People often talk about being stuck as if it were a malfunction. As if something in them is failing to do its job. They know what needs to change. They’ve thought about it carefully. They may even be tired of talking about it. And yet, nothing shifts.
Sitting with someone in that place, I’m rarely struck by a lack of effort. More often, I notice how much pressure they are already under — usually from themselves.
Stuckness tends to appear when different needs collide.
On the one hand, there is usually a clear sense that something cannot continue as it is. A situation feels too heavy, too constricting, or too painful. On the other hand, change is not neutral. It asks for something in return. Sometimes what it asks for is obvious. Sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the system notices.
One reason people get stuck is that change involves loss. This is not always a dramatic one, but it’s always present. A familiar role might need to be loosened. A relationship might shift in ways that are hard to predict. A certain image of oneself — capable, agreeable, reliable — might no longer hold in the same way.
When those losses come into view, slowing down can be a sensible response.
Another reason stuckness shows up is emotional exposure. Change often brings people closer to feelings they have organised their lives around not having to feel too much. Grief, anger, fear, disappointment. If distance from those feelings has been protective in the past, hesitation makes sense. Pausing here can be a way of checking whether the ground is solid enough to finally allow space for those feelings.
There is also the matter of habit, though not in the superficial sense people usually mean it. Ways of thinking about yourself, others, and the world tend to run on well-worn tracks. They require very little effort. New ways of responding take more energy, more attention, more tolerance for uncertainty. Knowing this does not make the old tracks disappear.
This is why insight alone rarely produces change. Most people already understand far more than they can easily live by.
Familiar patterns also have the advantage of being predictable. Predictable is not the same as comfortable, but it is often treated as safer. People routinely choose what they know how to manage over what might work better but feels less certain. They may complain about this choice at length, while continuing to make it. This is just human behaviour, not hypocrisy.
Stuckness is not a single emotional state. It can include frustration, resignation, fear, numbness, or a strange flatness that doesn’t quite have a name. Sometimes these states alternate. Sometimes they sit alongside each other. None of this is particularly elegant. Psychological processes rarely are.
What tends to complicate things further is pressure. When people decide they should not be stuck, they often respond by tightening the internal screws. More self-monitoring. More rules. Less patience. This approach is understandable, but it usually has the opposite effect. Systems that are already cautious tend to become more so under threat.
Seen this way, stuckness is often doing something. It may be buying time. It may be preventing a loss that feels too large. It may be holding the line until something feels possible rather than merely necessary.
This does not mean staying where you are indefinitely. It means recognising that immobility can have a function before trying to dismantle it.
From the outside, being stuck can look like nothing is happening. From the inside, there is often a careful, if uncomfortable, negotiation underway. When that negotiation is understood rather than overridden, movement — when it comes — tends to be slower and more stable.
Sometimes nothing moves because something important is being held in place.
“I don’t know why I feel this way.” Have you ever said that out loud while sitting with a friend or a counsellor, trying to make sense of what you’re feeling? I know I’ve been there. Sitting there, feeling the wheels of my mind turning, searching for any possible reason that could explain what I feel. And the thing is, whenever I go looking for a reason, I’ll always find one. I’ll explain a feeling away with whatever makes the most sense in that moment. That’s the left side of the brain doing what it does best: filling in the gaps, not worrying whether it’s true, only that it fits.
I know I’m not alone in this. (Yes, you — I’m talking to you.) I’ve heard that same sentence from so many clients in therapy, and it’s what made me want to write about it. The idea of not knowing exactly where a feeling comes from often brings up guilt or frustration, as if not knowing is some kind of personal failure. Like being unsure of your feelings means you’ve somehow failed at being a person.
But not being able to name or explain what you feel isn’t a sign of disconnection. I’d actually argue it might be the opposite. We live in a culture that teaches us to name and categorise everything (maybe because it makes us feel safe, because uncertainty is uncomfortable). And somewhere along the way, we started applying that same rule to emotions. The moment a feeling shows up (especially an uncomfortable one), we’re told to identify it, label it, find it on the emotions wheel (have you ever been shown one of those?), then analyse it, explain it, and make sure we can justify why it’s there. To me, that sounds like an exhausting process for something that, physiologically, only lasts about 90 seconds. Wouldn’t it be kinder to just let ourselves feel it, instead of rushing to understand it?
