When Problem-Solving & Urgency Strikes Again
The urgent-problem-solving energy can feel like a nightmare – exhausting, chaotic, unsettled. While this mode of thinking and operating can feel like a nightmare, it also may make sleep – and the possibility of a dream or nightmare – very challenging. That swirling, snap-your-eyes-open, sit-you-up-in-bed energy waits for you every night… and throughout the day…
I’ve been reflecting on this tug-of-war a lot recently. Most of my clients experience being overtaken or merged with the part in them that demands problem-solving, and in an urgent way. I, too, have experience with this energy and a similar part in me. Why? … there’s my problem-solver again, wanting to know the answer and the why!
I joke not to dismiss this part, but instead to normalize it. In this validation, I sense a door opening… a door to believing that part. What would happen if we believed that problem-solving energy? What if we believed that that part legitimately detects threat that demands a solution immediately?
What do you notice in or around your body with these questions?
I notice my awareness moving inward instead of outward, the tension in my eyes moving from “hard-focus” to “soft-focus,” and an overall sense of settling towards the ground. I’m wondering if you feel something similar? Or different?
Urgency and the perceived need to problem-solve tends to force our awareness up and out of the body. We scan our environment, relationships, society, and seemingly external factors for problems and relief. For many people, this strategy came online in childhood, and its pathways deepened throughout the moments and years.
Believing the problem-solving part involves at least a 2-fold approach — listening to and getting the needs met of that part, including inner child work, and resolving the issues present in our lives today.
If we can define the problem, we have more clarity of what decision to make. If we can make a decision, our problem-solver believes, then we will be out of suffering.
This is what I have landed in most recently – the struggle to define the problem. In my graduate studies at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work, professors emphasized the importance of defining the problem. Many people – and for that matter, people’s internal parts – want to help so desperately that they rush into… you may have guessed it… problem-solving! However, how we define the problem informs how and where and when we step.
In social work, defining the problem is dependent on how the problem is defined by the people we hope to serve. Not by our theories, our egos, or social media likes – but by the people experiencing the problem themselves.
So… what do we do when there are many problems in society today, all interweaving and building upon each other, creating a completely new problem at this moment in history? What do we do when, in addition to myriad problems creating “problem 2.0,” the data and information we are getting is confusing, misleading, and agenda-laden?
How can we make a decision if we cannot define the problem?
… Can we pause and check in with the information in your body? You’re welcome to close your eyes or allow them to be softly open. See if your breath would like to slow down, smooth out, and deepen. What do you notice?
I notice a fluttering in my chest amidst a sea of blankness.
Blankness – there is too much here to compute at once. Simultaneously, I have a blank slate. A blank slate to create from…
No wonder so many people are struggling with anxiety, depression, IBS, sleep, hypertension, headaches, chronic shoulder and neck pain, stressed relationships, and other signs and symptoms of urgent, chronic problem-solving. The sympathetic nervous system is on hyperdrive, in hypervigilance.
I believe these symptoms and signs. They are saying there is a problem. It is too much. Something is not right, not healthy, not safe. Whenever my clients and I reach the point in our work where we can really listen to the urgent problem-solving part, we almost always hear the exhaustion of that part. It does not want to play its role and serve the system in this way any more. It would like to rest. It would like to look out for the person in a way that truly feels supportive.
I want to validate – it is hard to rest when there are an abundance of problems, from the micro to macro levels, and when the problem has not clearly been defined.
Here is where I have landed – the experiment I would love to try out with you… Maybe, we make decisions in the way we always have:
Based on our values and what we value.
Our values are just like every other phenomena – they do not exist in vacuums, in isolation. They, too, are interdependent with the problems of our societies today. What if we believe ALL of this???
What I am offering is that we believe: something does not feel right and does not feel safe; the problem-solving part feels urgent to get to relief and safety; there are lots of problems in society and the world; defining the problem feels overwhelming, and thus making a decision and course of action feels paralyzing.
This is part of the mosaic of today’s world. Your values and your mission also are tiles – and beautiful, centerpiece ones at that – in this mosaic.
What are your values today? What is important to you? What if this is our compass for now? (How empowering!!! Self-determination is starting to sing once again!) And if we get to a point along the path where we need to re-draw the map and re-set the compass, what if we trust ourselves to do that?
Because all of us already have done this. Further, we continue to do so through our daily lives. We can make decisions the way we always have. However, in a world with more noise, more distraction, more problems, and lots of urgency, we are being called to go deeper inward.
Our bodies never lie. When it is hard to define the problem and pick a course of action, may we slow down, reconnect with the truth that our bodies offer, and take one step at a time.