Why Thinking Harder Doesn't Fix Overwhelm

I have a memory that has stayed with me my whole life.

My mother and grandmother, getting ready to face the day. The makeup applied carefully — deliberately — like putting on armour before a battle. My grandmother would dab a little lipstick to her cheeks and rub it in like rouge. If it wasn’t quite enough colour, she’d give her cheeks a small pinch.

I watched from the doorway. I was very young. But even then, I understood something about what I was seeing.

They would take a tentative look in the mirror when they were done. And in that moment — in that careful, searching glance — I could see exactly what they were thinking.

Does this do enough to keep up the preténce that everything is alright?

Their heads were held high. But I saw how they held themselves — a slight strain in the posture, a careful but uneasy side glance at whatever was about to play out. I saw the unspoken truths. The carefully constructed narrative. I knew, with the quiet certainty of a child who watches more than she speaks, that neither of them were okay.

They talked about life as their lot. As if they had to carry everything. As if life wasn’t meant to be easy. As if the only way to feel was through suffering — because pain meant meaning.

They applied their makeup like armour. And I watched. And I learned. And without knowing it, I began to do the same.

What I was witnessing was human struggle. The way we learn — from the people who raise us — how we are supposed to be, act and behave. How we mirror each other. How we absorb not just what our caregivers teach us, but what they are quietly carrying themselves.

I grew up searching. Not just for something that would fix me — but for something that might have done the same for my mother, and her mother before her. I watched how the suffering played out in different forms. The addictions. The self-abandonment. The reckless behaviours. All of them designed to soothe the soul. All of them making things quietly, incrementally worse.

And yet — even as a child standing on the sidelines — there was an inner knowing. If you listen closely, your body and your intuition will tell you when something isn’t right. When it doesn’t feel right. When it doesn’t look right. Even when you don’t have the words for it yet.

Life does not have to be about continuous suffering. But when suffering is all you’ve been shown, you go looking for relief in the places you know. And those places rarely lead anywhere different.

I spent years looking for the elixir. Searching in all the right-looking places. Reading. Analysing. Trying to think my way to the answer. It was like searching for something that would finally make everything make sense.

What I’ve come to understand — through my own journey, and through the work I now do with others — is that thinking harder was never going to get me there.

Not because I wasn’t thinking clearly enough. Not because the books were wrong or the therapy unhelpful. But because the thing I was looking for wasn’t located in the mind at all.

It was in the body.

Everything we carry — the patterns we learned at the mirror, the armour we put on each morning, the performing and concealing and managing — it doesn’t live in our thoughts. It lives in our nervous systems. In the slight strain in the posture. In the careful, uneasy side glance. In the held breath and the braced shoulders and the jaw that never quite unclenches.

You cannot think your way out of something your body is holding. That’s not a failure of intelligence or insight or effort. It’s simply how we are made.

The answers, I’ve discovered, are within us. We just have to learn to listen in the right ways — and the right ways are not always the ones we were taught.