A great indication that you are in a stressful relationship, whether at work or at home, is that when you think about the particular person or situation, you feel paralyzed.
You can’t go on. You cannot go back. You are stuck and stress is killing you!
The reason you feel paralyzed is that you have committed to this relationship and you don’t feel like you can leave it. Either it’s your job and you don’t want to lose it, or it’s a serious relationship in your family or with your “partner.” So you’ve already invested a lot of time, energy, and hope in this relationship. And yet it doesn’t work. Something went very wrong.
Let’s say the problem is in your marriage. It could also be a frozen situation with a father-in-law, or with your boss, a co-worker, or an assistant.
It could be that the warning signs were there all along, but, as happens so often when the signs don’t match what you decided you wanted, you ignored them and moved on with the relationship. At times, you may have felt unsettling uncertainty about it, but you dismissed your inner misgivings as cold feet or perhaps the normal anxiety about getting married.
But now you realize that you are stressed all the time and if you are honest about it, you can see that the pattern has been there all the time. There was a blueprint from the beginning, like for a garden design, and now all the plants are fully grown because the years have passed and they kept reacting to each other in unhealthy ways. You are drowning in the weeds, miserable and confused, when you thought you were going to have conjugal bliss with roses, fragrant lilies and songbirds.
If you weren’t fully involved in this relationship, it would be so much easier to break up, walk away, and move on. But usually we become completely entangled in such a way that making the decision to stay or leave leads us to feel unable to do one of the two things wholeheartedly.
Are you feeling paralyzed? Wondering what to do next? Does the ambivalence of the relationship keep your mind churning with indecision and your stomach churning with anxiety? Then take a quiet moment to think about these three points:
1. If you imagine yourself leaving, do you notice a sudden release of tension in your shoulders? That is a clue that your heart really wants you to find freedom from this untenable relationship, and just go, to find a new beginning.
2. If leaving makes you feel instantly terrified and panicky, it may indicate that you have a lot of work to do on your own self-esteem before making a decision in any way. So give yourself the gift of time to keep thinking about what is best for you. There is no need to rush, unless it is physical abuse; in that case, don’t delay another minute. Get you and your children safe.
3. If things are basically “good enough” and you’ve already made the decision to stay, then stop behaving as you always have. If you’ve gotten into the habit of arguing all the time, quit.
Understand that ending paralysis will require action. You need to change the way you run your life and stop dancing to the old tunes that don’t work for you.
