#85 The Real Trajectory of Growth When It Feels Like You're Back Where You Started

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Hello and welcome to When Depression is in your bed podcast.
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A couple of episodes ago, I told you about a family car ride that went really well, after a few that really had not.
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And I talked about how intentionally changing some of the conditions before that trip had helped my family have a new experience.
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It was new evidence about how things could be.
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And then we took another car ride, which did not go nearly as well.
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And that's exactly what I want to talk to you about today.
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Because I don't want to present growth as a steady, linear, upward trend.
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I want to share honestly and accurately what growth actually looks like, at least in my own experience.
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Because I think when we expect growth to look something like, I struggled, I learned something different, I did it differently, and now I don't struggle anymore, we really set ourselves up to have some really unrealistic expectations.
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And perhaps just as importantly, we may miss pivotal moments and opportunities for continued growth.
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Because how we respond when the change we're hoping would happen doesn't happen exactly how we would imagine it is part of the growth process.
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Because a difficult moment that happens after what seems like a successful moment of growth doesn't always mean that growth didn't happen or that it didn't last.
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Oftentimes, that's actually a part of the trajectory of growth happening.
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And that's what I want to talk to you about today.
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I'm your host, Trish Sanders.
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I'm a licensed clinical social worker, a certified Imago relationship therapist, relationship coach, and the creator of The Road to Reconnection.
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And I am delighted that you were here.
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Let's get started.
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So here we were, another weekend at the end of summer, and my husband, Ben, and I wanted to squeeze in one last trip with our kids.
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We were going to visit family and we didn't have any specific plans or places to be, so we didn't have a hard arrival time or a check-in time or anything like that.
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But I had said that I wanted to leave at a certain time.
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But as it ended up, I had a kind of slow morning.
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I woke up with my daughter, I had some breakfast, I did some work, I started my kettlebell routine because it was my strength training day.
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And somewhere in the middle of all of this, Ben woke up.
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And I had actually thought that it was nice that he was able to sleep in because I knew he had a busy week.
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But when he woke up, he was ready to get moving and get ready to go, and I wasn't.
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We ended up pushing back our departure time, which was totally fine with me.
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My cousin, who we were meeting, was also pushing back her time.
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So I didn't think it was any big deal.
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To me, it felt like a slow, easy, go your own pace kind of day.
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But that wasn't necessarily Ben's experience.
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And this is certainly a dynamic that we've experienced and talked about before.
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I can give a time, and sometimes in my mind, it's a soft time, and other times it's more of a hard time.
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Like, no, seriously, we actually have to leave at this time.
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But when I give Ben a time that I want to leave, he usually wants to uphold that time, whether or not we have any flexibility in our schedule.
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And I totally understand that, even though it is different from how I approach it.
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So as this very familiar dynamic was unfolding, I noticed and I could tell that things were starting to get worked up just a bit.
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So I reminded Ben that our priority, which we share, is to create happy memories for our kids.
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And I reminded him that specifically we were trying to create pleasant car rides for our kids so that they can actually have a pleasant experience of us all being together when we're going on the trip to wherever we're heading to, in this case, to our family weekend.
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And I shared something that I have truly come to understand about our dynamic around car rides, which is that pleasant car rides start well before we get in the car.
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And I could tell that escalation was happening.
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So I said to Ben kindly and respectfully that if he felt like he needed some space or downtime or he was eager to get on the road, that he was certainly able to take his own car.
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And I also made it very clear that he was absolutely welcome to come in my car with the kids.
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It was just that my priority was having a nice ride.
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And all in all, Ben seemed to be able to receive what I had shared and we were able to get back on track.
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And I want to take a moment to pause right here because that alone was growth.
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I was able to kindly and respectfully assert my own values and hopes for what I wanted for our family.
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And because I was able to keep my nervous system in a grounded enough place and I still felt safe, even though the situation wasn't going the way I had hoped, I was able to communicate in such a way that Ben's nervous system was able to feel safe enough as well, and he actually could receive my message.
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I was also able to take some accountability for the fact that I had actually changed the departure time twice.
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And I understood how that might be unsettling or frustrating for Ben, particularly given how I know we experience time very differently.
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I could have compassion for all of that, even alongside the bit of frustration that I did feel.
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But that bit of frustration didn't take over.
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And that alone was huge.
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Because a part of the experience for me was a little voice in my head thinking, hmm, didn't we literally just have this conversation a couple of weeks ago about how important it was to have nice car rides for our family?
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Does he not remember that we had this talk?
