Latest / Internal Insights / When You Have No Say in What Happens Next
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Hey, I'm Ted Thao This is Internal Insights. I'm a licensed professional counselor, which means I spend most of my weeks listening closely to people work through the hardest parts of being alive. This podcast is where I take what I'm hearing without any names or identifying details and open it up into a conversation for anyone willing to think a little harder about themselves and the world around them. Imagine your whole schedule, your job, your finances, even your sense of who you are suddenly gets rearranged by paperwork you do not write, and a calendar you do not control. No warning that fits your life, no say in the timeline, just the date, the place, and ex an expectation for you to show up. When someone is dealing with probation. repeated court hearings or any long legal processes, they are usually not dealing with the logistics. They are dealing with a very specific kind of stress that comes from having your time, your freedom, and your future controlled by a system that does not move on your own schedule and does not really explain itself along the way. This is different from ordinary stress. Most stress has some kind of endpoint you can picture. A hard project ends when it ends, a tough conversation ends when it ends, but legal processes often drag on with more vague timelines, last minute reschedulings, and decisions made by people who may only meet for a few minutes at a time. That combination being told what to do while not being told when it will be over. Is exhausting in a very particular way. Think of it like being a passenger in a car where someone else is driving. But they also will not tell you where you are going or when you will arrive. You see the road, you can feel every turn, but there's no hands on the steering wheels, or specifically your hands aren't on the steering wheel. Over time, that kind of powerlessness can wear on a person even more than the original event that got there in the first place. It is common for people going through this to feel strange mix of emotions. Some day it looks like anger at the unfairness of it all. Some days it looks like numbness just going through emotions because there's no other choice. Some days it's very heavy shame. Even when the situation genuinely was not fully their fault. Or was the result of the circumstances beyond their control? All of this is a normal response for an abundant amount of pressure. A question I often hear in some form is, okay then, how do I stay sane when I have zero control of what actually happens to me right now? And the honest answer is you focus on the small things you control. When the big picture feels like it's completely out of your hands. You cannot control the court date getting pushed back again. You cannot control how long the process takes or what the judge decides. But you can control how prepared you show up. You can control whether the paperwork is organized ahead of time. So at least that part is not adding to the stress. You can control who you talk to about what's going on. So you're not carrying it entirely alone. It also helps to separate the event itself from the process around it. The event already happened. The process is simply the aftermath, and processes, even slow and frustrating ones, do eventually move forward. Reminding yourself of that difference can keep the process from feeling like a permanent state rather than a temporary, if painful, chapter. Lastly. Give yourself permission to feel frustrated without turning that frustration itself into self blame. Feeling powerless in a powerless situation is not a personal failing. It is an appropriate response to genuinely difficult circumstances. If you are in the middle of something like this right now, you are not weak for feeling worn down by it. You are a person responding Reasonably to an unreasonable amount of pressure. Keep showing up for the parts you control and let the rest move on its own pace. That's where I'll leave it for today. You don't have to agree with everything I said, but I'd invite you to sit with it a little longer before you move on to whatever is next. I'm Ted Thao this has been Internal Insights. And if you want to learn more about my work, you can find me at internal insights therapy dot com. Take care, and I'll talk to you next time.