November Newsletter
Dear Friends,
I recently finished a book about blocks. Creative blocks, relationship blocks, business blocks. Its main idea was that the things that keep us from our potential often come from early messages about what we’re allowed to have. As a therapist, I have a soft spot for the self-help corner of the field, so this was right up my alley.
The book is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. His premise is simple: the ceiling on your life isn’t fate, it’s your internal limit. Not in a “just manifest more” way, but in a nervous-system way. We all have a kind of set point for how much love, success, creativity, or ease we can tolerate. When life rises above that level, we sometimes pull ourselves back down without realizing it. He calls this the Upper Limit Problem.
He gives examples of how people do this:
picking a fight right after a big win
procrastinating on the exact task that would move them forward
creating drama
even getting sick
He is clear that the point is not moral failure. It is that your nervous system is calibrated to “this much good, no more.”
Two days after I finished the book, I woke up with the flu.
It made me think that it is almost never just psychology or just circumstance. It is usually both.
I texted a friend: “I don’t know why I got so sick. I never get sick.”
She wrote back, half-joking, half-calling me out: “I know why.”
She’s a therapist too, so of course I wondered: Am I upper-limiting myself? Is it because my work is expanding? I have been in a season of expansion with a lot of really interesting things on the horizon. Is this about the holidays coming up without my family member, who passed away this year? The day I woke up sick, I was supposed to be helping clear her things out of her home. Is there some quiet grief in me that says, “You don’t get to feel good right now”? Or did I just sit near someone on the subway who sneezed directly into my face?
Here is where I land: it is probably both.
There are parts of life we do not control. Viruses. Holidays that stir up loss. Other people’s nervous systems. The timing of estate sales. We do not get to schedule those.
But there is a part we do control, and that is the part I care about in therapy. We can decide to look underneath the symptom and ask:
What part of me is tired from holding it all?
What part of me still believes I should not outgrow my old role?
Where do I need actual support instead of just pushing through?
Even if the flu was “just” the flu, looking a little deeper showed me there are areas that need more care right now. Grief around my family member. The pace of my work. The way expansion can feel exciting and threatening at the same time. That is useful information.
Therapy is nuanced. It is almost always both/and.
Both nervous system and circumstance.
Both childhood pattern and current stress.
Both the body saying “enough” and the world throwing something at you.
We cannot control the person who sneezed on the subway. We can control setting ourselves up with enough support, rest, and relational space so that when life hits, we do not immediately default to old patterns.
So no, I do not believe every illness is an upper limit. That is too simplistic and too blaming. I do believe every interruption is an invitation to ask, “Is there anything in me that needs tending right now?” That part is within our control.
If something has been getting in your way lately, try looking at it from both angles: what is circumstantial, and what is yours to tend.
Wishing you all a happy and healthy November.
- Jennifer CAP Founder