Let’s Get Hopeless and a Little Creative About Our Striving

Early in the pandemic when the stress of working motherhood and being a therapist was taking its toll, I noticed my unhealthy striving cycle rearing its head. Despite exhaustion, I found myself working more, comparing myself to others, and becoming increasingly rigid.

My familiar emotional avoidance strategy was back. I was doing more, but never feeling like I was doing enough, competing with people who didn’t have the same goals as me, and headed toward burn-out.

Use Creative Hopelessness to Get Unstuck

When clients come to therapy stuck in behaviors not working for them, I often start with creative hopelessness.

It may sound like an unusual way to launch therapy, but it helps to get a little hopeless before you can get creative about solutions. Creative hopelessness is a powerful tool in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) where you take an honest look at your attempts to control and avoid your inner experiences and the costs of that avoidance. You make contact with the unworkability of your behavior (that’s the hopelessness part) and consider the possibility of living differently (let’s get creative!).

In ACT, creative hopelessness exposes our roundabouts of attachment and avoidance and cultivates our willingness to take the exit ramp.

Tigers Above, Tigers Below

There is a Zen Koan about tigers and strawberries that I learned from Pema Chodron’s Comfortable With Uncertainty, which illustrates creative hopelessness beautifully.

In the story, a woman is running from tigers. She comes to a cliff and grasps onto a vine. She starts to lower herself down, only to find tigers below. Then she notices that a mouse starts to gnaw at the vine. The woman looks around and sees a patch of strawberries, reaches over and eats one. It is the most delicious strawberry she has ever eaten.

Chodron writes: “Tigers above, tigers below. Such is the predicament of life.”

Discomfort is inevitable; it is how we respond in the present moment that matters.

Are you caught in fixing, avoiding, and controlling with stressful striving? Is it no longer working for you? Try these 5 steps:

1. Get Curious: Approach your stressful striving cycle with an open, nonjudgmental mind. Curiosity just may be our superpower, according to Dr. Jud Brewer. When we can see our cycles clearly, we can better step out of them. Like most behaviors, stressful striving often follows a predictable pattern of trigger → behavior → result. Is your stressful doing triggered by uncomfortable thoughts and feelings? Do you use staying busy “fixing” yourself or seeking perfection to avoid these feelings? What is the result? Map out your cycle.
2. Give yourself grace. It doesn’t help to berate yourself for something that is inherently human. We all want to avoid uncomfortable feelings, and our brain’s drive mode is overstimulated by an individualistic and capitalistic society. “It’s not your fault but it is your responsibility,” as Paul Gilbert would say, to do something different. Let yourself off the hook, while also holding yourself responsible for changing your unhelpful patterns.
3. Be radically honest with yourself. Our brains tend to pay more attention to short-term rewards over long-term consequences. Bring attention to the costs of stressful striving to yourself. Notice the point of diminishing returns, and see the long-term costs of your avoidance behavior. This will help your brain learn that stressful striving is not what you truly want.
4. Climb your ladder differently. When you are caught in stressful striving, you climb ladders that are against the wrong wall and tend to step on people (including yourself) along the way. What if you were to climb ladders that were leaned up against the meaningful walls? How would you climb if you used compassion and your values as your guide?
5. Trust the process. Creativity is about the process, not the outcome. Be more present and engaged in the wonder of it all. Remind yourself you are not a self-improvement project with some endpoint. Instead, embrace the journey of Your Life in Process.

I hope these practices are helpful for you as you reach for meaningful goals without stressful striving.

Journal Prompts

• When have you felt creative hopelessness in your life? How did it help you get unstuck from an unhelpful pattern?
• What are you trying to fix/control/avoid in your life right now? How do you want to respond differently?