Anxiety, Part 2

The Comfort Trap: or What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?
by Judith Sills, Ph.D.

(Page 6 of 6)

The negative forces that cast us from comfort do not have to be so universal or so sweeping. Accident, illness, death, unwanted divorce, downsizing, all rip us from lives that seem immeasurably comfortable when viewed from atop their wreckage. In these wrenching life upheavals, we are thrown up against the fence of our fears in an emotionally weakened state, which is part of what makes them so horrific to endure. We do endure them, though at a cost. When life changes us, one way or another we make ourselves comfortable with that change. The ferocious anxiety, that discomfort, the sense of ill fit or of being an imposter that accompanies this surge forward, lasts as long as it lasts. Eventually the new role becomes you, the new job is mastered, the new house becomes home, and you have stretched to create a new comfort zone with its own emotional attachments, its own soothing routines, and its own sources of satisfaction.

In other words, we change pretty much because life forces us to. Things begin, so we adapt (unless we avoid the new beginning). Things end, so we change (unless we find a way to prolong the ending). This is an excellent system as far as it goes.

In your life, it may not have gone far enough. Maybe the prince hasn't come - or worse, he came and left. Maybe the career toward which you were so carefully nudged turned out to be socially acceptable quicksand and no one is throwing you a rescue branch. Your in-laws may never approve of your table manners nor excuse you from Sunday supper. Your marriage is a miserable stalemate, but your kids are young and cheerfully oblivious. Maybe your life will just keep on keepin' on, full of the same complaints and simmering frustrations, a small powerboat on a big ocean with no one at the helm, plowing its vacant course until it runs out of gas. You just can't count on life to put you someplace new, and if it does, the new it chooses might make the old look good.

So we are faced with a dilemma. How do we do the choosing ourselves? How do we force ourselves against that wall of anxiety of our own free will? How do we actually get ourselves to act - to marry this woman, leave this job, refuse to have this baby, divorce this partner, open this business - when the possible painful consequences of these actions are so real and our certainty is so slim?

That's a tricky "how to," but it must be done and the best of us do it again and again. No one does it immediately, few do it easily, and every one of us looks back and notes where we could have been bolder or should have been more cautious. Nevertheless, some of us do eventually act. We decide, despite uncertainty. We move, despite the pain of what is left behind. We act, despite the grave discomfort of action. We create change.

To break the boundaries of your comfort zone, you have to steer in the direction of your own anxiety, step on some inner reserve of psychic fuel, and force yourself across your own boundary. It can be done - in fact, it must be done. And the truth is, people do it all the time. If not you, then who? But if you, well, how?

Several years ago I wrote a book called Excess Baggage, about getting out of your own way. It generated some complimentary mail and one very articulate and cynical letter. The letter was from a colleague I'd never met, who described herself as a psychotherapist of some thirty years' experience. My book was very wise, she said, and she had no objection to any of my suggestions for creating a better life. But she herself had been making these suggestions to patients for years, and frankly, her patients made these same suggestions to themselves with great frequency, easily identifying what they should do to improve their lives. The thing is, they hardly ever did what they knew they should. Surely I must have some magic power that gets people to do what I'm suggesting they do, and would I kindly share that?

Ouch. It's perfectly true that what's wrong with self-help - well, with any help for that matter - is that identifying what to do is far easier than getting yourself to do it. But it is possible to get yourself to do it, possible to motivate yourself to change and to sustain that motivation through all the inevitable setbacks and fatigue. Possible and even probable, if you know how to push your own rock all the way up that hill.

I have thought about that letter for years as I've watched what techniques actually help people move themselves past the points where they are stuck, past their own self-limiting anxiety and onto higher ground. The Comfort Trap (or, What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?) is my answer to that letter.

The glory of self-propelled change - whether you want to stop smoking, stand up to your mother, get yourself back to school or out of it once and for all - is that you do not have to find all the energy, day after day, to confront the invisible fence of anxiety on your own. True, you must tote the burden of your fear and your ambivalence and the inevitable pain of loss up some psychological mountain. But the trick is to give this burden a little shove over the edge of your psychic cliff so it will tumble onto new ground of its own momentum, carrying you along with it. That little shove - in the form of one small step outside your comfort zone - will set in motion all the other changes to which you aspire.

In other words, if you're in a dull job, you have to fire yourself; in a stale relationship, you need to dump yourself; in a self-destructive pattern, deprive yourself. If you are afraid to speak, you need to reveal one truth; afraid to hear the answers, you'll need to blurt out a scary question. You will need to create those life circumstances that would have rescued you if only they had come along.

What's going to make you, or anyone else, go to these extremes? For all the sensible, satisfying reasons why we should challenge our own limits, there are only two reasons why we will: because we are suffering where we are and/or because we hunger for something that is just over our psychological horizon.

That's pretty much it. Either something comes into your life and you have to get comfortable with it, or you will make yourself deliberately uncomfortable for a damned good reason. The best reason of all is that, when you look around with honest eyes, you realize that the horse is dead. The next chapter describes how you can get off.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Judith Sills, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who for the last decade has appeared regularly on such national television shows as Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and NBC News. She is a contributing editor to Family Circle, the largest-circulation women's magazine in America, and also writes for O, The Oprah Magazine.