Keep pushing. Just push through. Fake it til you make it. No pain, no gain.
Phew. There are a lot of messages I’ve gotten throughout my life that have tried to tell me that the only way to learn, to grow, and quite frankly to exist, is to always be striving, trying harder, pushing limits, and doing more, no matter what. While practice does help with a lot of things, not everything in our lives benefits from us pushing ourselves.
These three little stories are spinning around in my head.
One.
I just finished a book, “Low Demand Parenting.” This book is specifically about parenting people with PDA (depending who you ask that stands for Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Pathological Demand Avoidance). Demands in this setting, are all the things that are asked of us, all of the time, including many unspoken expectations. An example used throughout the book is eating dinner with the family. This is not just one “demand” but several: to sit in a chair, to sit at the table, to participate in conversation, to eat what everyone is eating, to use certain utensils, to be quiet at certain times, and so on. Demands are not just the things we have to do (eat, go to work, pay bills), but the ways that we have to do them (what to wear, how to speak, how to interact).
One of the really interesting premises of the book is that dealing with demands does not increase our tolerance for demands. In fact, it takes away our capacity to deal with demands. The more demands that we deal with everyday, the more exhausted we are, and the lower our tolerance for more demands. So, if all a person’s energy is spent dealing with the little asks, they have no capacity for the big ones. Thinking back to the dinner table – if someone’s capacity for meeting demands is all taken up by eating with the family, they might not be able to go to an important appointment. Or for many of us as adults, all of our energy to respond to demands may be taken up at our jobs, and so we aren’t able to respond to a partner asking for help.
But this book suggests, if instead of trying to “increase our tolerance,” we drop the little demands, we will have more space and capacity to deal with bigger ones. That’s part of why working from home works for so many people – we drop the demands of wearing certain clothing, sitting at a desk, engaging in small talk – and then we are better able to do other things we need to do.
Two.
A few years ago I was at a presentation by a national renowned “expert” on resilience. There is a standardized resilience score used in many psychological studies. The presenter told a story about asking a group of news anchors to take the short quiz to get their resilience score. Then, before showing their score, he had each of them stick their hand in ice water. His premise was that the person who could keep their hand in the water the longest would have the highest score on the resilience index.
I was livid. I’d always struggled with that index because I didn’t know how to answer the questions. But now, I was even more angry, because resilience was being framed as a positive and so was having a high tolerance for pain. That’s not what I want for the world. That’s not what I want for all the children this guy works with. I want a world where we can feel pain and we can take action to stop the source of the pain. I want a world where we don’t have to desensitize ourselves or hide our feelings. That was not at all the world this person was advocating for. What if resilience was our ability to say, ouch, I don’t like this, so I’m taking my hand out of the ice water. Or to say, I can’t take my hand out, someone help. What if we instead looked at community based solutions to prevent pain and suffering, rather than just teaching people to endure?!
Three.
ME/CFS – often commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – is mostly managed by a strategy called Pacing. Pacing is about planning out activity and rest to avoid over exertion, and with ME/CFS, over-exertion comes from almost everything. Since I’ve had Long Covid, I’ve had to learn about Pacing to try to manage my fatigue and pain. It’s so much harder for me to do than it sounds! I have had to get more rest, take more breaks, and do less than I ever thought was possible.
Some researchers (in the past and now) have suggested that something called Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) would help with ME/CFS. The idea behind GET is to gradually increase the amount of exercise you get, thus gradually increasing one’s tolerance for exercise and exertion. However, as patient advocates know and have shared over and again, this approach is super harmful. With ME/CFS, any exertion can cause harm and lead to setbacks from which some people don’t recover. Pushing ourselves is the very opposite of what we need to be doing!
These three things have been coming together for me. As with most people in my life, I was brought up to push through, to exercise, to get stronger, and so on. Messages abounded like: Keep pushing. No pain, no gain. You gotta keep going. You need to do more to get stronger.
So, I don’t know anything about strength training. I don’t know if these ideas are even true for exercise, but I know they sure aren’t true for everything in our lives. Sometimes, we need less of something to increase our tolerance for it.
Sometimes, quite often in fact, we need less not more, we need rest, not pressure.
I wonder how much this is true of healing from trauma too. Maybe we don’t always have to be trying to get better. Maybe sometimes we will just sit in our pit of despair and sob. Sometimes we will cope just to survive, not to thrive. Where are the spaces that we get to ask less of ourselves? Where can we drop the demands, drop the pushing, and just be?
Maybe we can place fewer demands on ourselves and our loved ones, giving us more space to live and to do what really feels important. I start by trying to recognize the messages I’ve been taught about when to push and when to rest. I practice. I ask what the demands are on me and which I can drop.
What works for you? Where are you giving yourself permission to let go? When do you know it’s time to push through or cope with a demand? I invite myself, and anyone else who wants to, to imagine a world that lets us be gentle with ourselves. A world that encourages rest. A world where we don’t always have to be striving, but can just be.