What Is Frustration Telling You?
Have you ever caught yourself sighing out of sheer frustration, accompanied by an eye-roll?
Nothing hugely dramatic, I’ve had enough! kind of sigh. Just one of those little ones that seems to escape before you’ve even noticed you’re doing it. Maybe you even look around to see if anyone else noticed it.
Umm.. I know those sighs.
And I’ve come to realise they are often worth paying attention to.
Because frustration doesn’t always begin with something going horribly wrong. Sometimes it begins much more quietly. It can be years of adapting, being reasonable and as many years of thinking, and probably not worth making a fuss about.
You hold back because you don’t want to be difficult. You think things through because that is what we introverts tend to do. You give somebody else the benefit of the doubt. You push through. You accommodate. You tell yourself that this is just how things are.
Ringing any bells?
And because you are capable, you keep functioning. You get the work done. You turn up. You achieve things. People may even tell you how well you are doing. Meanwhile, somewhere underneath all of that, there is a growing sense that things feel harder than they should do.
Although still a little awkward, I can talk about this far easier now, because I’ve experienced those things myself. And I know keeping them hidden is not the answer.
There have been times when I have carried on professionally, whilst knowing that something wasn’t sitting right with me. And because there was no single catastrophe to point at, it was very easy to dismiss.
In those quieter moment, a single question demands to be considered – What exactly am I frustrated about – That is an annoyingly interesting question, isn’t it?
Because if we are looking for the one spectacular event that would justify our frustration, we’ll very likely miss what has been accumulating quietly for years. Perhaps it is the meeting where you once again didn’t get a chance to say what you really thought. Add to that the boundary you knew you needed but didn’t defend. And then there are the ideas you keep putting on the back burner because there is always something more sensible, more urgent or more acceptable to do first.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is simply the exhaustion of continually adjusting yourself to fit what seems to be expected of you.
And this is where I think we need to be really careful.
I don’t want us to think our frustrations are another thing we’re supposed to fix about ourselves.
I’m much more interested in becoming curious about it. Because frustrations need exploring not guiltily fixing on the quiet! Some people have actually told me that I shouldn’t talk openly about being frustrated but why on earth not? They have said it sounds like I am needy or entitled! I really don’t agree, because that’s tantamount to swallowing down or denying my emotions to suit their agenda. Frustrations are nothing to be ashamed of, they simply need airing productively. How else are we supposed to address and change things?
So, what is your frustration actually telling you?
What have you been putting up with?
Where have you been holding yourself back?
And, perhaps most importantly, what have you become so accustomed to that you no longer question it?
For me, that is where the interesting stuff starts.
Because sure, feeling frustrated can be uncomfortable, but because it also contains important information, it can help us to recognise what matters. It can point towards a boundary, a possibility, a conversation, a decision or an action that we have been avoiding. And that takes us somewhere rather different from simply trying to make the frustration disappear.
It asks us to become a little braver about listening to what it is telling us.
And when we listen closely, what we hear will not demand we dramatically or suddenly become somebody we are not. Far from it. But it does invite us to be braver, to be quietly gutsy, and to take appropriate action.
You see, once we notice what needs to happen, we pay attention, we stay positively curious, and most importantly, we can look at the why non-judgmentally.
That might seem like a very small beginning, but then, I’ve always been very fond of small beginnings.
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