Changing how you Relate to Your Problems

Weekly insights to turn pain, trauma, and the human experience into opportunities for growth, purpose, and meaning

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Issue 16 // Read Time: 4 Minutes 39 Seconds 

Changing How You Relate to Your Problems

I have thought a lot this week about how we relate to our mental health issues. I have repeatedly seen how shifting the relationship changes the inner landscape and creates greater leverage for addressing what ails us.

This week, I want to get into the difference between changing the relationship vs. solving the issue. These two can work together, but starting with the internal relating creates a lot of movement in the system and can make actual change easier. 

This week you will get:

Why the internal relationship matters

Reframing what the problem is

The loving embrace of curiosity and compassion

Understanding the Internal Relationship

Many of us fail to recognize that how we relate to ourselves and our problems is the foundational layer of change.

We believe that whatever we are experiencing is a problem and that this problem deserves our attention.

Here's the issue, though. When we become too entrenched in the belief that this problem must go away or that it does not serve us in any way, we often get stuck.

That is because our internal relationship to the problem has become one-dimensional. It is rigid. It is immovable and locked up.

Let me give you an example.

I work with a lot of people who experience anxiety. They come to me believing that anxiety is detracting from their life and their goal is to make it go away.

They have created an inner landscape where anxiety = bad, and it must be removed.

This approach to the problem fails to recognize two things.

First, anxiety is pretty normal. It is an alarm system in our body, signaling something is wrong.

Second, Getting rid of anxiety entirely is not possible. And if you set that up as the goal, you will forever be let down.

So we have to step back from the either/or, good/bad, black or white paradigm and ask ourselves different questions.

Asking different questions shifts our internal relationship with the problem and removes some rigidity from the system.

Envision an old, rusted-out engine that needs a little bit of lubrication. In this scenario, we lubricate the parts by changing the relationship, which gets things turning and eventually leads to change.

Reframing the Problem

I say to my clients all the time:

"Therapy isn't necessarily going to make your anxiety or depression go away, but is going to fundamentally change the way you relate to your depression or anxiety."

Now, that might seem like small potatoes if you are deep in the throes of a mental health battle.

But I promise understanding this reframe will completely change your approach to healing.

Think for a minute about a time in your life when someone was treating you as if you were the problem, and ask yourself these questions:

What did that feel like?Did it make it easier or harder to change?Did it contribute to or lessen feelings of shame, guilt, and unworthiness?

When you honestly answer those questions, you'll see that being treated as the problem locks up the system and stagnates any energy for growth.

OR it makes you act outside yourself to please people, cutting you off from yourself even further.

So, being the problem is an ineffective way of creating change.

You can imagine that your internal relationships are functioning in this same manner. When you identify a part of you (anxiety) as the problem, you heap shame/guilt/judgment onto this problem, and it gets stuck.

We lose all capacity for movement because we have already decided what it is. These decisions, over time, become very sticky.

They cement themselves into your internal organization and, ironically, actually keep things like anxiety fixed and stuck.

The Loving Embrace of Curiosity and Compassion

Curiosity and compassion are the twin emissaries of hope, change, and growth. They are the energies we need to transform any deficit into an opportunity for expansion. 

Curiosity is the ability to ask questions to better understand what is happening. Curiosity is non-judgmental, open, and expansive. 

If you are experiencing anxiety and want to understand it deeper a series of curious questions might sound like this:

What purpose is this anxiety serving?If it wasn't serving that purpose, what other defenses would I have to protect myself from the world?When did I first start feeling this way? When did I start labeling it as a problem?What have I learned through feeling anxiety?

Each of these questions creates an open-ended dialogue within yourself, and that begins to create movement. 

Compassion follows on the heels of curiosity because compassion gives you the kind and listening ear to tolerate the answers, even if they are difficult. 

Compassion asks you to become the caregiver to yourself and to nurture these problems instead of remaining critical and demeaning them. 

Again, reflect on the time you recalled when you were treated as the problem. If you are doing this internally, you are unlikely to change. 

Compassion helps bring you out of that. 

One of the most helpful ways to find compassion for yourself is to connect with your Inner Child. 

If you are interested, I have included a link to a free meditation on my YouTube channel. 

This meditation will connect you with your Inner Child and help you embody that feeling so you can nurture and show compassion to yourself. 

Wrapping Up

If I could leave you with one bit of advice, it would be to focus less on making the problem disappear and more on understanding why it developed. 

As a therapist, this is what I spend most of my time helping my clients to understand. 

Our defenses are not arbitrary, and they were created for good reason. If we want them to go away, we have to spend a lot of time understanding why they developed in the first place. 

So try and give yourself credit for setting up an internal and external landscape that helped you survive. 

And if it is no longer serving you, see if curiosity and compassion can open up new layers of understanding. 

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Feel free to respond with any questions!

Thank You!

I love that you are interested in exploring yourself in the pursuit of growth and expansion. 

And I love that you are diving deeper into the unconscious patterns that limit our capacity as a species to transcend this paradigm. 

You are becoming the change you want to see in the world and that is incredibly inspiring!

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey ✨✨

With Love,

Christian