Our Obsession With Knowing
We live in a culture that worships knowing. From a young age, we’re taught that the goal is to figure things out, to analyse, to explain. Uncertainty means you haven’t done enough. Remember school? There was always a right answer, and if you didn’t know it, you just had to try harder. That lesson sticks.
As adults, we bring that same mindset into our emotional world. We treat feelings like problems to be solved instead of experiences to be felt. We think if we can just understand why we feel something, then we’ll have done it “right.”
Iain McGilchrist writes beautifully about this — how our culture has become dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain, the side that values logic, categorisation, and control. It’s brilliant at making sense of things, but it also struggles to leave space for what can’t be neatly explained. And when that part of the brain takes over, we start to believe that knowing equals competence. That not knowing means failure.
So we analyse, interpret, and overthink our own emotions. We chase explanations instead of sitting with the actual feeling. It’s as if we can’t allow ourselves to simply be until we’ve written a full essay on why we’re feeling sad, angry, or lost.
What Happens When We Overthink Our Feelings
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor talks about something called the 90-second rule: the idea that an emotion, as a physiological experience, only lasts about a minute and a half. That’s how long it takes for the chemicals triggered by an emotion to move through the body. After that, what keeps the feeling going isn’t biology — it’s thought.
Emotions are meant to rise, peak, and pass. They’re waves, not storms. But when we start analysing them (Why do I feel this way? What does it mean? Should I be feeling this?), we keep activating the same emotional response over and over again. It’s like hitting “refresh” on a page we don’t actually want to stay on.
That’s how sadness turns into heaviness, how anger lingers as resentment, how fear becomes anxiety. Overanalysis traps us in a feedback loop where we’re no longer feeling the original emotion, just the story we’ve built around it.
And it can happen with any emotion. For some people, sadness feels unsafe. For others, it’s anger or even joy. So the mind steps in to manage it, to think it away, to control it, to make it make sense. But all that thinking just keeps us stuck inside the feeling we were trying to escape in the first place.
Therapy and the Value of Unknowing
Even in therapy, the “why” mindset sneaks in. We’re trained to look for root causes, to find patterns, to make meaning out of everything that hurts. And while understanding can be powerful, I’ve learnt that searching for answers too soon can actually pull us away from what’s most alive in the room: the feeling itself.
There was a time when I thought that was the work. Help people figure out their feelings. Make sense of them. But over time, I started to notice that the moments of real change didn’t come from explanation. They came from presence. From slowing down enough to actually be with what was happening, without rushing to label or fix it.
I’ve had to learn that myself too. I grew up in the same culture that values analysis over experience, knowing over feeling. So learning to stay with uncertainty, to resist the urge to tidy things up, has been a slow and ongoing process. To this day, I still catch myself trying to decode something instead of sitting with it.
It’s something I still work on, too. As a therapist and as a person.
What It Means to “Stay With” a Feeling
So what does it actually mean to stay with a feeling? It’s simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. It means noticing what’s happening inside you without rushing to understand or change it.
You might feel your chest tighten or your stomach drop. Maybe your jaw tenses or your breath gets shallow. Staying with it means allowing those sensations to be there, without turning them into a story. No analysis, no self-critique, no “why”. Just noticing.
It’s about presence, not understanding. Acceptance, not control. Letting the feeling move through instead of trying to pin it down.
If you want to try this, the next time you notice a strong emotion, pause before asking, ‘Why am I feeling this?’ Instead, see if you can bring your attention to your body. What do you notice? Where do you feel it? You don’t need to name it or make sense of it. Maybe do a slow scan from your head to your feet, or just follow the rhythm of your breath for a minute. That’s it.
It’s a practice that doesn’t offer quick answers, but over time, it builds a kind of trust in yourself. The kind that doesn’t depend on knowing, only on being.
The Reframe: Understanding Comes Later
Staying with your feelings doesn’t mean giving up on understanding. Insight isn’t lost. It just arrives differently. When we allow ourselves to fully experience a feeling without rushing to explain it, understanding tends to emerge naturally, in its own time.
This is how the therapeutic process often works. When safety and acceptance are in place, reflection comes on its own. Clarity shows up after presence, not before it. You don’t need to force it.
So if you’re sitting with an emotion and feel uncertain, remind yourself: it’s okay not to know yet. You’re simply feeling. And for now, that’s enough.
In therapy, we make space for not knowing. That’s often where the real work begins: in the unknowing, in the pause before explanation.
If you recognise this in yourself, if you notice the urge to figure things out instead of just feeling them, there’s a way to explore it with support. You can practise sitting with what’s here, noticing it, and letting it pass, without needing all the answers right now.
