Duct Tape Days—Resource or Reprimand
© Lynn Walden, 2024.
Some days you just don't feel like you have the energy to do anything. You don't have the motivation or you don't have the clarity. Some days you're tired and you feel like you’ve kind of lost the plot of the bigger, better picture you've been imagining for yourself and your life. What felt like something wonderful to imagine and build yesterday is out the window and all you feel able to manage is a little emotional duct tape to keep it together. It's so easy to get down on ourselves when that happens. I believe that this is how, why and where many of us plateau. There is a sense of defeat and hopelessness that can easily kick in at this point in our journey. We can feel like giving up, believing that ‘After all this work I still feel___________. What’s the point? I might as well eat that entire cake, get smashed, pick up a cigarette, call that ex…’ It’s moving back into OLD ways of nurturing the ego instead of moving towards the awareness that allows you to nurture the deeper Self instead.
It’s super important not to let it derail your self compassion and if you understand why the ‘duct tape days’ happen, it will be easier to hold yourself gently on those days and use them to build loving resources instead of falling into the old internalized pattern of self reprimanding. While we can sometimes use our faith to choose kindness and self compassion, sometimes our mind/ego needs to be coddled with supporting facts of process and progress.
But Yesterday I Felt So GOOD! What Happened?
Habits
There are a lot of reasons why they become activated. Sometimes it happens because you've fallen away from doing the things that you know are good for you - maybe because you’ve been feeling good and you forgot the effect that those old patterns have on you.. You might find yourself gradually sliding back into old patterns; not getting proper sleep, eating too much sugar, engaging in negative thinking loops, watching or reading things that trigger angry, fearful or sad emotions, not getting fresh air, imbibing mood altering substances to excess. These are all things that can destabilize your energy and affect your body chemistry in a way that shifts you towards the apathetic or even depressed state.
Antidote to self reprimand: Instead of beating yourself up, remember that there are neural patterns and chemical dependencies linked to these old behaviors. When our energy drops for any reason, we’re more likely to veer into them. It’s not about being weak or stupid. THERE ARE PHYSIOLOGICAL REASONS WHY WE VEER INTO THE OLD UNHELPFUL WAYS EVEN WHEN THINGS ARE GOING WELL. We’re still building new neural networks around the new, healthier habits. They’re not as robust as the old ones, and the familiar is…cozy somehow. Remember that at one point it was linked to taking care of you, it just outlived its usefulness.
Resource Ritual: Be grateful that you're being aware. Congratulate yourself for noticing and taking the time and courage to look beyond the usual self victimization (What a loser, I’ll never change…). Check in with where and why your energy has dropped. Just notice and see if it’s because you’d benefit from a change in positive routine. Maybe, for example, you need to get out of the house more. Maybe your meditation routine has been too long and so you keep putting it off, waiting for a better time. Perhaps this is a good time to reevaluate and choose something easier to fit into your day so that it doesn’t take so much effort or create too much disruption. Maybe you need to make your bedroom more welcoming so you go to bed earlier. GET CURIOUS instead of critical and see where there is an easy change to make the healthier habits easier to follow through on. Check in to see if there was some event that triggered a change. Did you get sentimental and gently slide into the familiar because it triggers ‘loving’ memories? (Sugar was the love language my Mum spoke with me). The old self nurturing for the ego can be a very strong psychological pull, linked to a loving memory and not necessarily linked directly to an immediate trigger.
Recuperation
© Lynn Walden, 2024.
Duct Tape Days can actually be a true act of self care and very necessary when your system is recuperating from having processed some old challenging beliefs. This can sometimes be hard to define, especially when you’ve reached a point where processing an old energy doesn’t feel like a big deal anymore. It may have happened almost organically. You might be acting in a new healthier, happier, more productive pattern and be doing it with a positive attitude so it doesn't make sense to you that it could trigger this kind of fatigue and lethargy. It might even create an emotional outburst of some kind (often tears, but sometimes explosiveness, hyper activity, feeling dissociated, kind of dreamy or out of touch with your physical surroundings, clumsy, needing to cocoon or conversely, needing to get into some kind of movement into the outdoors).
Antidote to self reprimand: If there was a tired child, a pet or someone you loved, you’d encourage them to rest if they felt they needed to. Offer it to the child part of you that is asking for a special exemption from regular daily life. Check in with how our social systems are designed to push everyone to be productive at all costs and check in with whether or not you actually believe that is a moral value you support. If not, then wow. Move on to Resource Ritual.
Resource Ritual: Be Grateful. You’re breathing and you have options of where to sit, lay or move and how to be comfortable. Check in with your body. Does it want sleep? Food? Hot bath? A trip to the water or the woods or a park? Does it need to rest in feelings and if so, be a witness for yourself and let them flow without judgment. Does your body need stillness or movement? Silence or music? Does it need distraction? No blame or shame around anything as long as it causes you to feel well.
