move, and it is worth knowing what was different that day: a deadline that took the decision away, a person who made it safe, a moment of anger that carried you past the hesitation. The exception shows that the lock is specific, and specific locks can be understood.

Where This Leads

• Pathogenic beliefs, on the convictions that pull one way.
• What a defense is afraid of, on finding the fear under the delay.
• Mourning and loss, on what moving forward would end.
• Vicious circles, on what the standoff produces and how it is kept going.
• How change happens, on why seeing this is a beginning rather than an end.