A Mental Block Is Not a Defect: It Is a Restoring Function That Runs All the Time

A mental block refers to the sense of I cannot do this that rises when someone turns toward a particular action. You stop before raising your rates. Your hand stops before putting something out in a new form. You turn back one step short of publishing. The sense gets talked about as an obstacle to be removed, but what is actually moving is not a foreign body. It is the function that pulls you back to the familiar position whenever you step away from it. That function runs continuously, and it is felt as resistance only when you touch the edge.

So the first distinction placed is a single one. The question “do I have a block or not” does not arise. The only question that arises is whether you are touching the edge right now. Inside the edge, the same function is running and nothing is felt. Read that absence of feeling as “no block” and the length of time spent inside gets counted as evidence of how wide the range is.

Once the rereading is in place, several questions become answerable. Why does the same weight appear in the next situation, after a full round of removal work? Why does raising rates carry the same weight after ten years of accumulated results? Why do other people appear to have no resistance at all? None of these is a question of quantity. Each is a question of the direction of the function and of where the edge sits.

Two things cannot be settled here. How long an edge takes to move, and which area is fastest to start with. The position of an edge can only be observed by touching it, so any figure handed over from outside is a figure produced without knowing where the reader stands. Nor does it treat the case where anxiety itself is at a level that disrupts daily life. That is not a matter of structure; it calls for the involvement of an appropriate professional.

The case treated here is the one where daily life runs and the hand stops only in specific situations. The object of treatment is not the sensation itself but two things: where that sensation appears, and where the return point has been placed. No method for eliminating the sensation is given here. What an eliminating operation drags along with it is placed concretely in the middle sections. Among the things dragged along are some worth keeping — the judgement that keeps you away from a counterpart you should avoid, for example.

The sections below begin with what the name block presupposes, and where the standard removal methods stop. It then places what the restoring function actually is, and what happens when you try to remove it, closing with where to check that the direction has changed.

The Name “Mental Block” Decides the Set of Moves Available

The moment the word is used, the phenomenon is positioned as something obstructing passage. If something is obstructing, the operation that comes next is settled: removal.

Two premises have entered with the name. The first is that it is something not originally there — a foreign body. Being foreign is what makes it removable. The second is that what remains after removal is empty space. Take down the wall and the road goes through, as the image has it.

Neither matches what actually occurs. What is moving there is not a foreign body but a resident function, and what remains after removal is not space.

There are certainly cases where a specific event was the trigger. After one harsh refusal, proposing in the same form becomes heavy. After being strongly denied in one area, you begin avoiding that area. In such cases the trigger can be identified, and identifying it makes the thing easier to handle. Even then, though, what is moving is not the memory itself but the position of the edge that the memory updated. Stop recalling the memory and the resistance still appears at the same place, as long as the edge has not moved.

A metaphor limits the kinds of operation that occur to you. As long as you call it a wall, the proposals that come out are: break it, climb it, go around it. All three treat the object as an external obstacle. A proposal that treats it as part of yourself never comes out of that metaphor.

Changing what you call it makes the moment of raising your rates no lighter by a single gram. What changes is not the weight but the set of options for handling that weight. Call it an edge and the operation becomes moving the position of the edge. Call it a restoring force and the operation becomes changing where it returns to. Neither is removal.

And the difference tells in the result. Treat it as a foreign body and the work continues until the thing disappears. It does not disappear, so the work does not end. Treat it as an edge and progress becomes measurable by whether the edge has moved. For the same phenomenon, one framing produces endless work and the other produces measurable work.

Choosing words differently is not itself a prescription. Change the name and nothing moves until you decide what to do next. What can be stated is only the order: the name narrows the set of moves first, and while it stays narrowed, the correct move never enters the set.

One cost comes with the renaming. It can make the matter look lighter to the person doing the work. Renaming it an edge does not shrink the problem. Moving a position takes longer than removing something. What became lighter is the handling, not the quantity of work.

The Three Standard Removal Methods Assume the Object Can Be Identified

The removal methods in circulation reduce to three, and all three rest on one assumption: that what you are caught on has already been identified.

The first works on thought. Find the negative reading and replace it with another one — reading impossible as not yet attempted. The second works on action. Simply do it once; if it holds, the experience produces the judgement. The third recommends the involvement of a professional: have someone from outside look at what you cannot find yourself.

All three have situations where they genuinely work. The condition is common to them: the object being handled must be specifiable. The first cannot be executed unless the thought to be replaced has been identified. The second cannot be executed unless the thing to try has been named. The third cannot even begin unless the area has been narrowed.

This is where they diverge from the actual difficulty. In most cases, what people are stuck on is the state of not knowing what I am caught on.

You know you cannot raise the rate. What is heavy about raising it, though, you cannot say. Maybe it is fear of refusal. Maybe it is not wanting to damage the current relationship. Maybe it is not believing that your work carries that figure at all. Each seems to apply and none is decisive.

