Living on the Impasse Frontier

I am working through Timothy Butler's book, Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths.  I was taken both by the title and by Butler's interview for the Harvard Business School's interview column, "Working Knowledge."  You can read the full interview at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5548.html.

In the interview, Butler describes the reality of psychological impasses in our lives.  According to Butler, the realization of being at an impasse often comes upon us slowly rather than all at once.  The impasse presents itself at the feeling level: frustration, stuckness and even some measure of depression.  "And along with that," Butler notes, "typically, is a self attribution: feeling that there is something wrong with us and [something wrong with] feeling stuck."

This is more than an episode of frustration or some momentary emotion.  A real impasse is, according to Butler a developmental necessity.  "The meaning of an impasse," he continues, "although it's usually first expressed as a failure or an internalized notion of inadequacy, is a request for us to change our way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world."

That sentence jumped out and grabbed me by the collar, demanding attention.  I know that many of us experience the death of a loved one as a failure on our part.  We tried somehow to save our loved one and were not successful in that effort.  Such a sense of failure can produce intense shame--the response most of us make to that "internalized notion of inadequacy."  The loss of a loved one can produce, I think, the textbook example of a psychological impasse.  The death creates a roadblock on my life path which cannot be circumvented.

So we are required to choose a different path.  "Impasse means that we need to change our whole approach to the problem," Butler notes in his interview.  "We need to change our understanding of the problem.  We have to change our repertoire of ways in which we approach life challenges."  Butler invites us, whether he knows it or not, to choose to re-frame our experiences of loss and grief.  Losing a loved one is a profound "request for us to change our way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world."

Refusing to honor that request will leave us stuck in the pain of our loss and grief.  Again, Butler is not addressing bereavement issues--otherwise he would have used different words (I think).  Nonetheless his words are powerful. "When loss or change brings us to impasse because we feel that we are at a dead end, we have to look at life anew because our old ways aren't working.  If we continue to try to use the old ways it will just mean more pain."

For those who can embrace the impasse as such a request and opportunity, the outcome will be some measure of personal growth.  At all those moments when I have been able to re-frame my loss as an opportunity to learn and grow, my life has gotten both easier and more interesting.  When I have returned to the impasse and nourished the sense of being stuck, my life has gotten harder and less fulfilling.

Butler describes six phases in overcoming the impasse.  I think they are a bit too linear for real life.  Instead, they appear to reflect the dual process model of bereavement.  The first three steps are about losing and letting go of the old life.  The last three are about embracing and growing into the new approach to life.  Those two patterns are in a rhythmic dance throughout our lives after loss.  One key to happiness is making choices that move us toward the second pattern more than the first.

I do appreciate so much Butler's description of an impasse as a liminal or boundary experience.  "In this sense," he notes, 

"impasse is the frontier of what needs to happen next for us if we are to live life as openly as possible...An impasse crisis happens when we have been, for some time, avoiding the work of living fully at our border.  We are missing something essential in our lives, and it is as if the impasse crisis is saying 'Enough!  No more evasion!  You can no longer avoid this, you must deal with it now or these symptoms will persist and grow more intense.'"

It was not Anne's death that created the impasse.  Rather it was my reaction to her death.  Making different choices about how to live after the loss has been the opportunity to live on the frontier of my life in ways that weren't available before.  I love Martha Lagace's summary of the conversation:

"Impasse invites us to shed our fears and move to the border of what is actually presenting itself to us, right now.  This returning offers us a bargain, an opportunity to exchange certainty for vulnerability, sentimentality for depth of feeling, and the comfort of the familiar for the energy of a world that, as hard and exciting as it may be, is always beckoning."

Preach it, sister!