If I Have the Capacity, Why Is It Still So Hard?

When Your Experience Seems to Contradict What You Just Learned

In the last article, we explored what can happen when you bring awareness to internal distress and discover that you may have more capacity to be with it than you realized. As you stay present with an uncomfortable thought, emotion, sensation, urge or impulse, you may experience some relief, greater internal spaciousness and a growing confidence that you can handle more of your internal experience than you previously thought.

Then, perhaps only a few hours or days later, something happens and you find yourself reacting automatically. Someone makes a critical comment and you are suddenly defending yourself, withdrawing or replaying the conversation in your mind. A wave of loneliness comes over you one evening and, almost before you realize what is happening, you are sitting in front of the television eating ice cream, scrolling through your phone or reaching for some other familiar way of changing how you feel.

This can be especially frustrating when you have recently experienced your capacity to be with difficult things. You may find yourself wondering, “If I really have this capacity, where did it go?”

Capacity and Access Are Two Different Things

This is where an important distinction begins to become useful. You can have the capacity to be with an internal experience while having different degrees of access to that capacity at different times.

Many of the strategies you have used to manage distress have been practiced for a long time, and some of them operate so quickly and automatically that you may already be doing something about your discomfort before you have consciously recognized what you are feeling. You may become defensive, withdraw, distract yourself, eat, work, shop, watch television, seek reassurance or reach for some other familiar strategy, and only later become aware that something inside you had become uncomfortable.

Developing self-awareness includes becoming increasingly able to notice these automatic movements. As that skill develops, you may begin to recognize, sometimes after the fact and sometimes while it is happening, that your attention has shifted away from what you are experiencing and toward trying to manage the experience.

That recognition gives you another opportunity to bring your attention back inside and become curious about what is actually happening there.

A Familiar Pattern at a Deeper Level of Recovery

There is an interesting connection here to something we explored earlier in this series when we talked about relapse being predictable. Part of the value of expecting relapse is that when it happens, you can become curious about what occurred and use the experience to learn more about yourself rather than allowing the relapse itself to define how you think you are doing in recovery.

Something similar happens as you develop self-awareness. You can expect that there will be times when you return to self-management because these are familiar and well-practiced ways of responding to internal distress. As you notice that you have done this, you can bring your attention back to the experience itself and begin again from awareness.

You might notice the embarrassment beneath your defensiveness, the insecurity underneath your need to explain yourself or the loneliness that was present before you reached for the ice cream and turned on the television. As you stay with what you notice, you have another opportunity to discover how much capacity you have to be with that experience.

Over time, this may become a familiar movement: you become aware of what is happening inside, something pulls you back toward self-management, you recognize what has happened and then you return your attention to your internal experience.

Your Experience Can Show You That the Skill Is Developing

As you make that return, one of the most useful things you can do is notice what happens inside.

You may feel your body begin to soften or notice a little more room around the emotion you are experiencing. The urgency to do something may decrease, and you may experience some relief, freedom or internal spaciousness simply because you have returned your attention to what is actually happening rather than continuing to organize yourself around changing it.

Those experiences can become valuable measures of progress as self-awareness develops. You may notice that you recognize self-management sooner than you used to, or that you are able to return your attention inward more readily. Something that once pulled you into a reaction for several hours may eventually be something you notice within twenty minutes, and with continued practice you may begin to recognize what is happening while the reaction itself is still unfolding.

The growing sense of freedom, relief and internal spaciousness that accompanies these returns can help you recognize that your access to your own capacity is increasing.

Keep Developing the Capacity to Return

There will likely be many opportunities to practice this because self-management has probably served you in important ways for a long time. Each time you notice that you have moved toward managing, controlling or escaping an internal experience, you can bring your attention back to what is happening inside and become curious about what you find there.

The practice develops through those returns, and each return gives you another experience of yourself that can strengthen confidence and self-trust. You begin to learn through your own experience that you can come back, become present again and reconnect with the capacity you have already begun to discover.

And as that happens, another question naturally begins to emerge. If the capacity is there and your access to it can change from one moment to another, what is happening inside that limits that access?

That is where we will go next.