Pick one of the three without a decisive reading, and when it does not work you cannot tell whether the prescription was wrong or the object was misidentified. What remains is the record it did not work for me.

And that record has a direction. The judgement of whether it came off is placed nowhere but in your own impression. You tried the replacement. You acted. The same weight appears in the next situation anyway. So the verdict becomes not off yet, and with repetition it turns into a different verdict: mine runs deep.

That is the damage. What was being handled was the weight of a specific situation. Somewhere along the way it was replaced by a conclusion about your own nature. Work on a phenomenon is producing conclusions about a person.

So before entering the three prescriptions, one thing is worth checking. Whether the operation of removing fits the phenomenon at all. If it does, the three work well from the moment the object is identified. If it does not, the work of identifying the object is what spins. What has to be checked is how the restoring function actually runs.

The Restoring Function Runs All the Time

Resistance is not a foreign body that appears only in specific situations. The function runs without stopping, and it reaches awareness only at the moment the edge is touched.

In 1929 the physiologist Walter Cannon set out the mechanism by which an organism keeps its internal state constant against external change, under the name homeostasis (Cannon, 1929, Physiological Reviews, 9(3), 399–431). Temperature, blood sugar, the volume of body fluids. However the outside conditions change, the inside is held within a fixed band.

This function requires no awareness. It makes no judgement. The motion of restoring after displacement simply keeps running. And when that motion stops, the body stops functioning. Restoring is not a defect; it is a condition of staying alive.

A closely similar form is observed for the range of behaviour. Move away from a familiar position and the state away is not maintained; left alone, it returns. This is not a claim that the two run by the same mechanism. The first is a concrete regulatory system that has been measured; the second is not that simple. What is being used here is only the shared form: a restoring motion running continuously after displacement.

From the shared form, one thing follows. The function is running even in situations where you feel no resistance at all. It is running and not felt because the situation sits inside the range. Inside, no restoring is required, so no force appears.

This is also the function that supports much of daily life. Getting through a day as planned. Running the work by the same procedure. Exchanging messages with familiar counterparts in familiar forms. These stay stable because the restoring function is working. Call a function that runs all the time and supports the day a block, and you are treating part of yourself as an enemy.

Treating part of yourself as an enemy carries a particular weight. Every time something does not work, the reading is not that the handling failed but that something inside you is too strong. With the opponent inside, winning and losing both cost you.

There is one more thing this function makes hard to see. You cannot observe the same function running in other people. What is visible about others is only the result: they raised their rate, they put out a new form, they went independent. What happened before that is invisible from outside. So people who moved look as though they had no resistance.

In fact the same function was running the same way. It is invisible because the time spent at the edge is time that cannot be observed from outside. That time usually passes alone. Remove that asymmetry and the handling changes. What is running is a normal function, and you are currently at the edge. Nothing in that description contains a defect.

Resistance Appears Only When the Edge Is Touched

Inside the edge no load arises; trying to cross it produces load. So the place where resistance appeared marks where the edge sits.

From this property, differences by area come first. The same person can have a distant edge for production and a near edge for negotiating price. So the phrasing I am a person with strong mental blocks does not capture the phenomenon. What is strong is not the person but the nearness of the edge in that area.

Second, as long as you are inside, the fact that you have an edge is itself invisible. You feel no resistance, so the existence of the range never enters awareness. From here an observational skew arises: other people’s edges are easy to see and your own are not.

Situations where someone else visibly stops sit inside your edge, which is why they are easy to see. Conversely, the situations where you stop are easy for them to see if those sit inside theirs. Neither is superior; the edges are simply in different places.

Third, edges move. A place crossed once becomes inside from the next time. Raise your rate once and the next raise does not arrive with the same weight. This gets described as experience building confidence; more precisely, the position of the edge has moved.

Crossing once does not always make the place inside, however. If the result of crossing was clearly bad, the edge moves nearer instead. A proposal becoming heavier after a strong rejection is that movement having occurred. The edge does not recede with the count of crossings; it re-decides its position from what happened on the other side.

So crossing is not itself the objective. The position of the edge is settled together with how you read what happened after crossing. From the same result, using it to check conditions for the next move pushes the edge outward, while reading it as evidence about your aptitude pulls it nearer.

This property makes measurement hard. The position of an edge can be observed only when it is touched. Without touching, you cannot tell whether an edge is there. So work that tries to list your edges in advance does not progress. What can be listed is only the edges you have already touched.

That constraint is also why the identifying the three removal methods presuppose is where the work stalls. Identification fails not because self-analysis is insufficient, but because an untouched edge cannot be observed. Identification therefore proceeds from contact, not from analysis.

After Removal, No Place to Stand Remains

Follow the operation of removal to the end and what comes off is not resistance alone. The signal of position, the return point, and judgement come off together.

