“A capacity to accommodate fragility, he says, is a fundament of vital, evolving systems, whether geological or human. At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. “And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community— people who are in difficulty — tend to be communities who do not evolve.””
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the polarity of rigidity and flexibility. And I have been actively living the question of this polarity in my body. Which is allowing me to experience rigidity and flexibility in a tangible moment-by-moment way. I get to kind of be an explorer of it—or an observer of it—which is different than my usual stance of frustration or disdain. For six weeks I couldn’t put any real weight on my legs, and now for the last 10 days I have begun the process of exercises and walking. Familiar actions I have done all of my life –like walking or stepping to the side—or balancing on a leg—all are now an active challenge with muscles that have completely forgotten how to talk to each other and my brain.
When I begin to walk there are brief moments of flexibility and fluidity—and then within minutes of walking, moving becomes something I have to actively concentrate on. My feet feel far away, and my muscles don’t bend or flow—they kind of stick, and stutter—they stiffen. The muscles tighten around what was hurt. They seem to think I still need the protection—and they go to the default that they know of as safety—tightly bracing what was broken-- and I finish my walk with legs that feel heavy and wooden.
While it isn’t easy to learn to walk again, I am appreciating this lesson about rigidity and fluidity in a domain where I can see it and feel it in real time. Where I don’t have even more protections and narratives to distract me. Where I can work with it in small, manageable increments that are easy to sort out. Where they make aides for the problem: crutches, braces, ice packs. Where I can easily see the fix: lean on something, stretch, rest, take a break for now.
Psychological healing is really no different than physical healing—you begin to use something that you haven’t used, or haven’t used in a long time—and in short order—you can feel yourself tighten up. You share your feelings. You let your guard down. You ask for help. You say no, or you say yes. Your chest tightens. It’s hard to breathe. Or your heart tightens—and you want to pull away. Or you can feel your whole self move behind a wall—where it feels like you are watching yourself from outside. You’ve lost any flexibility. You can feel like you just can’t bend—on that request, or on the change of plans, or on a different point of view.
Rigidity is defense, and it is also almost always protection. When my legs get rigid I lfeel like I lose my my way of moving and my feeling of being connected—interconnected with myself. And when I get rigid because of fear, anxiety or anger—I lose connection to the part of myself that trusts and knows what enough is. That part of myself that knows that everything will likely be ok, and that I have the ability to work through whatever is hard for me right then.
And rigidity makes it hard for me to feel connected to others. When I feel rigid, when I harden against what I don’t want to feel or don’t want to be happening—I lose the ability to feel connected. Relationships feel breakable, because hard things, rigid things can shatter. And because I feel less connected and the relationship feels fragile, I can feel myself tighten even more.
The hardest thing about healing in the psychological domain is that our rigidity often feels more normal—it feels familiar and safe—and it can be hard to see it for what it is. It can be hard to catch yourself in the act of pulling away, shutting down, putting up the wall. When you are finally able to feel it-- when rigidity feels uncomfortable —it’s actually a sign of healing—it means you know what some fluidity feels like. It means that you are longing for movement and the feeling of being connected. It means the old protections are probably no longer needed –and it’s time to work with them so they can loosen and you can move in the world differently.
It's harder to work on rigidity and elasticity with our emotions and relationships than it is for me to work on the flexibility with my legs. But it’s not impossible. And it requires a lot of the same elements. First, start small—stretching in the smallest way possible. Maybe writing your feelings down for yourself first, before you share them with someone else. Second, do it in short sessions so you build up the strength, tolerance and confidence in your emotional and relational muscles to hold you up. And last, figure out what you can use to support you—what you can lean on—and what you can use to soothe yourself afterwards—as you use these new muscles.
It’s obvious as I learn to walk again—that elasticity is the state of health for my muscles. But in healing from trauma, the feeling of elasticity came as a big surprise to me. I thought that feeling connected would feel like a taut rope that was always there—something that was tight—that had tension. Perhaps tension is all I knew, and I while I didn’t like ‘bad’ tension, I supposed I thought health was something more akin to ‘good’ tension. What I couldn’t anticipate was that the experience of healing my connection to myself, and my relationships to other felt like something that was a mix of space and elasticity.
There was room to move. And what took a really long time was understanding that healing was ‘the capacity to accommodate fragility’—not by protecting myself—or allowing myself to return to rigidity—but rather by staying right on the edge of that rigidity and allowing myself to stretch in the smallest possible way towards the new thing—letting myself ‘express my weakness’ and not protect myself from it.
© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
Xavier Le Pichon in Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise: An inquiry into the mystery and art of living