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But right alongside that voice, there was another voice that also made a lot of sense.
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It reminded me that before our last car ride, I had talked to Ben and we had prepared together.
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We intentionally looked at what usually happens for our car rides and we planned to do things differently.
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For this trip, we hadn't done that.
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And I realized that in my mind I had a narrative going something like, okay, we addressed this, check, it's been done, and now we are working on having better car rides together.
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I had essentially assumed that the learning we had experienced in the last car ride would automatically carry over to the next.
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Meanwhile, I totally know that learning requires repetition.
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We're revising predictions and expectations for everyone involved.
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This is a process.
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It's not one and done.
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So the successful car ride we had before did give us information.
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It was evidence of how we could have a better experience where we felt more joyful and connected as a family.
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But that one pleasant car ride didn't give us a magic formula that ensure that every future car ride would go just as well.
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And realizing all that continued to support me in responding with compassion.
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It also gave me some information that I didn't have before.
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Ah, this is something that Ben and I probably need to continue talking about before our trips.
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And that's not failure.
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That's the next piece of learning.
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And there was another really important piece.
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Our 14-year-old son had been upstairs while Ben and I were talking.
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We weren't yelling, I would not have in any way described it as an argument or a fight.
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I didn't experience Ben as angry.
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Certainly there was a bit of frustration, but I interpreted that through the lens that I look through, which is a nervous system lens.
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And so the story I was telling myself about him was that he was in a sympathetically charged place, this mobilized response to a threat, and the threat was actually me changing the departure time.
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And I totally got that because again, this was not a new dynamic for us.
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And I also know that a sympathetically charged nervous system, whether it's mine or Ben's, often lands in our son's nervous system as a cue of danger.
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And by the time we got in the car, our son's nervous system was activated too.
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I felt like I was experiencing something like a little tiny storm, and Ben was experiencing something a little bit bigger, but totally not huge.
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But our son's nervous system definitely ended up in the stormiest place, and he was the most mobilized in response to threat.
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And the threat for him was listening to the conversation that my husband and I were having and thinking that this was the start of a car ride that wasn't going to go so well.
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And maybe after the last car trip where things went well, he actually let himself think that things could be better.
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And here we were in this same old familiar pattern.
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And of course, I imagine that left him feeling disappointed, frustrated, or upset.
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Whatever was happening inside of him, I could totally recognize his reaction was something that made total sense in the context of our history.
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So I tried to name it was happening as best as I could.
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I acknowledged that this car ride was not starting out as well as I had hoped that it would, and it wasn't starting out as well as our last car ride did.
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And I acknowledge that that's what happens and that sometimes growth looks this way, and it doesn't mean that things are going back to the way they were before.
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It's just that we're all stretching into new behaviors and figuring out how to do things in a way that really worked better for all of us.
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I said we were all learning and that's not going to happen perfectly, and it's not going to look exactly the same in all of us every single time.
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I also validated that growth can in fact be a challenging process, but I wasn't going to give up on it because I thought that getting to a better place in life in general was worth it.
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And specifically, I thought that having better, more pleasant car rides was something that our family deserved.
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And there's another piece of our son's reaction that I really want to highlight.
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Historically, his tendency when things get overwhelming or he feels upset is to go into more of a dorsal collapse and a shutdown.
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He often goes quiet, withdraws, puts his earbuds in, listens to his music, plays a game on his phone.
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He often does his best to disappear.
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But this time, he was fiery.
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He was expressing himself.
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Now, some people might look at a teenager who's angrily expressing himself and think, now that's disrespectful.
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And to be clear, some of the ways he was, in fact, expressing himself were not especially helpful.
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And we're still working on that.
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And through my lens, I saw this as movement for him.
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The way I saw it, my son was moving from a more collapsed, withdrawn place of shutdown into a more mobilized place where he could express himself.
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And if that's what's happening, that's something that I really want to support for him.
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Not necessarily the way that he expressed every thought, but the emergence of his voice, his willingness to finally say, I'm upset, I don't like this.
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This is affecting me.
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Him being able to speak those things was important.
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And I didn't want to shut that down.
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And I share this because it is a great example of why it could be difficult to recognize growth sometimes.
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Growth does not always look nice and pretty as it's happening.
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Sometimes as something new emerges, we have to figure out how to work with it and how to do it in a way that really works in the way that we want it to.
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So I can validate and support my son and tell him that I'm so glad that he's expressing himself and telling us how he feels.
