What Was Underneath
This fall, we pulled out the grass in our front yard to replace it with a drought-tolerant landscape. The perimeter of our yard is ringed by tall, mature trees, and while I knew removing the sod would be difficult, I assumed digging the holes to plant our new landscape would be the simple part: a shovel, some holes, a few plants.
Then we started digging, and every single shovelful of dirt hit a root.
My kids and I kept running into them: thick ones, thin ones, fine webbing woven through the soil. Roots from the tall tree in our park strip had worked their way into the topsoil in the middle of our yard, 25 feet away. The roots stretched as wide as the canopies above us. The trees were nowhere near where we were standing, and yet their roots twisted through every square inch of our yard, holding the ground together.
I stood there with a shovel in my hand and realized I had never really, truly seen these trees. I had seen the shade they cast on hot afternoons. I had watched the leaves turn in the fall. I had enjoyed the fruit. But all of that was only the visible edge of something much larger, something that had been growing in the dark for years, long before there was any shade to sit under. And it was still growing, quietly, right where I was standing.
That root system is the part we rarely see, and it is the part I think about most in my work with people who are healing.
Growing in Two Directions at Once
A tree is never growing in just one direction. From the very beginning it is doing two opposite things at the same time, guided by two different kinds of intelligence
The shoot is phototropic, pushing upward toward light. The root is gravitropic, sensing which way is down and following it in total darkness. When a seed germinates, the root is the first thing to emerge and begin growing downward. Before there is a single stem, branch, or leaf, the plant commits to the dark. From that first root, other roots branch and fan out, forming an intricate, wide foundation.
This work below the surface is rough going. Root tips push through soil that does not want to move. They shed cells and secrete a slippery coating to ease their way, wedging through gaps, around stones, into compacted ground, and even through cracks in concrete. The resistance changes the root. Roots growing in tougher soil tend to thicken and strengthen in response. Trees that sway in the wind develop sturdier trunks than trees grown in shelter. The struggle is part of what builds a strong foundation, the kind a sturdy yet flexible tree can grow from.
These two systems also depend on each other. The tree's canopy can only reach as high and as wide as the roots can support. The leaves make sugar from light, the roots gather water and minerals from the dark, and each feeds the other. The visible growth of the tree is made possible by the unglamorous but necessary invisible growth happening beneath the surface.
Many of my clients excel at setting and achieving measurable goals. They are driven by data, research, and outcomes. They are self-sufficient and used to identifying problems, developing and executing plans to solve them, and reaching the outcomes they want.
The healing work we do together asks my clients to do something completely different and push up against a deeply uncomfortable growing edge. It asks them to trust a process that is happening below the surface, one that requires patience, persistence, and consistency long before they can see anything start to change. Trusting the process is especially hard for my clients because they are often used to trusting only themselves and their own abilities. More difficult still, it calls on my clients to work on releasing their attachment to outcomes, when of course what brings someone to me in the first place is that they want, more than anything, the specific outcome of being out of pain. This work asks us to expand our capacity for holding paradox: the sincere wish to be out of pain, held right alongside the wisdom that the more we demand the outcome, the more elusive it becomes. This is the slow, invisible, and necessary work that must happen before we ever start to notice anything happening above the surface.
"What Did You Notice This Past Week?"
If you have ever sat across from me in session, you know how I begin. Instead of asking, "How was your pain this week?" I ask, "What did you notice this past week?"
It is a deliberate question. People who come to me in pain, whether physical or emotional, almost always arrive carrying the same measuring stick. Was it a good week or a bad one? That usually translates to: how much did it hurt? The pain becomes the scoreboard for the day, the week, sometimes the whole treatment. A low number means I am getting better. A flare means I am failing, or that this approach doesn't work, or that I am one of the people who cannot be helped.
This is completely understandable. When you hurt, the pain is loud, and it demands your attention. Of course your entire life comes to revolve around whatever is happening with it.
But it is the equivalent of judging a tree by its fruit in its first year. It measures the one thing that cannot yet tell you what is happening below the surface.
So my work, in large part, is helping people turn their gaze downward. Instead of asking only "How much did it hurt?" we get curious about the questions that point toward the roots. What did you notice shift in how you relate to your pain? Did you tense up less quickly when it showed up? Did you get curious for a moment instead of afraid? Were you able to hang out a moment longer in the uncertainty and discomfort without rushing to fix or figure it out? And what did you notice shift in how you relate to yourself? When the pain flared, was there a flash of self-compassion where there used to be only self-blame? Did you treat your body like an enemy a little less?
These shifts are easy to miss because they are quiet. Nobody else can see them, and often you cannot either until someone asks you to look. People wired for overcontrol tend to be extremely good at delaying gratification and moving the goalposts indefinitely, while noticing and taking in the small wins is much harder and requires practice and intention. But these are the deep roots: a growing capacity to hold yourself with compassion and a felt sense of safety in your own body and your own mind. Like roots, they take a long while to show any fruit, and yet they are absolutely essential. You can build them for weeks and sometimes even months while the pain stays stubbornly the same, and you can have a good week of symptoms with the roots no deeper than before. That is why I never want you to let the fruit decide whether the work is working.
