Escape the Busy Trap of Burnout with IFS and Somatic Therapy—Meet the Moving Target
When Life is Dangerous, Stay Busy & Be a Moving Target
The Moving Target is an agile taskmaster adept at staying busy and staying productive. This protector identity only feels safe if it keeps moving, as if it is forever being chased by an invisible predator. Dreams and fantasies of being chased by a monster are common. A client once expressed, “I live my life like my hair’s on fire!”
Facing challenging feelings in stillness can feel like trying to put out a wildfire with glasses of water. Better to keep moving.
Literal physical exercise is often a goto for the moving target, as it provides the most direct feeling of movement. Ticking through a todo list, completing work assignments, or attending a string of social engagements can all provide a similar sense of safety through momentum.
The moving target fears that if it lets its guard town for even a minute, everything will fall apart and catastrophe will strike. If it stops now, who knows if it can start it all up again? A sense of imminent collapse pervades and motivates more movement.
The problem is that by staying in motion, the moving target perpetuates a state of anxiety and avoids restorative and healing activities. It is often unaware that it even has anxiety. Because it actively avoids relaxation, it doesn’t have access to deeper states of mind where wisdom and intuition reside. As a result its action is often not strategic and it lingers in tactical hell, dashing between trivial tasks. The moving target finally finds itself on the therapy couch, when the body brings it to its knees.
In the healing process:
The moving target wants to see progress quickly and is willing to work. It asks for homework and completes assignments diligently. It is however reluctant to do somatic and embodiment practices, since it does not provide a sense of movement. More pertinently, the last thing the moving target wants is to turn around and face the monster that has been chasing it.
As you may have guessed, this is exactly what it must do! Luckily, when the monster is faced with enough support, it shrinks and becomes either friendly or humorous, since it is from the past and it is only an image of the mind after all.
How to work with the moving target:
Discover the safety and comfort of deep rest states and schedule downtime proactively. This is less costly than our body shutting down prematurely.
Become more aware of underlying anxiety and learn to feel through it, rather than using distraction or looping in fear-based thinking. Somatic therapy is particularly helpful for learning how to do this.
Develop the ability to stay with challenging feelings so that stress cycles can complete and somatic resonance becomes available. As we do this, the chasing monster gradually loses it’s power and fear dissipates. Over time, action becomes more coherent, strategic and easeful. We are pulled forward by our passions rather than pushed by fear.
