Writer's Block? Bored With Writing? Lacking Motivation? It could be a blockage between awareness and mobilization of energy

Wow, what a long title. This is part three in the Contact - Withdrawal Cycle for Researchers and Writers.

This interruption is a big one for intellectual types, and let’s be honest: academia is full of intellectual types. When it comes to emotion and reason in the intellectual, reason nearly always wins. I say “nearly” because, in the end, it really isn’t much of a win.

 

With this blockage, a researcher or writer knows what they want to say. They are unable, however, to come out and say it. There is creative energy available in the scholar’s body, but it has no outlet. It gets trapped there. Stuck. The person finds themselves with lots of energy but an inability to act on it. The energy may manifest as anxiety, writer’s block, boredom, or frustration.

 

As an intellectual type myself, I had no trouble coming up with examples of this in my own writing. Let me describe a few.

 

Writer’s Block While Writing My 7^th Book

 

A few years ago—2022—I was working on my autonomy support book. I was cruising along without any blocks or interruptions and had finished 5 chapters. Then I hit a wall. I lost all motivation to continue. I had to drag myself to the computer every day, then drag the file out of the folder, then laboriously scroll up and down the document I had written. It was like everything was soaked in molasses. That’s how the interruption between awareness and energy tends to go: everything is so much harder than it needs to be.

 

Before describing what happened next and how the blockage emerged and was later removed, I want to describe an important feature of Gestalt Therapy from which this model I’m using is derived. The feature is this: We can get into knots with ourselves in which energies get stuck working against each other. It can be modeled like this: Make a hook with both index fingers, then link them together. Next, try to pull them apart. It will look like this. (Note the tension in the face.)

 

It doesn’t matter how hard you pull in each direction: nothing happens. It looks like sitting around doing nothing. “I can’t write,” is what you think. In reality, there is a lot of energy being expended, but different goals are working at cross purposes and therefore nothing is accomplished.

 

So back to my Autonomy Supportive Teaching book. After spending some time away from writing it, I realized that I was trying to talk to too many audiences. When I began writing the book initially, I imagined that I was giving an informal workshop with my colleagues—college professors with whom I had actually workshopped the teaching strategies. After a few weeks of writing, however, I began wondering about a more global audience. I considered how it would be read by researchers, psychologists, philosophers, and so on. That’s a lot of people to try and impress with one book. It’s a lot of different hats to wear at once.

 

I would sit down to write and think, “I want this to be personal and honest.” But before I could begin, I would think, “But I also want it to be serious and careful.” Two hooks pulling against each other.

 

To finish the manuscript, I had to give up the second goal of writing a serious scholarly book. I kept it honest and personal, and stopped getting nauseated whenever I talked about opinions, intuitions, reflections, and so on. Later, I revised the entire manuscript with an eye towards the serious scholarly community (although I’m still divided about having done that).

 

In this example, the solution was to recognize both goals and how achieving one meant thwarting the other. I had to choose one goal and effectively disown the other. That meant accepting that I couldn’t be all things to all people. (And let’s be honest: Who wants to read a book that attempts to be all things to all people?)

 

Loss of Motivation Ushered in by Fear of Rejection

 

Earlier today I recorded a lecture in my office for my research methods class. The lecture covered Chapter 2 of Keith Stanovich’s How to Think Straight About Psychology. One of the points in the chapter was that science moves forward with mistakes, not with genius. The biggest breakthroughs are called discoveries, but they are always evidence that an existing theory is false. Thus failures are evidence that science is moving forwards. They’re good!

 

Still, I don’t like being wrong. I want to be talented, insightful, and clever. I hate it when a peer reviewer, for example, recognizes an error I had made. I would much rather have avoided the error in the first place and then submit a flawless research report.

 

At times throughout my career, especially very early on but it still happens on occasion, I had received some critical feedback from a peer reviewer and it makes me want to give up writing forever. This happened rather forcefully over this past summer. In 2023 I had gotten positive reviews back on a new book, but I didn’t quite like it and rewrote the book and resubmitted the proposal. I was proud of the new version. But the second set of reviews were noticeably negative—enough so to get a formal rejection from the publisher. Rather than feel grateful that the reviewers were saving me from making a huge mistake, I felt humiliated. I seriously considered never writing again. It felt that bad. (I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was in the throes of autonomic dysregulation due to overtraining, which made it easy to make mountains out of mole hills.)

 

It took me three months to revisit the manuscript and rewrite most of it. I realized that I had tried to turn an academic book into a general interest book. I tried to be someone I wasn’t. The reviews alerted me to this incongruence, which is why I think they were so hard for me to read: I thought they were right, but I wasn’t prepared to accept it.

 

Now, I haven’t quite recovered this time—I still feel a little embarrassed and temperamental about it, but I have started writing again for a scholarly audience (I’m working on a few articles and one study right now). The big shift is this: I have am again beginning to accept that failure is an important part of the process; it isn’t evidence that I shouldn’t attempt the process. 

 

To really embrace this understanding, I would “lean into” failures. I shouldn’t try to avoid them, I should try to make spectacular failures. When I receive criticism, I can take it seriously and make corrections. Then I can try again. In this way, I will be working with the system of public verifiability and peer review rather than develop an anxiety-stricken relationship with it.

 

In this example, the solution to recovering my motivation was to lean into what it was that I was so afraid of instead of trying to avoid it. In the language of Gestalt Therapy, this is the process of integrating polarities. We might consider the scientists personality as having a bunch of traits:

1.     Careful

2.     Rigorous

3.     Meticulous

4.     Intelligent

5.     Clever

And so on. We tend to praise the positive traits I’ve just listed. But there is always a shadow side of each trait that is unavoidable. A scientist isn’t clever because they always have the best perspective on an issue; they’re clever because they quickly recognize when their perspective has been bested by another or they’ve made a mistake. Therefore it isn’t a solitary trait; it is a polarity.

Clever - - - - - - - Foolish

The well-rounded scientists, while generally clever, is also the first person to recognize their foolishness when it is there.

 

In Gestal Therapy, leaning into these negative or shadow traits isn’t a way of accepting the bad side of yourselves; it actually strengthens the so-called positive traits. As Zinker says, you go around the world with the negative/shadow trait. You go so far into “foolishness” that you wind up back on the other side into extreme cleverness.

 

For me, I had to and still have to lean into failing with research and scholarship. If I can really give myself to it, then I will probably find a bunch of beneficial researcher traits, such as courage, creativity, and devotion to the ideas. I will also be more interested in criticism and grateful for it.