How to Let Go of Compulsive Busyness Through Surrender
A personal story of overcoming codependent behaviors
Photo by Radu Florin on Unsplash
For the majority of my life, I’ve been a doer. A list maker. A person who accomplishes. It was often a character asset and contributed significantly to my career success.
As an only child, I conjured up activities to keep busy. Busy in the sense of 9-year-old projects, bustles, and schemes.
Some seemingly important duties like laundry or figuring out how to make a semblance of a meal. Some adolescently trivial exercises like transposing Stairway to Heaven song lyrics into a notebook or filling Coke bottles with tiny, paper circles of confetti I’d made with a single hole punch.
I was often alone, and these mindless, repetitive activities helped me escape the fear.
This was when I learned to retreat into the sweet otherworld of compulsive busyness. The fantasy is that if I do these substantially or unsubstantially important things, I will:
Be safe and
Earn some sort of recognition and love
It was a coping mechanism I developed to survive.
It worked ostensibly well as an adolescent. As an adult, it morphed into a codependent character defect that I battle to this day.
How Busyness Served Me
High performer. Rising star. Determined and hard worker. All superficial, pleasant descriptions attached to my professional reputation. As a consequence, for most of my adult life, my identity was the sum of my professional endeavors.
I was a thorough planner, a strong communicator, and a diligent, motivating leader of execution. I typically reported to the highest level person in the company and was the go-to gal for prominent, multi-faceted projects.
I loved it! I thrived while earning fancier titles, higher salaries, and perks of access and influence. All surface-level accolades kept me hooked on the drug of doing and the high of achievement.
While the socially acceptable label of “workaholic” could have easily been stapled to my forehead, in hindsight, I don’t see it that way. Did I choose to work more than necessary and cause harm to myself and my close relationships? Yes, unquestionably.
However, what feels more true about my journey is that I used busyness, incessant doing, to-do lists, and my career not only as a means of avoidance and disassociation but also as a source of love.
In Pia Mellody’s book Facing Codependence, she writes:
“A dysfunctional family is unable to support the value of the children. The message to them as they are being natural (vulnerable, imperfect, dependent, and immature) is, “There is something wrong with you.” They may learn to esteem themselves based on the perceived quality of their doing or performance, not their existence. Such children believe that esteem will come from external things, such as how good their grades are, how many honors they can win, . . . the approval of others for their accomplishments or behaviors and so on.”
My addiction to busyness befriended me as I avoided lifelong feelings of unworthiness. It also subsidized an arena where I could be praised and feel seen.
These opposite spectra coping mechanisms served me very well until one day, they didn’t.
The Harm I Caused
I had what I refer to as “Gold Star Syndrome,” and for many years, I was a full-blown addict. An “Atta girl” from a teacher or coach was my heroin. A “Great job” from my boss or peer was my crack.
I would sacrifice myself and others for recognition, utterly unaware of how destructive it was to my physical and mental health and the authenticity of my relationships.
When love is perceived through the lens of being externally earned versus inherently given, it’s never satisfying, and this left me hollow and constantly seeking. Seeking validation and acceptance. Seeking connection and worth.
My addiction was too strong and fostered a mirage of future happiness. When I complete this next project, get a raise, earn a more prestigious title, or move for the ninth time to yet another new city, chasing the ever-unattainable — then — I will be happy. Always happiness later through things outside myself and out of my control.
Textbook delusion.
My incessant doing gave me an out. An easy excuse I could use to justify not changing. I was too busy being busy to worry about processing my childhood trauma or cultivating emotional intelligence.
I was stuck in an exhausting cycle that perpetuated my suffering, never understanding that I had other options, other choices.
I was my own perpetrator.
I harmed myself and the relationships that meant the most to me and candidly had no clue. I was completely oblivious to what was completely obvious. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I chose work, other people’s priorities, and meaningless, busybody riffraff over quality time with myself or my family.
It’s where I excelled. It’s where I got my bump of a high and no one could tell me differently. I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t understand them. It was like they were speaking a foreign language I didn’t yet comprehend.
This is how strong codependency can take hold. It gripped every cell of my unawakened being and almost took my life.
Hope Steps In
It was a Thursday afternoon late in the summer of 2015 when my feebleminded consciousness was cracked open. I was finally ready. For the first time, I could begin to hear the whispers of authenticity that I had evaded for so long.
A therapist asked towards the end of one of our first few sessions, “Have you heard of this thing called codependency?” She was so gentle, so calm.
“No,” I answered. What first came to mind was enabling, but I sensed that wasn’t quite right. Nonchalantly, shrugging her shoulders, she suggested, “You may just want to Google it. See if anything resonates.”