Compassion and safety are the soil and the root system that healing grows out of. Without them, there is nothing to hold the fruit. You deserve to give yourself the gift of a recovery that has a wide and deep foundation. As they say in twelve-step rooms, "Don't quit before the miracle happens."
A Closed Mind Is a Threatened Mind
The soil is going to be hard. That part is a given. What varies is how the mind meets the resistance, and in Radical Openness DBT (RO-DBT), Thomas Lynch describes three ways [1].
When we feel uncertain, criticized, or exposed, most of us close up. A closed mind is almost always a threatened mind, and overcontrolled people tend to close in one of two directions: fight or escape.
Fixed Mind fights. Its message is that my pain must have a structural cause, or that this particular activity or position causes it. It's the client who tells me their pain is at the exact same level at every moment of every single day. It's even the client who hears about Fixed Mind and decides immediately that it couldn't apply to them. Fixed Mind explains, defends, justifies, and discounts, and it becomes a suit of armor against feeling uncertain, wrong, or incompetent.
Fatalistic Mind escapes. Its message is that this doesn't work, or it won't work for me. For me, this was the many years I wouldn't try something as basic as yoga because I already knew I wasn't a flexible person, or wouldn't try mindfulness because I knew my brain just wasn't the type that could ever get quiet. It's what shows up whenever a client tries a new approach for two weeks, sees no relief, and concludes that nothing will ever work.
Flexible Mind stays long enough to find out. Its message is that maybe something needs to change, so let's find out. You can still disagree, keep your opinion, and feel things strongly. Sometimes flexibility means persisting, sometimes backing off, sometimes following the rule, sometimes breaking it. It holds a little healthy self-doubt: my perspective is real, but it may not be the whole picture. The target is simply more openness to new information.
This is the tree that has been through weather. It is flexible about the path, with roots bending around stones and a trunk giving with the wind, and steady about the direction: down into the dark, up toward the light. The sway is part of how the trunk gets strong.
And it is the answer to the quick verdict. When you try something new and it does not help right away, Fixed Mind says this can't help because my pain is somehow uniquely untreatable or structural, and Fatalistic Mind says nothing will work for me. Flexible Mind says something humbler and braver: I don't know yet, but I am willing to stay here in the dark and uncertainty and see what I can learn and how I can grow.
Why Your Brain Needs More Than a Few Weeks
There is a reason that "I tried it and nothing happened" is such a convincing conclusion, and it has to do with how the brain works.
Predictive processing models describe the brain as a prediction machine. It actively generates expectations and checks them against incoming experience. When reality matches the prediction, nothing updates. When reality violates it, that mismatch, called a prediction error, is a signal that the model may need revising. The catch is that predictions built over decades and reinforced thousands of times carry heavy weight. A single experience that contradicts them tends to get explained away as an exception. If uncertainty, criticism, or a pain sensation has historically meant danger, one calm or pain-free moment is not enough to rewrite that. When we are caught in Fixed or Fatalistic Mind, we may not even be open enough to notice and take in the small corrective experiences that could help update the model.
Research on inhibitory learning, much of it from Michelle Craske and colleagues, adds an important point [2]. New learning leaves the old prediction in place and builds a new, competing one that has to gain enough strength to win out. The experiences that help most are those that clearly violate what you expected, that happen across different situations and contexts, and that you approach rather than escape. Our brains update through repetition, and that early stretch of repetition is hard to measure and often looks, from the surface, like nothing is happening at all.
How to Help Your Roots Grow
First, set an intention this week to catch at least one moment when your brain is engaged in Fixed or Fatalistic thinking. For now, noticing is the whole job. We are training ourselves to spot these default ways of thinking that run all the time outside our conscious awareness.
Second, when you catch one, try your best to celebrate that you caught it at all. When we are growing the roots, fruit is the wrong metric. Notice if you find yourself checking, "How is this changing my pain?" The better questions are: Did I show up? Did I stay with the discomfort a little longer than last time? Did I turn toward the sensation or the situation with a bit more curiosity and a bit more safety? Did I collect one more piece of evidence against the old prediction?
Third, stay curious rather than conclusive. "It has not worked yet" and "it cannot work" are very different sentences, and only one of them leaves the door open. If you catch Fixed Mind or Fatalistic Mind showing up, meet it with kindness rather than a fight. It is trying to protect you. Then ask: what might I need to learn here?
That quiet, dark stage of growth is the necessary process in which the structure gets built that makes everything later possible: the shade, the strength, and eventually the fruit.
Keep rooting down.
References
Lynch TR. Radical Openness Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Theory and Practice for Treating Disorders of Overcontrol. Context Press; 2018.
Craske MG, Treanor M, Conway CC, Zbozinek T, Vervliet B. Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2014;58:10-23.
Why does it feel like my chronic pain treatment isn't working?
What is Flexible Mind in RO-DBT?
What are Fixed Mind and Fatalistic Mind?
Why does the brain take so long to change how it responds to pain?
What should I track instead of my pain level?
What is inhibitory learning?
References
Lynch TR. Radical Openness Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Theory and Practice for Treating Disorders of Overcontrol. Context Press; 2018.
Craske MG, Treanor M, Conway CC, Zbozinek T, Vervliet B. Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2014;58:10-23.
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