Something in You Is Trying to Help
What the stuckness is actually protecting
I opened Friday’s call with a simple provocation.
We were working with the topic of not being able to get started — something familiar enough that within seconds of naming it, everyone in the room had already located their own version. The task undone. The email unsent. The thing that keeps appearing on the list and getting pushed to tomorrow.
I said: notice the language. You can’t get started.
Oh, really?
Has somebody tied you to the sofa? Is the body not functioning? Because looked at plainly, “I can’t get started” isn’t quite accurate. There’s a waiting happening. A holding back. And on some level — not a conscious, deliberate level, but a deeper one — that holding back is a decision.
I invited people to sit with that for a moment. Not to argue with it. Just to notice what came up when it landed.
Later in the call, one of the participants raised his hand.
He’s a coach. He has room for more clients. And he finds himself, as he put it, making a big deal out of following up with people who’ve already shown interest in working with him.
I asked where that was showing up in the body.
He paused. Took his time. Then: a mixture of anxiety and sadness. In the solar plexus area.
I invited him to turn toward that. Could he allow what was there to be there? Could he make space for it, especially the sadness?
He could.
I asked if there was a judgment present. There was. The feeling had been labeled as something bad, something not to feel. So I asked if he’d be willing to flip the script: to welcome it, lean into it, feel every bit of it as something desired rather than avoided.
He said yes.
Then I asked: is it possible this feeling might be trying to help? Trying to protect?
His answer was immediate. Putting off taking action appears to protect me from feeling rejection, pain, and hurt.
Right.
We kept going. More of it rose to the surface. He breathed into it. He thanked the feeling — not ironically but genuinely — for trying to help, trying to protect.
Then tears came.
I asked him if it felt personal.
Not really. It just feels like energy that wants to move through.
This is what I want to point to.
The thing we label “I can’t get started” is almost never about ability. It isn’t laziness or lack of motivation or a character flaw that needs correcting. Underneath the stuckness, something is functioning exactly as it was built to function: protecting you from an outcome the nervous system has already decided it doesn’t want to risk.
The email doesn’t get sent because somewhere underneath, not sending it feels safer than sending it and being rejected. The will doesn’t get written because writing it means holding, all at once, what it actually means — the people, the love, the weight of that responsibility. The project doesn’t get started because starting it makes it real, and real things can fail.
The protection is genuine. Clumsy, sometimes. Costly, often. But genuine.
What changes when you stop fighting the stuckness and turn toward what’s underneath it isn’t willpower. It’s something closer to relief. The energy that was being used to hold the thing at arm’s length starts moving again — not because you pushed it, but because you stopped blocking it.
Tears with a T.
Just energy that wants to move through.