Everybody’s got ‘em. Whether it’s something physical that is a minor annoyance or an emotional sensation that makes you feel as though you want to crawl out of your skin, we all feel something we’d like to get rid of and out of our lives for good. While it’s true that no one wants to feel bad, it might just be the case that our symptoms are trying tell us something that we’ve ignored elsewhere. For example, a person might experience extreme anxiety when faced with going to a workplace that has become gradually more hostile over the past months or years. She may not have considered the possibility that the workplace is no longer a healthy or viable one for her and that the time has come to make a change.

Here the symptoms, anxiety, fear, ruminations, among others, are not merely a person’s reactions to a particular environment, but are also important clues about the environment itself. We’ve all heard the story about the frog who won’t (or can’t) get out of a pot of water whose temperature is gradually increased to the boiling point. Whether or not the facts of this tale are true, the important piece to take away is that the frog finds a way to be oblivious to negative changes in it’s environment. Human beings have a similar capacity, though even more deeply refined through our language and the stories we tell ourselves about situations. “It’s not that bad…I’m sure it will get better soon…There must be some reason for all this…”

Symptoms cut through this barrier of language and make real the very things we find so easy to gloss over. They are like the stone in our shoe shouting “Hey ! You up there ! I’m the stone in you’re shoe….telling you exactly that. I’m here.”

Now that you know, you have a choice.

Some time ago, I was speaking with a woman who was telling me about the problems she had been having at work with a band of difficult co-workers and a particularly virulent supervisor. She mentioned that she had been off work for several months and could not imagine returning, and in the next breath, explained that she was unable to work due to problems she had with concentration and focus. As she detailed the months of slights, disrespects, harassments and her responses to each and every one of them, I came to understand that there was nothing at all wrong with this woman’s ability to concentrate and focus, and, in fact, both her long as well as term memory were perfectly functional and intact. When I mentioned to her my observation that there seemed nothing wrong with her concentration, she countered with specific details of an incident 6 months earlier where a co-worker had spoken to her in a particularly harsh manner and how that had resulted in poor work performance because she could not concentrate.

“You remember every detail of a brief conversation that occurred over 5 months ago, if that’s not concentration and focus, I don’t know what is,” I said to her. Reluctantly, she admitted that she had been spending a lot of time thinking about the workplace to which she would not be returning.

I paused, considered her situation for a moment, then asked, “What do you think you could accomplish for yourself if you directed your formidable concentration resources towards what you want in your life rather than the pain you’ve finished with and rejected?