This article unpacks why intelligent, self-aware people can remain unable to act despite knowing exactly what they “should” do. It examines the difference between information and movement, explains what clinical language such as avoidance, resistance and psychological inflexibility can: and cannot: tell us, and explores how ancient myths may offer a more human way to recognise our patterns.
It also introduces Unstuck: A Mythology of Moving Forward, Dr Steve Halls’ forthcoming book of twelve myths for people who have done everything right on paper and still feel as though they have not moved.
“I know what I need to do. I just can’t seem to do it.”
After more than thirty years in clinical practice, Steve has heard some version of this sentence countless times. It is rarely a problem of information. Most people who feel stuck have already received advice:
- Sleep more.
- Set the boundary.
- Leave the job.
- Make the phone call.
- Start exercising.
- Stop contacting that person.
- Apply for the opportunity.
- Have the difficult conversation.
The instructions may be sensible. They may even be clinically appropriate. But advice can only reach the part of us that is ready to act on it. Stuckness often lives somewhere underneath conscious knowledge.
That is where myths become useful.
1. Knowing is not the same as being able to move
In psychology, persistent stuckness may be described using terms such as experiential avoidance: attempts to escape or suppress uncomfortable thoughts, memories, emotions or bodily sensations: and psychological inflexibility, where behaviour becomes governed by rigid patterns rather than values and context.
These are valid clinical concepts. Research links experiential avoidance with distress and functional impairment across anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other difficulties. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), for example, aims to develop psychological flexibility: the ability to remain present with difficult internal experiences while taking action in a personally meaningful direction.
However, clinical language can sometimes describe a pattern without helping a person recognise its felt reality.
| Clinical description | What it may feel like in daily life | A useful question |
|---|---|---|
| Experiential avoidance | “I keep delaying anything that might make me feel exposed.” | What feeling am I trying not to experience? |
| Cognitive fusion | “If I feel afraid, it must mean I should not proceed.” | Am I treating a thought as a fact or instruction? |
| Inaction or disengagement | “I understand the next step but cannot initiate it.” | What would make one small action possible? |
| Shame-based self-concept | “I am the problem; everyone else seems able to manage.” | What difficulty am I turning into an identity? |
| Loss of values-based direction | “Nothing feels important enough to begin.” | What matters, even if motivation is absent? |
The table inventories useful therapeutic territory. It does not provide a complete explanation of any individual’s experience. Stuckness may involve anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, exhaustion, neurodivergence, chronic stress, relationship dynamics or practical barriers. Often, several factors interact.
The first task is therefore not to force movement. It is to understand what the stuckness is doing.
2. The myths we already live inside
Long before psychology developed diagnostic categories, people used stories to describe recurring human struggles.
Sisyphus pushes the boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down. His story may resonate with the person repeating the same argument, habit or relationship pattern while hoping the outcome will change.
Icarus flies too close to the sun. His story may speak to someone who takes a dangerous risk because remaining grounded feels unbearable.
Penelope weaves by day and quietly unweaves her work by night. Her story may describe ambivalence: not simple dishonesty, but the need to delay an irreversible decision while buying time to think, grieve or survive.
These stories do not diagnose anyone. They do not tell us that a person is Sisyphus, Icarus or Penelope. Instead, they offer a moment of recognition: I know something about that.
That recognition can be clinically important. Shame tends to narrow attention and reduce behavioural flexibility. A person who believes “I am lazy,” “I am weak” or “I always sabotage myself” may become increasingly identified with the problem. A story can create enough distance to ask a different question:
“What pattern am I participating in, and what is it protecting me from?”
This is related to the therapeutic practice of externalising a problem: separating the person from the difficulty rather than treating the difficulty as the person’s essence. The evidence base for narrative therapy and externalising is promising but less extensive than for approaches such as CBT or ACT. It should not be presented as a universal treatment or a replacement for evidence-based clinical care. Yet as a shared language, storytelling can help reduce self-blame and open space for reflection.
3. What Unstuck is actually about
Unstuck: A Mythology of Moving Forward is built around twelve stories:
- Sisyphus
- Icarus
- Theseus
- Atlas
- Orpheus
- Pandora
- The Phoenix
- Penelope
- Heracles
- Chiron
- Tantalus
- Narcissus
Each chapter tells the myth simply, then considers the human experience it circles:
- Atlas and the exhaustion of carrying responsibilities that have become invisible to everyone else.
- Tantalus and the hunger of being perpetually close to what you want but unable to reach it.
- Chiron and the possibility that a wound can become connected to what you offer others: without romanticising suffering.
- Orpheus and the difficulty of moving forward when part of you remains turned toward what has been lost.
- Narcissus and the narrowing effect of becoming trapped inside a single self-image.
- The Phoenix and the fact that renewal may involve the loss of an old identity, not merely the addition of a new habit.
The book is not a “find your myth and fix your life” exercise. It does not sort readers into twelve neat categories. A person may recognise something of Atlas in their work life, Penelope in a relationship and Orpheus in grief.
The myths are better understood as twelve doors. You can enter through whichever one fits.
4. Why a myth may reach what a framework misses
Frameworks are valuable. They help clinicians organise information, identify maintaining processes and select appropriate interventions. At Keystone Therapy, our neuro-counselling and psychotherapy services draw on behavioural neuroscience, emotional regulation and brain-based approaches to understand the relationship between thoughts, body states, behaviour and environment.