This was the atomic bomb that torched everything my wounded-child ego thought to be true.
This one-word explanation had weaved its destructive tentacles into every relationship and every facet of my life. It was the answer I’d been searching for since I was a teen.
I’m not crazy or terminally unique. I’m codependent.
In Melody Beattie’s landmark book Codependent No More, she describes codependency as,
“We will judge others as having all the answers; feel angry, hurt, scared, guilty, needy, and controlled by other people. We will desire to control others, value pleasing others at any cost, and fear disapproval and abandonment. We will hope for everything but believe we deserve and will get nothing unless we force things to happen . . .”
12 Step recovery literature refers to codependency as,
“A most deeply-rooted, compulsive behavior that is born out of our sometimes moderately, sometimes extremely dysfunctional family systems.”
For me, codependency is a disease that makes it hard to identify what I’m feeling, causing me to diminish, modify, or reject how I genuinely feel. My mind is easily manipulated into thinking I need to fight, flee, or freeze due to my underdeveloped emotional awareness.
Codependent thinking skews my reality with projections of past hurts and future fears onto the present moment, hijacking my amygdala and causing chaos.
It may be easier to grasp codependency through specific examples versus cerebral definitions, understanding that for a healthy person, moderation is often present and tampers extremes.
Many people have codependent traits. It's how much these traits drive their mental health bus that tips the scale into diseased thinking or irrational behaviors.
I carry a smattering of unhealthy codependent character defects relating to control, avoidance, compliance, denial, and low self-esteem. My most robust codependent patterns of harsh judgment, approval-seeking, the inability to identify or ask for my needs and wants, and having trouble admitting a mistake are all inherent to low self-esteem.
Doing, busyness, gold star syndrome, and constantly seeking praise and recognition all stem from a sense that I have to do or perform to be loved. That worth is derived from my actions as opposed to intrinsically at birth.
The Facade Falls, Healing Begins
Pain granted me the willingness to change. This willingness emerged from my emptiness and despair with an undeniable presence.
It’s hard to express how freeing it is to own parts of myself that I used to hide and deny. The charade is over. I no longer feel the compulsion to pretend or impress.
Through my recovery work, I have been released from the clutches of incessant busyness and seeking my worthiness from doing. The removal of these character defects has created space for healing and the capacity to do it in a mindful, curious manner.
This is the gift of healing that has given me a life worth living.
Cultivating Balance
My intention is to live authentically, just as I am in the present moment.
I continue to deepen my emotional reservoir day by day. I have learned to listen to and honor my feelings whether joyful, excited, sad, angry, or anxious. To invite them in. To feel them in my body, accept them as true, and allow them to flow through me.
Previously I thought I needed permission to choose self-care. As preposterous as it may seem, I now understand that I’m an adult and that I have choices.
I can choose myself and my serenity. I can choose healthy amounts of activity and still accomplish my personal and professional goals while remaining in the space of loving-kindness toward myself and others.
I’m cultivating integration of being versus doing into my psyche through the practice of surrender.
Today my life is intentionally slow, simple, and exactly what my soul was craving. To breathe and just be. To use my precious gifts of time, energy, and capacity to investigate and instill healthy ways to nourish myself.
Nurturing my spiritual senses through prayer, meditation, yoga, and hikes in nature has been profound. My new favorite hobby is sitting on our back porch and watching clouds form and dissipate. I playfully call myself a professional cloud watcher—a long way from my previous job titles and daily tasks.
All of these tools have aided in my growth and healing. However, I can’t gloss over the freedom that arose from accepting the reality that I was acutely challenged by codependency and asking for help.
Turning my codependent character defects over to a power greater than myself allows a release from the compulsion that I may reside in a place of calm serenity.
In my addiction to busyness and doing, I tried to create a fictional land where productivity was the currency, and I would be illustriously revered.
I’m grateful to now have an abundance of restorative, conscious tools, resources, and community I utilize daily to nourish my soul in a healthy, productive manner.
My journey on this spiritual path of recovery is lifelong. There is no easy cure. There is no perfect plan, and I will occasionally stumble. Progress is what’s essential as I continue doing the work, peeling back the layers of codependency.
I have chosen to stop the abuse cycle and live from a space of authenticity and faith.
I hope that I may inspire others to do so as well.
. . .
Rebecca Murauskas is a Life Coach for professionals. She helps people be free of stress and overwhelm, reclaim their purpose, and feel fulfilled. Rebecca and her husband, Adam, abandoned their careers and moved to Panamá in 2019 to pursue passions for helping people heal. Take the free Time Saver Quiz and find additional content at RebeccaMurauskas.com.