Understanding Restless Feelings

“I learned through weaknesses

And through the web of your lies

That everyday I live

Another piece of me dies

And in the black and white

I found a need to move on

To find a road of gold

A throne to live upon.”

Cause & Effect, It’s Over Now (1994)

Sometimes we have to be careful when we feel the need to find that “road of gold.” Is it really a “need” to grow more fully into who we are, or is it a “compulsion” to escape from life—and primarily to escape from ourselves?

I often feel trapped or stuck. Suddenly I’m not happy with my career, with the work I’m doing, with my surroundings or with the people in my life. I long to trash it all, to pick myself up and to travel down that road of gold.

I tell myself I could flourish so much more in California; in Los Angeles, San Diego or San Francisco. I’d be free—free to be me, free to enjoy life, free to be more fully creative. And that may all be true. Or it may be that I am simply wanting to escape from me.

It’s all about feeling restless. What is our restlessness trying to tell us? When we feel restless, how do we know the difference between the need to grow and the compulsion to escape from ourselves?

Well, we can start by looking at our past patterns of behavior. How often—over the course of our lives-- have we been restless this way? Has it been seldom or frequent? What has been our past response to our restlessness? Do we have a pattern of picking up, leaving everything and everyone behind and heading down a road of gold that actually turns out to be the same old road of addictive dung?

Some of us establish a pattern of behavior in which we compulsively move from one place to another, from one career to another and from one relationship to another. And yet, nothing ever changes for the better in our lives. We get to a new city, or a new job or a new relationship and suddenly we’re uncomfortable, anxious and restless all over again.

In reality, we haven’t been yearning to grow or to find our perfect niche at all. No, we’ve been compulsively running from ourselves—again and again and again. And we’ve been totally oblivious to the fact that the real problem is us. It’s all about our bad relationship with ourselves.

For many codependents, our restlessness has never really been centered on our careers, or the cities we live in, or our relationships. The real truth is that we haven’t wanted to face ourselves and so we’ve been living with a false notion that we’re unchallenged by our jobs, or that we’re tired of a particular city, or that we’ve outgrown a relationship. We’re in denial. Truth is our restlessness is all about us. And it’s time we stopped running and chose, instead, to face our skeletons.

Eventually, every road of gold (actually every road of addictive dung) leads back to us. We need to accept the fact that the restlessness we feel is usually about us. Consciously we need to become aware that it’s really all about the fact that we can’t stand to be with ourselves for one more minute. And we need to stop projecting the false belief that we can’t stand this job one more minute, or we can’t stand this city one more minute, or we can’t stand this person one more minute. Once we can do this, we can stop our running.

And once we stop our running, we can take time to face our feelings of restlessness. We can meet ourselves in the crossroads of reality. There we can ask our feelings what more they have to teach us. We can ask “What is it about myself that I am always running from?” And we can wait on an answer. Once we have the answer, we can ask our Higher Power to help us become comfortable with whatever it is about ourselves that has made us so restless.

It’s one thing to feel restless because we feel like our talents aren’t being fully utilized; or because we really don’t like the city we are living in; or because the relationship we are in is lifeless or smothering. It’s another thing to feel restless as a pattern of behavior—an addictive pattern of behavior that’s all about escaping from ourselves. Learn to know the difference.