But frameworks usually explain a problem. Myths allow you to sit inside a feeling without immediately being handed a five-step plan.
That distinction matters because many people respond to stuckness by trying to understand themselves even more thoroughly. They analyse the childhood origin, identify the cognitive distortion, read another book and create a more sophisticated explanation of why they cannot act.
Sometimes insight helps. Sometimes insight becomes another form of delay.
Research on ACT suggests that improvement is not necessarily achieved by eliminating difficult thoughts and feelings. Instead, psychological flexibility may increase when people learn to make room for internal discomfort while moving toward what matters. In plain language, you may not need to feel ready before taking a meaningful step.
You may need a different relationship with not feeling ready.
“Most people don’t get unstuck by understanding their stuckness more thoroughly. They get unstuck once they stop fighting the fact that they’re in it.”
: Dr Steve Halls
This does not mean resignation. Acceptance is not approval of harm, passivity or injustice. It means acknowledging the present reality accurately enough to choose the next response.
5. Using myth as a practical reflective tool
You do not need a background in psychology or classical mythology to use stories reflectively. The following process is deliberately simple:
Step 1: Name the pattern without naming yourself as the problem
Instead of “I am a failure,” try:
- “The fear of getting it wrong is shaping my decisions.”
- “The pressure to keep everyone happy is making action difficult.”
- “The grief I have not processed is keeping me turned toward the past.”
This is not wordplay. It creates a distinction between your identity and the process affecting your behaviour.
Step 2: Ask what the pattern is protecting
Avoidance often provides short-term relief. It may protect you from rejection, conflict, uncertainty, shame or the possibility of discovering that a long-held hope cannot be fulfilled.
Ask:
- What happens immediately when I avoid this?
- What discomfort becomes smaller?
- What long-term cost is accumulating?
Step 3: Identify the value underneath the stuckness
A boundary may feel difficult because connection matters. A career decision may feel impossible because security matters. Leaving a relationship may be complicated because loyalty, family or hope matters.
Stuckness often contains a value conflict. Finding the value does not automatically resolve the conflict, but it can make the decision more honest.
Step 4: Choose a small act of movement
Do not demand a complete life plan. Choose an action small enough to be possible and meaningful enough to count:
- Draft the message without sending it.
- Make an appointment.
- Take a ten-minute walk while noticing your surroundings.
- Tell one trusted person what is happening.
- Write down the decision you are avoiding and the fear attached to it.
The objective is not to conquer your entire pattern in one day. It is to create evidence that the pattern is influential, not absolute.
6. When stuckness needs professional support
Reflective reading can be helpful, but it is not a substitute for assessment or therapy. Persistent inaction may reflect depression, trauma-related avoidance, ADHD-related executive-function difficulties, autistic burnout, anxiety, sleep disruption or other concerns that deserve individualised support.
Keystone Therapy’s mind-body integration approach considers how awareness of bodily states, emotions and behaviour can support regulation. This may be particularly relevant when a person understands a decision intellectually but experiences shutdown, agitation, fatigue or threat responses when attempting to act.
Stress and sleep also have a reciprocal relationship: stress can disrupt sleep, while insufficient or poor-quality sleep can intensify emotional and cognitive difficulties. Our stress and sleep services address these interacting factors as part of broader mental health support.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, immediate danger or an inability to keep yourself safe, contact emergency services on 000 in Australia, or Lifeline on 13 11 14. A myth may help you find language, but urgent risk requires direct professional support.
7. A different definition of moving forward
Moving forward does not always look like confidence, productivity or a dramatic decision. Sometimes it looks like stopping the argument with reality long enough to see what is actually happening.
Sometimes it means recognising that the boulder is not proof of personal failure. Sometimes it means noticing that the ground you are standing on has become more painful than the risk of flight. Sometimes it means admitting that you have been unweaving your progress because you are not yet ready for what completing it would require.
These recognitions are not solutions by themselves. They are openings.
Unstuck: A Mythology of Moving Forward is written for anyone who has done “everything right” on paper and still feels unable to move. It is also being used as shared language in clinical work, where a myth can sometimes communicate what a technical label cannot.
A companion guide includes reflection prompts and writing space for working through one story at a time. The book is coming soon in print and eBook.
Request a free copy
To request a free copy of Unstuck: A Mythology of Moving Forward or to be notified when it is available, email info@keystonetherapy.com.au.
If you would like support understanding what is keeping you stuck, you can also contact Keystone Therapy or book an appointment for in-person or telehealth therapy.
References
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy appears to reduce psychological inflexibility: including experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion and inaction: while increasing values-based action and psychological flexibility. Changes in these processes are associated with reductions in psychological distress.
: Based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of ACT trials.
- Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. What is psychological flexibility?
- Gloster, A. T., et al. (2020). The empirical status of psychological flexibility as a transdiagnostic process. Clinical Psychology Review. ScienceDirect
- Levin, M. E., et al. (2014). Examining psychological inflexibility as a transdiagnostic process across psychological disorders. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science. ScienceDirect
- McCracken, L. M., & Morley, S. (2014). The psychological flexibility model: A basis for integration and progress in psychological approaches to chronic pain. The Journal of Pain. PubMed
- White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W. W. Norton.
- Research review of externalising practices in narrative therapy
