The anxiety of not being "useful"

There is a way of being in the world that often looks like kindness, empathy, and attunement—even love—but at its core is something more anxious and costly.

It is the compulsive need to orient toward another person’s emotional state: to scan for what they need, to soothe, reassure, stabilize, fix, or rescue, often before we even know what we ourselves are feeling.

When we are not cueing off another’s needs, something feels wrong. We feel uneasy, ashamed, unsettled, as though we have failed in some essential duty.

Many of us learned this very early. As children, love was not freely given. Attention was conditional. Affection arrived when we were useful, compliant, emotionally perceptive, or sufficiently self-erasing.

Implicitly, in the body, we discovered that the safest way to belong was to hypervigilantly track the needs, moods, anxieties, or fragilities of others and organize ourselves around them. If I can help you feel better, maybe I’ll be allowed to exist.

Over time, this role becomes fused with our identity structure. Our sense of value and worth comes to depend on tending the unlived life of another.

We may feel magnetized toward people who are wounded, overwhelmed, uncertain, or chronically dissatisfied. We might confuse intensity with intimacy, need with love, or responsibility with devotion.

We struggle to receive. We feel uncomfortable when things are calm. We don’t know what to do when no one needs us.

Boundaries feel selfish. Asserting a need feels “narcissistic.” Rest feels undeserved. Saying no feels like abandonment.

Beneath it all lives a haunting question: Who am I if I’m not taking care of someone? If I’m not quietly denying my own soul life? Many therapists, coaches, healers, and caregivers carry this pattern into their work, often unconsciously.

If clients are not improving, we feel anxious. If someone is suffering, we feel responsible. If we are not helping, fixing, or healing, we begin to question our worth. Isn’t that my job?

But this is a subtle reenactment of an old wound. Healing was never our job as children, and it isn’t our job now. Our task is presence, not rescue; relationship, not repair; accompaniment, not outcome.

When this caretaking reflex goes unexamined, it quietly erodes intimacy, authenticity, and vitality. It keeps us oriented outward while our own needs remain vague, deferred, or invisible.

The work is not to stop caring. The work is to discover choice—to become skillful and conscious, to tend our own unlived wounding rather than projecting it into the relational field, where it can fuse, entangle, and quietly reenact itself.

It is to feel what it is like to stay with ourselves even when no one is asking for anything, to tolerate the anxiety of not being useful, and to let our worth rest somewhere deeper than tending the ghost of the unlived in another.

This is not a withdrawal from love. It is a return to it: a love that does not require self-abandonment, a care that arises from fullness rather than fear, and a presence that trusts it is enough—even when nothing is being fixed.

It is what loved you enough to wait

How the Soul Learns to Hide Itself

There is a silence beneath every story we tell about who we are.

If we listen closely, we can feel it — a subtle pulse beneath our self-image, our preferences, even our spiritual longings. It is the vibration of what has not yet been lived. Of something in us that once reached toward the world and quietly withdrew when it found no welcome.

This is the beginning of the shadow. It is not evidence that something is wrong with me or I failed, but a gesture of love — the soul learning how to protect what was most tender.

Long before we had language, the body learned the rules of belonging. It learned which feelings drew closeness and which led to distance. In moments of overwhelm or rejection, something instinctive took shape inside us — a quiet vow made in the tissues:

This must never happen again.

That vow becomes the shadow.

This is not pathological, but the activity of intelligence. The nervous system tucks away what felt too much — grief, anger, joy, desire, power — not because these energies were wrong, but because they were unsafe then. Each hidden feeling becomes a pocket of unlived life, waiting patiently for a future where it might be met.

We learn to wear a face to the world. A way of being that works. A self that adapts. But whatever we live through consciously casts something behind us. The more tightly we cling to the identity — helper, healer, achiever, even the spiritual one — the more the unseen gathers strength, asking to be known.

Eventually, it does not stay quiet.

It leaks through as irritation, compulsion, restlessness, fatigue, longing. What we call symptoms are often invitations — signals that something essential is ready to return.

This moment can feel like falling apart. Like darkness. Like losing our way. But this descent is not a mistake. It is the soul loosening what has grown too small. What was hidden is not trying to be fixed — it is trying to be included.

And the doorway is the body. Not analysis. Not insight. But sensation.

The body remembers what the mind could not hold. Tightness in the throat. Heat behind the eyes. A hollow in the chest. These are not obstacles — they are language. The alphabet of the unlived life.

To meet the shadow is not to search for darkness. It is to soften toward what has been waiting. To turn, slowly and with kindness, toward the places that once learned to hide in order to protect the heart.

The shadow is not what is wrong with you. It is what loved you enough to wait.

Matt's new Mystery School for Embodied Spirituality & Healing starts in February 2026

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Wishing you a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time

Dear friend

I wanted to take a moment to wish you a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time. Thank you for sharing your hearts and journeys with me this year – your suffering, your chaos, your courage, and your love. 

This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening a portal into feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain. 

We may also have some positive associations with the holidays – joy, connection, play, and belonging – a childlike innocence as to what the holidays symbolize to us. 

And, for many of us, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. 

Let us take a moment to tend it all with one another, including the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. 

And open together into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, each an essential portal into the depths of the soul. 

I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, with the rug pulled out from underneath. In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us.

To take a moment to touch and to shepherd this – the myriad of losses, betrayals, and transitions, but of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out. Me and my life, and how it was all supposed to look and feel. 

Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum. 

The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.

It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears, 

I look forward to staying in touch over the weeks and months to come. Please look out for an announcement about my new yearlong group, The Mystery School for Embodied Spirituality & Healing, in the new year, where we’ll gather together as a community to explore a contemporary, relational, trauma-sensitive, soulful path of transformation and self-realization. 

Please take care of yourself and I look forward to connecting with you next year. 

With love and appreciation,

Matt