Self-Esteem

Maybe it’s just ambition, energy, a healthy desire to grow. Maybe. This script looks respectable: it builds careers, businesses, reputations. It moves progress forward, both for the person and for all of humanity. But there’s a nuance that helps tell progress from a trap.

In my practice, people who say this often go on to describe the same picture. The high of a win wears off by dinner. A pause between achievements brings mounting tension. Rest doesn’t restore you; it creates a feeling of missed achievements. And working it through helps even less here than usual: everything is clear, everything has been analyzed, and still they can’t stop, they keep running.

The reason it doesn’t work is simple. What won’t let you stop doesn’t live in your thoughts or your history. It lives in the body, in background tension that neither awareness nor willpower can switch off. But it can be found with my hands and gradually released. From the outside it looks like this: the person keeps achieving, but the running becomes a choice, not a compulsion. They gain the ability to enjoy victories no one will ever see. And to live without proving anything.

Maybe those authoritative professionals are right. Especially when they’re so sure of it. But at best, they’re right for themselves. If they were in your shoes, their decision would be right for them. Not for you. They don’t know, and can’t know, all of your circumstances. They don’t feel what you feel. And your intuition doesn’t speak to them in the language of your own sensations. Most importantly, you’re the one who’ll have to deal with the consequences of your decision, not the ones who gave you that advice.

Feeling uncertain when making a decision is normal. In most cases, we don’t know how things will turn out; we have to weigh the odds and the circumstances that may or may not arise.

That’s when we usually turn to our experience and our intuition. And then comes the hardest part of making any decision. The choice. Experience speaks to you in the voice of caution; it tends to remember failures better than successes. Intuition often barely whispers, because its voice can’t get through the noise of tension in the body. And other people’s voices play at full volume. So agreement arrives on its own, before you have time to think: a familiar script fires.

Somatic therapy won’t spare you the need to make decisions. But it can help clear away much of what gets in the way: past experience stays in your memory but leaves the body’s patterns; it remains as a lesson learned, not as the sense that you’re still reliving it. And intuition… yes, you can learn to listen to it and understand it. In many cases, it can be made stronger. But that’s a separate topic. Growth & Meaning →