Resistance, Reluctance, or Time Out?

I've been trying to figure out this muck I’ve been sitting in the past couple of weeks - thinking that if I can understand it (meaning name it, embrace it, figure out what it’s trying to tell me) then, I can get myself the heck out of it!

At first I called it resistance.

Using a stream-of-consciousness journaling technique, I began asking questions. With this, I discovered a fear of success hiding under the resistance. I was also reminded that overwhelm is one of my favorite methods of self-sabotage.

Talking to a friend a couple of days ago, she too was commenting about being in a resistance mode. She’d just finished several big projects and completed a four-year training course. As she talked about just letting go and letting herself be resistant, I realized that, while trying to let myself be however I needed to be after my crazy busy school year (or two or three… or seven…) I was also laying a guilt trip on myself for not being done with it already. After all, two months ago, I’d laid out all my summer projects on the calendar and here it was mid-June and none of them had been completed yet!

Getting my June newsletter out was one of those projects – was due June 1. Typically, I figure out the topic for the newsletter whenever it comes due, using a topic from whatever’s been going on with me or in my life.

But with all the resistance…. this strategy was not working. (And, yes, I do realize that in-the-moment-topic-searching is not really a good strategy for keeping a monthly newsletter going, but….)

Today, I went to Answers.com and searched for definitions, trying to at least get a starting point for just sitting down and writing something! I found an interesting definition for resistance.

Resistance - a process in which the ego opposes the conscious recall of anxiety-producing experiences.

Huh?

Further down the page I found an English translation:

Resistance - an unwillingness to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness.

Hm…. Not really what I’ve been feeling.... But on down the page I found a clue for another angle to search through:

resistance is a kind of unwillingness - the trait of being unwilling

With unwillingness having that circular kind of definition, I moved on. Continuing my search, I came across reluctance, which paired down to reluctant with three meanings:

1. unwillingness to do something contrary to your custom
2. unwilling to become involved
3. not eager

This was getting closer to what I’ve been feeling, so I went back to my journal:

Reluctance, what are you here to teach me?

Trying to get you to slow down and just be. Take a time-out.

Of course! Time out! I should have known. My computer does it to me all the time… and there was a definition for that, too!

Time-out:
In communications, the intentional ending of an incomplete task…. Timeouts are common in communications applications in order to free up a line or port that is tied up with a request that has not been answered in a reasonable amount of time. For each type of situation, there is a default length of time before the timeout is initiated....

Now THAT describes me and how I feel exactly! I’ve been tying up my lines with bunches of requests that have not been answered in a reasonable amount of time, which initiated a timeout....

But wait... that’s the same as overwhelm, isn’t it?

Here’s to continuing the Journey... gaining deeper understandings, and learning not to be so resistant about time-out!

-Becky