The Crossroads

On knowing the right choice and being unable to make it, and why the block is where the growth is

The crossroads

Some of the hardest moments I witness in my consulting room aren't about not knowing what to do. They're the opposite. A person sits in front of me who knows, with real clarity, what the right choice for them is. They can lay out the reasons. They can argue their own case better than I could. And still they cannot move.

They have reached a kind of crossroads, and they're standing at it, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. The mind has decided. But something in the body has not. There's a tightening, a drawing-back, a quiet but absolute refusal that doesn't answer to the reasons they've so carefully assembled. They say some version of the same sentence, often with great frustration: I know I should. I just can't.

I want to say something about that gap, because it is one of the most important places a person can stand, and one of the most misunderstood.

Circling the block

The frustration is real, and it has a particular quality. It isn't the frustration of being lost. It's the frustration of knowing exactly where you want to go and finding yourself unable to take the step, as though an invisible wall has risen across the one path you've decided on.

So we circle. We go over the reasons again, as if the problem were that we hadn't argued the case well enough yet. We make the decision in our heads a hundred times and unmake it each time we reach for the body's cooperation and find it withheld. We grow impatient, even contemptuous, with ourselves. What is wrong with me? It's obvious. Why can't I just do it?

And here is the thing I most want to offer: the circling is not the failure. The wall is not the enemy. The place where we keep getting stopped is not an obstacle on the way to the work. It very often is the work. We just haven't been taught to see it that way.

The “no” that’s trying to protect you

The body's refusal is not irrational, even when it looks that way. In psychodynamic thinking we talk about defences: the strategies we developed, usually very early and usually for good reason, to keep ourselves safe from something that once genuinely threatened us. A defence is not a flaw. It is a piece of old protection, still faithfully doing the job it was hired for, long after the danger it guarded against has passed.

So when the body says no to a choice the mind has blessed, it is often an old protector stepping in. The person who can't bring themselves to leave a role that's making them ill may carry a deep, early conviction that security depends on not rocking the boat. The person who can't let a good partner close may have learned, once, that closeness was where the danger lived. The analyst Ronald Fairbairn observed that we stay loyal to these internal patterns long after they've stopped serving us, even when they cause us pain. The no is loyalty to an old arrangement, not weakness.

This is why willpower so rarely wins at the crossroads. You cannot overpower a protector by force, because the harder you push, the more convinced it becomes that it's needed. What it responds to is not force but understanding, being turned toward and asked, in effect: what are you afraid will happen if I choose differently?

The weight of being free

There's a deeper layer still, and it's worth naming, because the crossroads is not only a psychological event but an existential one.

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we are, in his stark phrase, condemned to be free. Whatever our circumstances, we are always choosing, and we cannot hand that responsibility to anyone else, because even letting someone or something else decide is itself a choice we've made. Sartre thought this freedom produces a particular kind of dread, the anguish of realising that the shape of our life rests, finally, on us. A real decision may close doors. It commits us. It makes us responsible for how things turn out, with no external rulebook to blame if they turn out badly.

Faced with that weight, Sartre said, we are tempted into what he called bad faith: we quietly persuade ourselves that we have no choice. We tell ourselves our hands are tied, that circumstances forbid it, that this is simply how we are, in order to escape the vertigo of our own freedom. And here “I can't” becomes a subtly comforting sentence. As long as it's true that I can't, I am spared the far more frightening truth that I can, and must, and will therefore, be answerable for it.

I don't say this to be harsh. Quite the opposite. Most people at the crossroads are not being lazy or dishonest. They are standing at the edge of a genuine freedom and feeling, accurately, how much it weighs.

Under the eyes of others

There's one more thing often standing in the road, and Sartre named it precisely. He wrote about the look, or gaze, the experience of being seen by another person. When we are alone, absorbed in something, we are simply a living subject, the centre of our own world. The moment we realise someone is watching, something shifts. We become an object in their eyes, something they are seeing and judging, and we feel it in the body as a flush of self-consciousness. His own example is a person caught peering through a keyhole: lost in the act until they hear footsteps behind them, and are suddenly, burningly, seen.

Sartre's unsettling insight is that the self we recognise is shaped partly by that gaze. We come to know ourselves, in part, through how we imagine we appear to others. And this has everything to do with choice. Very often the decision we can't make would expose us to someone's judgement. What will they think if I leave? Who will I be to them if I stop being the dependable one, the one who copes, the one who stays? We are not only choosing an action. We are choosing to be seen choosing it, and to let the old image others hold of us be broken.

So a surprising amount of our paralysis is performed under an invisible audience, much of it made up of people who may not be watching at all, or who are long gone, and whose imagined gaze we've carried with us far past its expiry.

The growth is at the block

If the block is a protector, an old loyalty, a flight from freedom, and a self, arranged under the gaze of others, then forcing past it was never going to work. And this reframes the whole project. The task is not to batter through the wall or to shame ourselves into the step. It's to turn and face the wall with curiosity, and ask what it's made of.

This is where the body becomes an ally rather than an obstacle. That tightening, that drawing-back, is not noise to be overridden. It's information, often the most honest information available, arriving before the mind has had time to tidy it into a story. In the room, I'll often slow a person right down at exactly the moment they want to speed up and push through, and ask them simply to notice what happens in the body as they imagine making the choice. Where does the “no” live? What age does it feel? Whose voice is in it? What is it frightened of?

That turning-toward is where growth actually happens. Not in finally forcing the decision, but in coming to understand the one who's been refusing it, until the refusal softens because it's no longer needed. The choice, when it comes, then tends to come almost quietly, less an act of will than the natural result of no longer being at war with yourself. The crossroads was never really about the decision. It was about meeting the part of you that the decision frightened.

Standing at the crossroads

If you're standing at a crossroads like this, circling a decision you're sure of and unable to make, I'd want you to hear that it isn't a sign of weakness or a failure of nerve. It's a sign that something in you, something that once needed protecting, is asking to be understood before it can comfortably step aside. The frustration you may feel is the sound of a wiser, older part of you refusing to be bullied, and waiting to be met instead.

That meeting is much of what therapy is for. Not to supply the answer you already have, but to help you turn toward the block with enough safety and curiosity that it no longer has to hold the line alone.

At Rollswood Therapy in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, and online, I work with individuals and couples caught at exactly these crossroads: the decisions we know and cannot make, and the blocks, the defences, and the old fears that, once explored rather than overridden, become the very place our growth begins.

Sources

• Defences and resistance in psychodynamic theory; W. R. D. Fairbairn on our loyalty to internal patterns formed early in life, even when they cause us pain. Overview

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943) — "condemned to be free", the anguish of freedom, and bad faith (mauvaise foi), the self-deception by which we deny our own freedom to escape its weight. Overview

• Jean-Paul Sartre, the look (le regard), Being and Nothingness — being seen by another turns us from subject into object and shapes the self we recognise. Overview