Whether you’re looking back to New Year’s or looking ahead to summer, the process of setting goals, writing out intentions, or making resolutions often includes a desire to get rid of things that no longer seem to fit; unwanted pounds, for example, or clutter around the home or office, or even old beliefs and patterns of behavior. As part of supporting my therapy clients in reaching such goals, I often ask them to first consider “the pole in the middle of the room.”
Dan Keusal, M.S., LMFT
“Imagine that there’s a pole,” I tell them, “that stretches from floor to ceiling here in my office, and it’s rusted and ugly and directly in the line of sight between my chair and yours, so that every time we go to look at each other, the pole is in the way. Wouldn’t it be tempting to just get rid of the unwanted pole by knocking it down?”
“The problem,” I continue, “is that while the pole may be problematic now, it was originally put there for some reason. Imagine that I check with the building engineers at my office at they tell me that the pole is, in fact, holding up the ceiling, that years ago when the suites on this floor were configured differently, there was a wall around that pole (so at the time the pole didn’t seem out of place), and then when suites were reconfigured, the walls were moved, but the pole stayed.”
See the dilemma? I don’t want the pole there, but I also don’t want the ceiling to come crashing down.
There are, of course, other ways to hold up the ceiling; the building engineers might tell me they could install cross-beams that would distribute the weight of the ceiling out to the nearest load-bearing walls. Once they did that, the pole could be safely removed.
What are your “poles”? How did they get there? What purpose do they serve? Do those unwanted pounds, for example, insulate you from feeling uncomfortable feelings? Maybe your weight loss plan needs to include help with feeling those feelings. Does that clutter conceal the fact that you don’t really know what you do want in your life? Maybe your plan for “getting rid of all this junk” could include some help with identifying what you’d like to take its place, or at least some help with tolerating the relatively empty post-clutter life while you figure that out. Does your failure to confront protect you from dealing with other people’s reactions when you do speak up? Maybe you need to get some help and support for hanging in there after the initial confrontation.
Here are two more things to consider. First, the “pole” in my fictitious office example was put there by someone else, but many of the poles in your life, many of the things you now want to get rid of, may be things you put there yourself. And that’s fine, because the second thing to consider is that those “poles” were, at the time, a solution to a problem (they held up the proverbial ceiling), and was the best solution you could come up with back then.
These solutions were often downright creative, even life-saving. For example, “failing to confront” may have been your solution to an abusive parent standing over you and screaming “One more word out of you and I’ll give you something to cry about!” Back then, shutting up kept you safe; now, years later, when circumstances have changed, it’s getting in your way.
Today’s problems were often yesterday’s solutions. Before you look to remove them, spend a few moments considering how they got there in the first place, why they are still there, maybe even design some sort of ritual to honor their years of service, and then consider what the alternatives might be. You may also want to seek the counsel of a professional psychotherapist to help sort all this out.
Whether you go it alone or with help, taking some time to look at, reflect on, and respond to “the pole in the middle of the room” increases the likelihood that your attempts at change will have a greater chance to make your list of “Top 10 Goals Accomplished This Year!”