If You’re Interested in Reading More
If you want to dig deeper into the ideas I’ve mentioned here, these are a couple of great places to start:
Jill Bolte Taylor’s work on the neuroscience of emotions and the 90-second rule, which explains how emotions naturally rise and pass: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (2008).
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2019) explores how our culture and left-brain–dominant thinking shape the way we perceive and interpret the world.
Both offer fascinating insights into how our minds work and why learning to sit with feelings, rather than immediately trying to explain them, can make such a difference.
You probably imagine your therapist living a flawless life: a spotless apartment, a white fence outside, a matcha latte in hand, never raising their voice or losing their temper.
Maybe you picture us gliding through every awkward or painful moment with calm wisdom, always knowing the right thing to say, as if a secret emotional cheat sheet lives in our brains. Sometimes you worry that if you cry, or tell me about a fight over something as trivial as the dishwasher, I’ll silently judge you—or worse, crumble under the weight of your story. That’s understandable.
But the truth is far less glamorous. I lose my keys. I forget birthdays. I’ve sat through a client session wearing an inside-out t-shirt and didn’t notice until halfway through. My cat will sometimes leap onto my lap during a Zoom session, scaring me senseless, and I can’t help but shriek. Somehow, feeling tangled in my own life allows me to sit with yours too.
TV and Social Media Lie to You
We all have seen therapists on TV or social media: composed, neat, glasses perched, nodding thoughtfully in their green cardigan. That image seeps into our expectations, even if you’ve never met a real therapist. In reality, most of us start out in our therapy training learning how to listen and be present, not how to perform perfection.
Real therapy doesn’t come with a green cardigan or a perfect smile.
Some clients look surprised when I sit cross-legged in the chair, sip my tea mid-session, glance away while thinking, or laugh at something absurd that happens in the moment, like a dog barking nonstop during a particularly heavy story. Those pauses don’t mean distraction. They are simply humans at work. And unsurprisingly, research confirms what feels obvious in practice: clients often assume professionals have life figured out, when what actually matters is empathy, attention, and a willingness to sit with difficult feelings.
Humans at Work, Not Robots
Therapists are trained in psychological techniques, not in living flawlessly. We notice patterns, ask questions, and hold space, but life remains messy. I’ve snapped at my partner, cried over shows I have been rewatching a hundred times, and laughed at moments I shouldn’t have.
Once, a client apologised for sending a drunken text to an ex; instead of judging, I laughed with them, and that shared moment became a doorway into understanding shame, embarrassment, and communication. These moments only deepen the work. Sessions are about sitting together in the middle of what feels complicated, noticing it, exploring it, and sometimes finding humour in the absurdity of being human.
Busting Therapy Myths
There are plenty of myths floating around beyond TV and social media. Some people think therapy is only for people in crisis. Others imagine therapists have all the answers, like sages with plans for every life problem.
The reality is simpler and stranger: we show up, curious, paying attention, ready to reflect and respond without knowing the future or holding a master manual. Some days we have the same ordinary anxieties you do, the same confusion, the same “how did I get here?” thoughts. That shared uncertainty is exactly what allows us to sit with your experience.
Freedom in Imperfection
Knowing that your therapist isn’t perfect can be quietly freeing. You don’t have to hide the awkward or confusing parts of your life or apologise for moments you barely understand yourself. Therapy is a space to explore those moments without judgement. You can learn to notice patterns, test ideas, and pay attention to what matters. And sometimes, the most memorable part isn’t the insight or the technique. It’s the sense that someone sees you, really sees you, and sits with you anyway.
Therapists being human matters beyond the therapy room. Life itself is chaotic, confusing, and occasionally absurd. Connecting with someone who understands that reality changes how you experience your own life. You begin to notice yourself, your reactions, and the humour tucked into difficult moments. You realise you don’t have to act, hide, or carry everything alone.
Sometimes the most memorable part of therapy isn’t the insight, but the sense that someone really sees you.
If the idea of therapy has felt intimidating, imagining someone flawless sitting across from you, know that you’ll find none of that. You’ll find a human who can hold space for what’s heavy, strange, or even embarrassing without judgement, without expectation, and sometimes with a shared laugh at life’s absurdities. If you’re ready to explore your thoughts and feelings, to feel understood and noticed, you’re welcome to reach out. You won’t find quick fixes, but you will find someone who notices, stays with you, and makes the load lighter.
