"Frustration is a surface-level emotion, trapped in the chest seeking expression, balance, and justice, progress, fulfillment, and change. Although just like fear and resistance it is an emotional block and part of a deeper, hidden, complex pattern that keeps us reacting and taking flight. "

Nicola Lucie

Frustration, we know it all too well!

Something triggers us and the frustration rises like a tidal wave that threatens to drown us. Fuelled by anger, annoyance and disappointment and uncontrollable fire, it sends us into flight mode, wanting to run, hide, sabotage or fix.

But frustration has magic woven beneath it, sent from the depths of our psyche to teach us a profound lesson about reaction and response, patience and expression, communication and boundaries.

However, we’re impatient to learn the lesson.

We want results, we want change, we want to express something and we want to do it all now, yet there is an unconscious perception of something or someone preventing us from doing so and because we’re not able to clearly understand or articulate it we react with frustration, chasing our tails like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Frustration is a surface-level emotion, trapped in the chest seeking expression, balance, and justice, progress, fulfilment and change. Although just like fear and resistance it is an emotional block and part of a deeper, hidden, complex pattern that keeps us reacting and taking flight.

When frustration is activated it’s visceral, exploding through the upper part of the body, flooding the mind with unhealthy dialogue, sending the nervous system into chaos and creating innumerable amounts of stress.

It lingers in our aura like an unwelcome friend and hijacks the psyche. We are possessed by it and within the possession is the obsession that we have with it. We don’t want to feel it, yet we feel helpless and hopeless to go beyond it.

So it repeats itself over and over again, we react to it in the same old way, and nothing changes we just create more frustration.

But frustration is just another emotion, energy trapped in the body seeking motion, seeking to be acknowledged, felt and heard.

There is an unmet and often unconscious need hidden beneath it, which is related to a wound or trauma, or a thread of our conditioning that has disconnected us from our true nature.

But because we’ve never been able to identify this need we are not able to express it in a healthy and balanced way and this triggers the frustration.

We want to change something, but we have no idea what it is we’re trying to change.

Whatever it is, is seeking resolution and expression but the armour of frustration has been woven so tightly that it is impossible to dig beneath it.

And this is often why we go no further with our inner work, we quit, we walk away, and we tell ourselves it’s useless to continue because it’s never going to change.

We believe frustration is here to stay because we cannot even begin to imagine who we are without it, as it has been so deeply embedded into our psyche creating the patterns of flight and flight, sabotage and avoidance.

So this is the frequency we are unconsciously choosing to vibrate at.

The more frustration we have, the more we manifest it in our lives and relationships.

Therefore if we want to come back into right relationship with frustration and learn its lessons, we will need to give ourselves permission to be present with the profound level of discomfort frustration presents, which is fundamentally showing us the way.

Like every other emotion that has become trapped and toxic in the mind, body and soul, we give ourselves permission to lean into it without reacting to it. We take ownership of it and step into the role of the conscious observer and witness how it manifests in our lives and relationships, how it makes us feel and how we react to it.

By giving frustration permission to be present, we are activating our personal power and will to change what now needs our attention by being in a relationship with it, rather than giving all of our power away to the emotion and the trauma response.

We are quite simply choosing to hack our own psyche.

However, we think that we can master a lifetime's worth of frustration in just one go, and this is especially true of my clients. I hold space for them to wade through the thick, constricting chaos of frustration every single time it arises, and the deeper we go the more challenging it becomes as their resistance and need to take flight becomes more concentrated as we move closer to their core wounds.

The ego is holding on for dear life because it’s those core wounds that have defined their sense of identity and letting go will catapult them into the unknown magic of life beyond.

The frustration, therefore is a protective mechanism so deeply embedded into the psyche, with a range of complex patterns, but it is a process to unravel just like any other and takes time and care, attention and awareness.

We will be invited to learn patience, and considering we have been conditioned to be impatient and demanding within a society where instant gratification is the norm, this can again prove challenging.

But for those who love a challenge, just like my clients who really want to experience deep and lasting change, then you will be rewarded.

Because to commit to the inner work through deep shadow work, you will eventually break open the frustration and reveal a hidden treasure trove of understanding and expression, integration and healing like never before.

Unmet needs you never knew existed are seen and heard for the first time, shining a light on how you can now meet them without expectation or judgement or seeking them to be met by others and the external world.

And gradually your inner world will reflect your outer world, where peace, calm, compassion and gentleness become the norm.

You embrace an aspect of yourself you never thought existed because your imagination, which has been previously locked down in frustration and reaction, can now expand into potential and possibility, love begins to seep from your pores and touches your life with grace and beauty.

So the next time you feel frustrated, I invite you to hold space for this frustrated aspect of yourself, and invite her in like an old friend, holding space for her to be seen and heard and if you are able to love her without reprimanding her or taking flight from her you will have begun your journey back home to self, reclaiming more of your sovereignty along the way.

With Love, 

Nicola x