Stress means constantly feeling under pressure about commitments, bills, and relationships in the pressing time that is never enough for anything—especially not enough for rest. People find time to get their duties done, but doing something pleasant or taking a break regularly remains on the back burner. Stress also means somehow not being “with yourself” and almost always doing not what you want, but only what you must! Stress also means feeling daily tension in your work or with your partner, yet lacking the strength, courage, and belief that anything in this situation could change. The violence you inflict on yourself in order to endure and resign yourself is systemic stress.
Thus, life becomes one endless duty. We’ve been taught that only useful actions have value, and rest and fun are silliness and a waste of time, that happiness is an illusion and a luxury we don’t have the right to dream of, because it’s enough that “we have something to eat and the most important thing is that we’re alive and healthy”! We’ve been taught that change is not necessarily something good, and that stability means persistence and determination to do the same thing for years, to stay in the same place with the same people, without changing anything, no matter how unhappy we are! And we’ve come to believe that!
Stress turns into a chronic suppressed dissatisfaction and bitter taste from daily life, which eventually makes us sick—even physically—bringing on so-called psychosomatic illnesses or even autoimmune diseases. Very common manifestations of stress are also workaholism and burnout—a strange state in which the stress and tension themselves start to become a need and even a drug, until we overdose! And just like in addiction, the dependent person usually denies there is a problem, convinced that everything is under control.
Behind stress often stands an exaggerated sense of duty and responsibility or a lack of knowledge about our own needs and desires. It’s as if we’ve forgotten what it’s like to enjoy rest or to relax without feeling guilty that we haven’t done anything useful. Psychotherapy explores what lies beyond these pressing feelings of eternal obligation, insatiable ambition, and anxiety over unfinished work—a type of work that never ends!
No one has the full ability to follow all their deepest desires and needs, but one can at least give them a voice and hear them, instead of only suppressing or replacing them with “substitutes.” At least some of them can be fulfilled, and some of the obligations can be better distributed and shared. But if we don’t take the time to examine, understand, and reorganize our daily life, habit and inertia turn us into robots, even slaves. We turn ourselves into a tool for achieving our own goals. But are these really our personal goals, or do they come from somewhere else? In psychotherapeutic work, these are exactly the kinds of questions explored—questions about our own and others' expectations, as well as about the properly or wrongly constructed notions of meaning, satisfaction, control, boundaries, beginning and end, gain and loss, success and failure.
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