Triggered Wounds and Old Stories
We all know by now that dealing with a mindful approach to life and self awareness about how we think and make choices will inevitably bring up things that are not in alignment with our deeper wisdom. We’ll find those childhood hurts that are still running below our conscious awareness as we aim to live in our wise adult self. Whether we’re actively in therapy or not, the choice to let go of the past will bring up those things that keep us tied there and sometimes they come in like a wave that knocks us over and drags us into the stormy tides of emotion. It can feel very chaotic and deeply uncomfortable. This can be especially frustrating if we’ve had recent happy-making epiphanies and then all of a sudden the foundation of who we think we are is severely shaken. On these days, any emotional duct tape is TOTALLY our friend.
Antidote to self reprimand: My world is rocked and right now I need a time out. Period. This is too much for me to ‘figure out’ in the state I’m in so I’m going to give myself permission to deal with it differently, even if I’m not sure what ‘differently’ is at this moment. I’m just going to remind myself that this is a temporary state on the way to feeling better. I wouldn’t be feeling ‘off’ if I weren’t in the act of allowing myself to feel better.
Resource Ritual: Congratulate yourself for stirring the pot so that you can identify the ingredients and then choose to change the recipe! If you really don’t have the energy to think, or the desire to go deeper at this point then you give yourself permission to read a book or use some other kind and healthful self-nurturing distraction. If you want to use this as an opportunity to gently explore the feelings, journaling can be a great way to tap into your higher mind, intuition, guiding forces of your choice. If you don’t like to write, record into your phone. Ask yourself questions to reign in whatever chaos might be there. You can use the AAA process in the exercise section to help you focus. Sometimes you need to talk things out with a wise friend who can accompany your self discovery. You might want to make plans to speak with a therapist. Use the day for exploration of how to move into stability, whether it’s for more information or distraction. Whatever you do, do it with the knowledge that you are doing it lovingly and supportively of whatever emotion is brave enough to come up for your perusal. Decide that, however shaken it has made you feel, you have the option to see it as an energy that is moving through you and you can develop a new relationship with that emotion as it moves. Remember that energy wants to move. By its very nature it IS movement. If you don’t demonize it or glorify it or hold onto it in some other fashion, it will move and change as it does so. So what is your intention for how you’d like it to change?
Every Physical and Psychological Function Relies on Energy Supply
It's important to remember that all of this is energy based. Everything is moving through your system at a physiological level which obviously affects the psychological level, and vice versa. Even if you’ve already dealt with the psychological aspects of an outdated belief system and fully embraced a new one that is more positive and fulfilling, sometimes that old energy is still in the body and it's not until you take action in accordance with the newly realized belief that energy comes up out of the tissues to be processed out of your system or transmuted. It takes energy to release and transmute energy and the system will need to take breaks to resource and replenish itself as it does so.
It’s much easier to identify the energetic nature of the process in the context of a therapy session where there is an obvious ‘beginning/middle/end - recuperation’ framework around a specific issue. It’s much less so as we gradually evolve in our daily interactions due to deliberate increased self awareness. Further to the main three I outlined above, sometimes fatigue arises from having challenged an old belief or pattern as our system tests us to see if we’re really ready to let it go. In all of these cases, your mission is to go back to the 1st principle for change and that is to not beat yourself up when you do slip back, or when you think that you’ve fallen backwards in your efforts. In all cases, one of your super powers for change is the ability to be curious instead of critical. Ask questions. Asking questions is key in all of this. Asking questions opens it up and allows you to become the Observer which automatically puts it into a higher frequency and therefore creates more energy for momentum. Higher frequency attunes you to higher mind, intuition and your compassionate heart.
A Short Note on a Another Duct Tape Day Visitor: Resistance
Potentially integrated in all of these or appearing all on its own is the idea of resistance. Resistance is worthy of being looked at. It's been there for a reason. It may be because there is an old self protection mechanism that your system is not willing to let go of. It may be because your inner healer knows that you don’t currently have the resources to process whatever is behind it. For more on that please check out the blog post on Resistance and the accompanying exercise that will be condensed and highlighted in the exercise section. But for now, on your duct tape days, it's just about keeping it together in the calmest way possible. It's not the time to construct new things. It's the time to pull out the duct tape, the emotional or the physical duct tape, just to hold things in place as you allow yourself to move through this energy with a curiosity and a kind heart towards yourself. It's a good reminder to get back on track, usually with self nurturing, and to embrace gentle questions about deeper meaning - or just Netflix it with something that is upbeat and not depressing. Create positive energy around this quiet temporary state and see if you’re able, allow it to be neutral. If you can't allow it to be neutral then bring out the questions again, the gentle questions. Please remember this; duct tape days are not getting in the way of the process, they’re part of the process. You’re living them and you have a great opportunity in them to use them as a way to build new patterns around resourcing yourself with a new paradigm of self love.