Doing Less

Writer’s caveat: I am publishing this post on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court and other institutions, pundits, and profiteers posing direct threats to democracy here and elsewhere. So I want to dedicate this essay specifically to those of us currently caring for young children and additional truly dependent living beings. For us to stay well enough in mind, body, and spirit to be able to engage politically within and outside the walls of our homes, I maintain that many of us need to learn to do less.

Recently, I was working with a client engaged in criticizing herself for not speaking up to a family member who had, once again, ignored her wonderfully reasonable request. As I listened, what struck me—for what felt like the millionth time that week—was that this client would never be so negligent of someone else’s needs. So I asked her if she would switch roles for a moment and consider: if you were the one who had been asked multiple times to attend to this same request and had not found a way to absorb it and respond accordingly, would you be mad at the requester for not voicing it yet again?

“Of course not!” she declared, and began to contact the anger emerging from within. Within the blink of an eye, she turned that anger on herself. “Why didn’t I think of that!?”

So we explored the origins of this immediate reaction to blame herself. Turns out, finding fault with herself helped to protect against critical projections, gaslighting, and even aggression by various people with whom she was in close relationship, both in the past and present. Self-blame also elicited a sense of agency. If the lack of responsiveness from those in her inner circle was her fault, at least she could do something about it. I encouraged her to contact the legitimate anger inside of her in the current moment and feel it in ways that didn’t continue to hurt her or, as she feared, cause harm to others.

To help her hold such charged emotion, I sought to establish what we in the biz call a safe relational container. I especially needed to reassure her that I was not afraid of her anger and felt confident I could be with it with compassionate curiosity. Since she and I have a longstanding relationship built on trust, she was open to my promotion of allowing the anger to unfold, in her body, and organically reveal what she needed. Eventually the simple and seemingly impossible-to-utter, “No more,” came from staying with her anger—a natural and healthy response to repeatedly being unheard and unmet.

My new M.O. these days is to do less, and I am in the presence of very good company (I’ve listed some of the many resources I have found to be helpful at the end of this post). Here are some of the things I’ve committed to do less of: laboring, striving, achieving, defending, explaining, ruminating, worrying, cajoling, and serving others. Perhaps most importantly, I am dedicated to spending less time and energy understanding others’ perceptions of reality and giving more attention to identifying and trusting my own.

There are countless reasons why we’ve learned to over-function and multiple contexts, from the micro- to the macro-level, that demand such disproportionate giving. Here’s another abbreviated list of contributing causes and conditions: being slotted into a parentified role when we were children, being inducted into gendered expectations and roles in a patriarchal society, needing to please and appease to keep someone with whom we have a close relationship from hurting or even killing us, learning early and often that we have to perform to be loved and belong, and confronting unequal power dynamics in hierarchical systems. I could go on and on about contributing factors because I’ve over-studied them for much of my 48 years on this planet. What I want to concentrate on now is transforming these systems into which vast inequality has been baked for millennia.

In our daily lives, those of us adults who have learned to over-do can interrupt this nonsense by refusing to be what Jen Hatmaker’s friends call the clean-up crew and human spotlight. Unlearning these roles is no small or easy task, and supportive community is often the best facilitator of our evolution. If we’ve spent decades attaching our value to what we accomplish, how skillful we are, and how much we care, the pull is strong to take responsibility for others’ messes as well as uplift folks regardless of the costs to ourselves.

Please don’t mistake me for saying that I’m advocating for turning into a cold-hearted, passive stone. No. Not at all. What I would like is more mutuality and more encouragement for those adults who have learned to be under-functioning in these imbalanced structures to self-reflect and, as a consequence, be hit with the insight that they’re not pulling their fair share of the weight. And then for those individuals to use their capacity as grown ups not to turn toward the over-achievers among us for help but, instead, to go seek out (actively!) the abundant resources that already exist and use them to practice being more equal collaborators in relationship and life. As we also like to say in my line of work, what we practice grows stronger.

So many of us remain attached to the idea that if we just say the truth a little more skillfully or improve ourselves just a little bit more, then maybe those adults in assisting roles will finally hear us and willingly step into the role of being a fellow system builder. On this front, Lindsey Gibson’s work on emotionally immature adults has been life altering for me and so very validating. I often remind myself of her statement: “If a person wants to understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how you say it.” SELF-reflection grows emotional maturity, not the perfectly articulated explanation by a hyper-functioner.

So how can we best support releasing all this over-responsibility? I am not claiming to have some magical elixir here. Ideally we would all have access to the resources that teach us how to go inside and stay connected with our personal experience long enough—and with enough safety, empathy, and curiosity—to name and attend to our needs and wants rather than neglect or reject them. I can, however, offer what I’ve learned about doing less while accompanying clients on their healing journeys and setting out on my own.

First up is the sequence for growth that a client learned from a 12-step program and recently shared with me: acknowledgement—> acceptance—>aligned action. To acknowledge that something is impacting us is the first step since without this acknowledgment there’s no awareness that anything is amiss. Most over-functioners that I know don’t struggle with this step. Insight barriers are the least of their problems. Here’s the tough pill to swallow, fellow hyper-doers. We want to jump straight from recognizing the issue to aligned action. But accepting the situation as it is, including an honest assessment of our own limitations, is what makes our actions more aligned with what we actually need and can handle. Acceptance is often where the difficult feelings arise, like anger, grief, shame, resentment, envy, and fear. So of course we want to skip over this part of the process. But we likely will choose a superficial or misaligned action if we don’t first more fully understand what the issue before us actually is. And challenging feelings offer some of the best data for illuminating what we need in a given situation. The pain is worth it as long as an empathetic adult witness, whether within or beside us, is present to be with it.

In the realm of unburdening ourselves of what is not ours, the first aligned action may be the establishment of a boundary. There are SO MANY great resources out there about boundaries. What I’ll underscore here is that I’ve really appreciated the folks who stay focused on the central kernel of what a boundary entails: determining what is and is not okay. So fellow busy bees, stillness is our friend if we agree that clearly ascertaining what is and is not okay is the initial goal. If we can’t see clearly what we want to let in and keep out, the boundary is probably not going to be very effective, right? Unfortunately multitasking and moving a 1,000 miles a minute doesn’t foster lucidity.

The good news about this definition is that boundaries are first and foremost an inside job. We can keep our attention on identifying what’s okay and not okay rather than being swept away by what we should say out loud or do about it in the outside world. If we do decide to generously offer clear communication about our boundaries to other people, particularly when something is not okay with us, that utterance can be short and sweet and requires no defense or even explanation.

One boundary script that I like follows this sequence, which can be said firmly AND kindly: “This particular behavior is not okay with me. If you continue to do it, here’s what I’m going to do.” That is not an ultimatum, by the way. It’s the succinct expression of the acknowledgment, acceptance, and aligned action sequence I mentioned above when we’re seeking to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It’s also not trying to pull someone along or control them. It is an assertion of what is going to happen if the behavior that is not okay with us continues. In my experience, the challenge is to muster the courage to stay loyal to that boundary, regardless of internal and external pushback, unless or until something changes in our conditions or relationships that renders it unnecessary.