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And I can also further support his growth by telling him that I want to continue working on how he communicates how he's feeling and what he's thinking so that he can say things in a way that other people can better receive.
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And both things can be true.
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He can be doing something new that's really wonderful, and he can also still need some work doing it.
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Ultimately, the car ride was okay.
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The tension between Ben and I faded pretty quickly.
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We listened to music, we got food, so we were able to eat lunch along the way.
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And honestly, when my family is well rested and fed, we have a pretty strong baseline for us to be able to handle whatever comes up.
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And we got to our destination and we were able to have a weekend with our family.
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It wasn't the beautiful, intentional car ride that I had shared with you in my previous episode.
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But it also wasn't an enormous disaster.
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And when I look back, it wasn't the outcome of the car ride that was really the greatest measure of growth.
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Because the car ride itself, particularly the start of the car ride, was not a huge success.
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But I was different.
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I was able to see and understand enough of what was happening in the dynamic that I was able to stay pretty regulated in my response to Ben.
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I was able to communicate what mattered to me and still recognize his experience.
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I was able to acknowledge my frustration without being overwhelmed by it.
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And I was able to understand my son's response in the context of what was happening for all of us.
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So afterwards, instead of thinking, wow, that was another failed car ride, I actually found myself thinking, what did this experience teach me about what we need to do next?
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There are more conversations I want to have with Ben.
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I want to understand his perspective more, and I want him to understand mine.
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There's conversations that I've already started having with my son, and there's conversations that I want to have for all of us as a family.
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And all of that information together can help us plan differently for our next car ride.
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And these are things that I think we can miss if we imagine growth as a steady upward line.
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Imagine looking at individual moments as their own little separate dots.
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One difficult car ride, one really pleasant car ride, another really difficult one.
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And if you only judge the dots, you might think failure, success, failure again.
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And it's easy to conclude, ugh, we're back where we started.
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But that's not exactly true.
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The individual moment and the trajectory of growth are not the same thing.
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Up close, maybe all you see is the dot.
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But if you step back and you look over time, you can start to see the real trajectory of what's happening.
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The circumstances may look familiar.
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You might even feel some familiar ways.
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But what has changed?
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Did you notice something sooner?
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Did you understand more?
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Did you have more choices available?
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Did you stay connected to yourself?
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Were you able to remain curious about the other person involved?
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Or were you able to make a repair sooner?
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But did you learn something that could influence what you do next?
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All of those things count.
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In fact, some pretty significant growth can be visible in what we do when the hoped for growth we had imagined doesn't happen.
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And realizing this can deeply support more growth.
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I do think for a long time I imagined growth as a destination.
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Somehow I would do a certain amount of work, figure out some magical thing, and then I would arrive and then stay there.
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But the more I think of it and the more I live it, growth actually happens one step at a time.
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We take a step, then we look around, and we notice, hmm, where am I now?
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What became available?
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What became less available?
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What did I learn?
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What do I need now?
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And then we take our next step from this new place.
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Not from where we thought we'd be or from where we wish we were, but from where we actually are.
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Because a hard moment after a good one doesn't necessarily mean that we moved backwards.
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Experiencing a familiar pattern doesn't necessarily mean that nothing has changed.
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And a response that is different from where we used to be, but not quite where we want to end up, can still represent very important movement.
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So I don't think the real trajectory of growth is a straight upward line.
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I think it's something we learn to notice over time in our ability to notice, to understand, to recover, to respond differently, and to learn from what just happened.
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And that learning can help inform us of where we want to take our next step.
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And if we can view growth through this lens, which is much more compassionate and usually much more accurate, we can set the stage for even more growth to happen.
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Because if we judge each individual experience, each dot as only pass or fail, we may miss all the growth that's actually happening in the so-called failures.
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And that can lead to disappointment and judgment and criticism and other things that don't support growth but actually inhibit it.
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So maybe when the next step we take doesn't lead to exactly where we thought it would, we don't have to label it a failure.
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We can look around, learn something, and take another step.
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And if we keep doing that, there's a really good chance that we are going to travel to a destination where we really want to be.
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And I think there's something incredibly hopeful about that.
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And I hope there is something hopeful in today's conversation for you too.
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As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments.
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Because I want to thank you for showing up today.
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And I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey.
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In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown.
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And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay.
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Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once.
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We don't travel a whole journey in one stride.
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And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one.
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Any type, any size, in any direction.
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It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind.
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It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you.
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I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed.
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If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released.
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I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw.
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Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you.
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Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared.
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Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.