What if It’s Not a Problem?
When your sense of worth is externalized, which is the core wounding of codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing tendencies, we tend to source our own wellness, worth, and value from others. And especially if you grew up in chaos or see yourself as a fixer, that person who takes on other people’s issues as things you need to help them with or solve for them, then you may be creating a problem in your mind where there isn’t actually one, so you can step into being the savior, can prove your self-worth.
Our focus is on the language that we choose to use to talk about the circumstances in our lives. The way we think, talk about, and label things as problems in our own minds and interpersonally. And as always, I’m not out here labeling things in the world as not problems. Always quite the opposite.
Anti-Black racism is a problem that leads to the thought error that some people are better than or superior to others. And that’s a problem. Poverty is a problem, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, patriarchy, these things are problems. Prejudice and structural inequality, those are massive problems that must be addressed.
We’re talking about something really different.
We’re talking about this concept of what is a problem in terms of our day-to-day lives and how we think and talk about problems because language matters.
The way you think about and describe your life creates your experience of it.
And I know this matters because I can feel the difference in my body when I shift my language and my clients share this day in and day out. I made a small shift in the way I thought about and talked about something, and it brought me so much peace.
It changes my life in such powerful ways to get really clear about the language choices I’m making and the stories I’m feeding into my nervous system, thereby freeing me up to think about the things in life in less intense and problem-focused ways, which then in turn frees up energy to be of service in the world, to do my part to affect social change around the issues that are in fact problems in our society.
When your internal habit, your focus is on the problem, with calling it a problem, experiencing whatever may be happening in your life as a problem, it will always feel like a problem.
And so when that is your life story, when you’ve never paused to ask yourself if it’s really a problem or just something you’ve habitually called a problem, you stay mired in the problemness. Your energy is focused there.
I know in my own way I start labeling and calling a situation a problem, I am as far from being able to see it objectively as humanly possible, and I start rolling around mentally like, oh no, all is lost, this is terrible. And that train of thinking takes me further and further away from potentially or possibly even seeing the solution because my world, my mind becomes absorbed in the problemness.
Simultaneously, my body braces.
There is more and more tension within me when I tell the story that there is a huge problem here.
Because science, my digestion doesn’t work the way I’d like it to. Of course I have jaw, shoulder, hip, and neck pain because my whole body is bracing for a blow like a boxer in the ring.
I am armored in my physiology against this problem, and so it continues to consume me, mind and body.
To the codependent mind, discord or disagreement can seem like a problem in your world.
So I’ll ask you, my sweet love, what if it’s not a problem if other people have different opinions, wants, needs, hopes, dreams, ways of reaching their goals?
What if it’s not a problem for someone else to already have the things that you want, and for you to be in process?
I’m thinking here of how often my clients say to me, well, my friends from high school are all married, they all have the house, the children, the picket fence. That’s a problem. But thinking that that’s a problem, the difference between you is a problem keeps you stuck in thinking of it as a problem.
What if it’s not a problem to want something different from the people you love?
And from what the people you love want for you? The work around this is to learn how to just want what you want, which I know can be really challenging for the codependent thinking mind.
But that’s the work, right? To learn what you want and to allow yourself to want what you want for your life and to stop questioning that, and to sit with the discomfort of having emotions that are incongruent with those of someone you care about, or society at large, or your conditioning.
And this process is really challenging at first, until it isn’t.
We make situations into problems when we are not in acceptance of the facts, when we are fighting reality.
That things are exactly how they are, and are often out of our control. And so we make situations into problems when we feel that lack of control and want to feel it, which is completely human, but I don’t believe serves us in a lot of situations.
Because when we are not in acceptance, we are not truly in our power.
And sometimes we have the power to change the situation and sometimes we don’t. And we get to decide to change our thoughts around it. To either find that solution or to find peace within ourselves in the face of a situation we don’t like.
And life is full of situations that are not exactly what we want or like. But the sooner you stop calling life’s circumstance problems and start accepting what is and changing what you can, the more peace you’ll feel in my heart. My perfect little ravioli.
Another way our brains may habitually attempt to manage a situation we call a problem is to see them as immediate and urgent, chaotic, and messy.
