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People who are naturally driven and high achieving can feel the psychological strain of being thrust into the forest of injury and rehabilitation.
You may have found that your determination, your ability to think your way through challenges, to stand on your own two feet and to push yourself hard, work well for you in many areas of your life.
But in this rehabilitation process, with this injury, and at this particular stage of the journey - how are these qualities helping you ride out the ups and downs of rehabilitation with all its uncertainty, emotional challenges and loss of sense of self?
Where you’re used to relying on your determination to succeed, rehabilitation asks you to heed your limitations.
Where you’re used to thinking your way through challenges, rehabilitation asks you to surrender to the wisdom of others and your body.
Where you’re used to standing on your own two feet, rehabilitation asks you to lean on others.
Where you’re used to pushing hard, rehabilitation asks you to cultivate patience.
As the existential psychotherapist, Rollo May, stated, “It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
And so it is with rehabilitation: the qualities and skills that have led you to be successful in other walks of life are often the ones naturally drawn upon in rehabilitation, as you venture into your forest, uncertain of when you’ll come out, who you’ll be when you do and whether things will ever be the same again. It’s no wonder you run faster to get through it and ‘get back to normal’.
The cost of which? Exacerbating your sense of frustration, feeling lost in the process and losing your sense of self.
But what if there was a different way? Instead of running, pushing and ‘thinking’ your way through, you stood still. What if you took stock of how you’re showing up in this process, at what cost and how you’d like to be instead, given where you are? What if that determination was recalibrated towards honouring the process of rehabilitation, and allowed you to broaden your sense of who you are beyond ‘just a runner, footballer, Hyrox athlete’ etc?
What differences might that make?