The Urgency Is the Problem

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to heal faster than healing moves.

Most of us have felt it. The impatience with our own process. The quiet frustration that we're still here, still working on this, still not past it. The sense that if we could just push a little harder, understand it a little more completely, do the work with a little more intensity.  We could get there sooner.

We know this feeling in our clients. We see it constantly.

What we don't always acknowledge is that we know it from the inside, too.

What the urgency sounds like.

In clients it sounds like: I just want to be done with this. I've been in therapy for two years,  shouldn't I be further along? Why does this keep coming up? I thought I dealt with this already.

In us it sounds like: I've done so much work on this. I know exactly where it comes from. Why does it still affect me? I should be past this by now.

Different words. Same architecture. The belief that healing is a destination with a timeline, and that something is wrong if we haven't arrived on schedule.

What urgency actually does.

This is the part worth naming clearly.. to our clients and to ourselves.

Urgency contracts the nervous system. It introduces a layer of evaluation on top of the experience, not just I am feeling this but I am feeling this and I should not still be feeling this and what does it mean that I am still feeling this.  And that layer of evaluation is its own kind of suffering, separate from and added to whatever the original thing was.

It also, practically speaking, works against the very process it's trying to accelerate.

Healing — real healing, the kind that changes something at the root rather than managing it at the surface — requires a quality of presence that urgency makes almost impossible. It requires the willingness to be with what's actually here, at the pace it's actually moving, without trying to push it toward resolution before it's ready.

The urgency to get through it faster is, in almost every case, the thing slowing it down.

Where the urgency comes from.

It doesn't come from nowhere.

For many of our clients, and for many of us, the urgency to heal faster is a learned response. A reflection of a culture that pathologizes slowness, that treats emotional pain as a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be moved through, that has very little tolerance for the messy, nonlinear, takes-as-long-as-it-takes reality of actual human healing.

It is also, sometimes, a protection. If I can hurry up and be done with this, I don't have to stay in the discomfort any longer than necessary. The urgency is not the enemy of healing...it is a scared part of us trying to get us out of pain as fast as possible.

It just doesn't work. And naming that — with compassion, not judgment — is part of the work.

What we can offer instead.

Not slowness for its own sake. Not an argument against wanting to feel better.

Just the honest truth that healing moves at the pace of safety. That the nervous system does not respond to pressure the way a deadline does. That the parts of us that are still tender became tender for reasons, good reasons, protective reasons.  And they will soften when they trust it's safe to, not when we decide they should.

We can offer our clients permission to stop fighting their own timeline.

And we can offer ourselves the same thing.

The clinician's own urgency.

Here is what I want to leave you with.

If you are doing your own work—and I hope you are—there will be moments when you hit the same wall your clients hit. The frustration of still being here. The impatience with a process that isn't moving as fast as you'd like. The suspicion that you should be further along by now given everything you know.

When that happens, try to hear it the way you'd hear it from a client.

Not as evidence that something is wrong. Not as a reason to push harder. But as information...about what feels unsafe, about what part of you is still scared, about where the tenderness still lives.

The urgency is not the enemy. But it is not the answer either.

The answer is the same thing it always is: presence, patience, and the willingness to let healing take exactly as long as it needs to.

Which is, sometimes, longer than we wanted.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.