And when our brains go to there, there’s not a lot of space for pausing, breathing, centering, and thinking. Not a lot of breathing room in which to pull back and get a real handle on what the what is.
And remember, when you are functioning from urgency, from chaos, you are in sympathetic activation. And remember, my sweet nerds, when your body is flooded with adrenaline, norepinephrine, eventually cortisol, you can’t think so goodly.
Once again, because science. Versus, pausing, slowing it all down, and connecting in, orienting to what’s real, getting grounded in this moment, however that works for your body, so that you can actually get to a solution that makes sense.
Because when life feels like a series of problems, urgent problems to fix now, there’s a lot of pressure on ourselves to find a solution and fast, versus trusting and doing our internal work to hold space for the solution to appear, opening ourselves up to creativity, to being flexible to the possibility, versus forcing a solution because we think the thing in front of us is an urgent problem that must be solved immediately.
For the fiercely independent stripe of codependence, that means a problem is yet another thing that only you can solve.
Meaning you need to do that thing where you drop everything that matters to you personally so you can step in to be that savior, fixer, the resentful problem-solver who then screams, “Why do I have to do everything around here?” Into the void, where the void is often folks who literally didn’t ask you to turn a simple situation into a problem, much less to solve it.
For the self-doubting codependent thinker, another stripe of us, we also can come to feel this urgency for confirmation of our thinking when we believe something is a problem. So we get on the phone with a bajillion different people, repeating this story of woe, seeking external validation, first and foremost, that something is a problem, that it’s logical for us to be upset, which can sound like, “Hey, I mean, you’d be really upset if your partner did this, right?”
In so doing, in painting the situation as a capital P problem, we—without realizing it—strong-arm the people we love to chime in, to give our story and thus our struggle and thus our sense of self, value.
And we end up strengthening our internal story that this situation is a problem, which again, either keeps us spinning in our story and not seeing possible, simpler solutions.
And listen, if you’re standing there holding your own eyeball, that’s a problem. Please, get to care. But if you’re not sure if you want to quit your job or go to grad school or get married or get a divorce or get a dog or a thousand other quotidian things, baby, that’s not a problem. It’s something that you can solve for without creating more stress and drama in your life.
Because from that urgent place, let’s be real, we all just make more and more problems.
We move fast and frenetically. We make mistakes. We trip over our own feet. Some of us more than others.
And we do all of that, versus pausing, and finding that calm energy within that comes from trusting yourself, that a solution is possible. And one of the things we love to do is to create these relationships with a problem focus. Not a solution focus.
We connect by complaining, by spinning others into our problem narrative. And I’ll ask you, is that who you want to be? Do you want to create relationships around your problems?
When stress, chaos, worry, drama are your norm, what you’re used to living in, what you grew up in, it feels cozy to stay there.
And the work of self-love and self-trust is learning to rewrite those experiences and that internal story that you need them to be comfortable, that discomfort is comfortable, to simplify, and to see the solutions versus calling the facts of life a set of problems and then spinning in that story and rushing to frantic solutions or throwing your hands up to say, “I can’t possibly know what to do next because this is a problem.”
My beauty, what emotions do you want to live in, do you want to show up to your life in?
Do you want to live full up with urgency, pressure, and worry? With the frenetic internal energy, which may be what was modeled for you as a child?
Or do you want to show up feeling capable, resourceful, and resourced? Ready, willing, and able to handle what life hands you, and to focus on that rather than on labeling life as a set of constant problems that are keeping you from living your dreams?
The choice is yours, my beauty. This is challenging work, but my goodness, I think it’s so much more challenging to live life leap-frogging from problem to problem. Putting out fire after fire.
I’ll invite you, my darlings, to see how much more you can accomplish when you allow your brain to rest, allow your body to not be awash in tension and anxiety, and to focus on self-love, on gentleness, on pulling back and seeing what is possible.
See what you can accomplish and how beautiful you can feel when you focus on the remedies and your own wild capacity to show up for yourself and your life.
Life isn’t a set of problems. See what it feels like to stop calling it that.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
Get My Top Meditations and Other Resources To Calm Your Nervous System and End Codependency and People Pleasing
I know not everyone is into podcasts, so I wanted to provide digestible blogs to go along with the episodes! If you’re curious about the podcast and haven’t checked them out yet, click here.
