The Messy Middle of Growth
I'm preparing for a retreat in a few weeks, and part of our homework is to read the book Positive Intelligence. We were also asked to complete an assessment of our saboteurs.
Saboteurs are the voices in your head that create stress, anxiety, frustration, self-doubt or conflict. They are not who you are; they are habits of mind that developed over time and became your default way of coping with challenges.
Shocker for those who know me, I learned that one of my strongest saboteurs is "The Controller".
On my best days, this shows up as determination, decisiveness, persistence and a willingness to tackle difficult challenges. On my harder days, it can show up as a need to take charge, push too hard or carry responsibility that doesn’t belong to me.
Underneath the drive to control is often anxiety, fear or a desire to protect myself and others.
For a moment, I felt a wave of shame; the results of the assessment were describing me spot on. I found myself thinking, “After all these years of personal work, how is this still here and still so true?”
Then I remembered something important. We all have our saboteurs. We all have patterns that once helped us survive, succeed or navigate difficult circumstances. The goal isn’t to eliminate them. The goal is to become aware of them.
The Controller isn’t all bad. In many ways, it helped me build a business, raise my children, navigate hard seasons of life and keep moving when things felt impossible.
But every strength has a shadow side. That same part of me that helped those things is also the part that struggles to trust others, carries too much responsibility and sometimes forgets I don’t have to hold everything together alone.
I think this is one of the hardest truths about healing: growth isn’t always inspiring. Sometimes growth feels like grief. Sometimes it feels like regret. Sometimes it feels like seeing yourself clearly and wishing you had done some things differently.
Healing is messy because it asks us to acknowledge both the gifts and the costs of our coping strategies. There can be shame in that process. There can be sadness. But there can also be pride. Wisdom .Freedom. Growth.
The healing journey is rarely neat or linear; it's messy, very messy. But I’ve come to believe that the messiness isn’t evidence that we’re doing it wrong. Maybe it’s evidence that we’re brave enough to keep growing.