Against Emotional Redundancy
What we already feel won't help us
Imagine that I’ve spent a lot of time and brain power on trying to feel better. I have self-diagnoses, stories, and analyses. I am positively bristling with explanations for my patterns and behaviour.
But, somehow, none of this has enabled me to get out of my own way.
I can talk about the problem endlessly, but I’m not getting any closer to solving it.
In fact, all the talking about it has built up of kind of wall around the problem. I’ve surrounded the issue with so much verbiage that it feels inaccessible, cut off from any actual resolution.
Rather than fixing the problem, my explanations have become a problem in their own right.
I actually see this happen a lot, which is truly strange.
It’s strange because, as I am so fond of reminding y’all, you’re intelligent and intrepid. You’re exceptional in both curiosity and pattern-recognition. You’re also very open to challenging received wisdom.
Yet somehow all this skilful and committed exploration lands people in an interpretive dead-end. What is going on?
For one thing, I don’t think any of it started out this way. In fact, most of the explanations we find ourselves repeating were like a lightning bolt out of the blue when we first encountered them. It felt like they could change everything for us.
But then something happened. We got stuck on repeat. What once felt revelatory and like an opening to somewhere else became more like a doctrine we’d learned to recite.
I call this experience emotional redundancy, because it’s fundamentally about repeating the same feelings about the same insights. An analysis that might have been a stepping-stone toward a different future somehow got turned into a holding pen.
And although I do think internet #mentalhealth culture deserves some blame here, it’s also true that our brains fucking love a holding pen.
This is particularly true for those of us dealing with persistent avoidance. We have brains that are extra skilled at blocking the changes we want. Turning some new insight into another way to keep us stuck is child’s-play for this kind of brain.
It’s as if they’re saying, Oh, you think you understand what’s happening in here? That’s so cute. Why don’t you go talk some more about your insights? And I’ll just let you know when I’m actually ready to change. Bye-bye now!
Because having more explanations feels like progress, this is a subtle and successful avoidance strategy. It really feels like we must be getting somewhere, even though we’re not, because look at how much we know.
Well played, Brain, well played.
Is this happening to you?
It’s so rare that I get to provide a simple, try-this-one-trick answer, but this is one of those delightful times.
It’s very easy to tell whether you’re actually moving toward change vs. just stuck in emotional redundancy, because they feel fucking different.
The first one feels juicy, electrifying, like the lid of your brain suddenly popped open. It might feel terrifying, but it never feels routine. Whereas emotional redundancy feels comfortably familiar, even when the explanation itself is grim. It’s like a cul-de-sac we can circle around forever, safe and enclosed.
This difference is one of the reasons I emphasise live, conceptually rich teaching in my coaching programme: I want you attuned to that lid-of-brain-popping-open experience, because that will tell us when we’re on the right track in changing things for you. And even my most emotionally remote, cerebral clients have no trouble identifying the feeling of learning something importantly new.
With emotional redundancy, there’s still a feeling of satisfaction, but it’s more like the pleasure in repetition. We’ve been here before, and we know the terrain. We’re just making sure it still looks the same. And it always does.
Emotional redundancy feels practiced, it feels rote, and on some level it feels dead.
It’s the polar opposite of the feeling we get when suddenly there is a rip in the fabric of the known and we can see through to the world we want to join.
The difference is unmistakable once you’re paying attention to it.
How to respond to emotional redundancy
First, understand that you 100% should not blame yourself. Our brains are designed to make knowledge routine, and mostly that’s a good thing. It’s why we don’t have to think about making a left turn or conjugating verbs in our native language. It’s just that in this case, our brains are using that expertise to keep us from looking further.
And that is precisely what we need to do to escape emotional redundancy: look further.
We don’t need to throw out the explanations we have. We just have to treat them as a starting point rather than a finish line.
Here are a few questions I recommend asking about any analysis or explanation of your patterns/behaviour you find yourself repeating:
How does this knowledge help me to change in the ways that matter most to me?
What will I do differently based on this knowledge?
How does this knowledge give me more power and freedom than I had before?
Not only will these questions give you an opportunity to understand what you actually need in order to change, they will also automatically surface any hidden ways in which your brain is leveraging this explanation to prevent rather than enable your transformation. If your brain at first insists that these questions are inadmissible or unanswerable, that’s a pretty good sign of emotional redundancy.
But you don’t have to let your brain stop you there. The whole point is to look further than what has become our brains’ default response. And once you actually start exploring these questions on purpose, you will likely be able to find positive answers to at least one of them.
And the next time you brain wants to sink into emotional redundancy, you can act on that answer instead.
Got questions? Let me know in the comments.