Feeling Stuck Despite a Good Life: What Therapy Can Offer

There is a particular kind of difficulty that comes without a clear cause. From the outside, your life may appear to be the definition of 'success': academic achievements, a status occupation, relationships, family life generally working well. And yet something feels...well...off. A type of flatness, repetition, or a persistent sense that life is not quite as it should be, that what you have built is not quite enough. The challenge is that you find it difficult to articulate what life should look or feel like instead.

This kind of stuckness is often hardest to verbalise and address than difficulties that come from a clear source. And this is why it is often harder to justify asking for help.

Why stuckness without a clear cause is harder to address

When something specific has gone wrong, we have a shared vocabulary for the difficulty. Stuckness without a precipitating event does not offer that. When we can't quite articulate what is wrong, we can be filled with self-criticism, guilt, or unappreciated privilege. We can be left feeling misunderstood or even judged when we try to share our experiences with our friends or family who see us as "so fortunate."

What psychological stuckness actually involves

From a psychological perspective, stuckness is rarely random. There are usually patterns maintaining it (in our thinking and/or our ways of relating to situations or other people) that may have become habitual over time, inadvertently limiting what feels possible.

The stuckness might be due to an outgrown self-story that we are narrating internally, or a limiting sense of who we are or what we are allowed to want, do, or become. Sometimes stuckness is centred on a set of assumptions so familiar that they have become invisible, and on enquiry, we have no idea (or conversely, a very clear idea of) where they originated from. These types of circumstances can quietly close off certain possibilities before we have had a chance to seriously consider them.

The gap between external circumstances and internal experience

One of the features of this kind of stuckness is the gap between how things appear to others and how they feel to us on the inside. Even though our external circumstances suggest that things are going reasonably (or extremely) well, our internal experience is of something not quite alive, or not quite right, or aligned with our expectations or values. That gap often indicates that the life we are living is not sufficiently connected to what actually matters most to us.

What therapy can offer

Therapy does not resolve stuckness by providing answers or quick fixes. It works by creating enough space and honesty for you to acknowledge, explore and verbalise the space between expectations and reality, and the gap between the external perception of life, versus your internal experience of it. It can be a space to step into vulnerability and truly answer those deep rooted questions: what is it that I truly want? What do I fear most about change? What measured risks will I have to take to step more closely into alignment? What might I have to let go of or say goodbye to? What am I not allowing myself to feel or see?

Therapy helps us to understand the unconscious choices that we might be making in our lives, and the impact of these choices on our emotional wellbeing. It allows us to step back and scrutinise our choices and to ask "is there another way to live?"

If you recognise yourself in any of these experiences; the life that looks (better than) fine from the outside, alongside a persistent internal sense that something is missing, therapy may have something to offer.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online, telephone and 'Walk and Talk' therapy. She works with adolescents, adults, couples, and families across the UK and internationally. Visit www.drerinreid.com to find out more.