Suppose the restoring function could be weakened. First, the edge of the range becomes vague. Once it is vague, the load signal stops appearing. The load signal is also the information telling you where you currently are, so when it stops, the sense of position is lost.

Second, the return point disappears. The restoring function works as a set with the place it returns to. It restores because a place is specified. Erase the place and the function itself carries no meaning.

The expectation that losing the fear makes you able to move is half right. You do become able to move. But moving with no return point leaves your position unsettled where you land. Unsettled, what to do next is not settled either. You reach in various directions with the resistance gone, and none of it continues, because what makes something continue is that the place is felt to be yours.

Where the resistance was pushed down instead, a different form is observed. After a period of forcing through it by will, the rebound arrives all at once. While you are forcing, the range itself has not moved. It is only being pushed; the position stays where it was. So the moment the push stops, the return happens with exactly the force that was applied. A project sustained for months stopping completely after a single interruption is this form.

The third is harder to see. Judgement is mixed into the resistance. Some of the sense behind I will not take it at this price is the edge, and some of it is a sound judgement. The same holds for I will not work with this counterpart. As sensations, the two cannot be told apart. Both rise with the same weight.

Removal does not make that distinction. It weakens both. So judgement comes off alongside the edge. What can happen is that after a run of removal work you begin accepting conditions you would previously have refused, and months later only badly conditioned work remains in your hands. What came off was not the edge but the judgement.

So an operation aimed at removal is less ineffective than unpredictable in its side effects. What will come off cannot be specified in advance. An operation that cannot be specified can only be read after the results appear, and by then time has passed.

One handle exists for telling judgement from edge. Whether putting the sense into words brings out specifics about the counterpart or the conditions. This counterpart has a record of paying late is a judgement. Something about it just does not appeal is more likely to sit on the edge side. Here too, what serves the test is the specifics.

“I Cannot” Is Not a Prediction; It Works as a Function That Holds the Position

In form, the sentence I cannot do this is a prediction, yet disproving it does not remove it. It is not operating as a prediction but as a function holding the current position.

A prediction should disappear on disproof. Succeed once and the estimate has been shown to be wrong. Yet a single success often fails to remove it. An explanation gets attached — the conditions happened to be good this time — and the prediction is maintained.

Read as a holding function, the failure of disproof becomes explainable. If holding is the purpose, then what gets done when disproof arrives is not changing the conclusion but adding an explanation.

There is a neighbouring description. In the account the psychologist Leon Festinger set out in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), holding two cognitions that cannot be held together produces discomfort, and people move to reduce that discomfort by changing one of them. “I cannot do this” and “I actually did it” cannot be held together. So one of them moves.

And the one that moves is the one that moves more easily. What decides which is the current position. If the position has not changed, the I cannot side is the harder one to move, because it is tied to the position. What moves instead is the reading of the event: it happened to work, the conditions were unusual, the counterpart was generous.

So work spent verifying whether the sentence is true does not get far. This is not to say verification is worthless. The fact that something once held stays as material. That material gets reread when the position moves. Only then does the reading I was actually doing it hold.

There is an order to it. You do not gather evidence in order to move the position; the evidence gathered acquires meaning when the position moves. Gathering is not wasted work — gathering alone simply does not complete the order.

This structure breaks one expectation. The over-trusted order in which accumulating results produces confidence. Results do accumulate. Yet cases where results accumulate and the position does not move are observed. Ten years in, the same weight can appear at the moment of raising the rate. The quantity of results and the height of the position are separate variables.

The reading needs a limit. Not every I cannot sits on the position side. Preparation is short, the materials are not assembled, the counterpart’s conditions have not been checked — the I cannot in these cases is an accurate estimate, and it disappears once the gap is filled. What sits on the position side stays at the same strength after the filling. So which it was becomes clear only after passing through the same situation twice.

What Can Be Changed Is Not the Strength but the Direction

The restoring function has two components: strength and direction. Strength cannot be changed. Direction can.

Strength cannot be changed because it is built in as a condition of staying alive. Push it down and the rebound returns after the period of pushing through. What decides direction is the return point. The return point is the position that feels natural to occupy, and it is not decided by your current results.

There is a neighbouring concept. Self-efficacy, as the psychologist Albert Bandura formulated it in 1977, refers to a person’s own estimate of their capability to carry out a given task (Bandura, 1977, Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215). The point is that this is not actual capability but the person’s estimate of it.

That capability and estimate are independent variables can be observed in daily work. Two people with the same skill quote entirely different figures. Two people with the same record: one takes the next job, the other does not. What differs is not skill but the estimate.

And what comes up as a candidate for action follows the estimate, not the capability, because action beyond the range of the estimate never enters the candidate set. So changing direction becomes concrete as an operation of resetting the estimate.

Resetting an estimate and believing something without grounds are different things. Groundless belief does not last. It conflicts with daily experience and experience wins. Worse, as the conflict continues, holding the belief itself becomes a load.

Resetting means changing the position of the criterion. Instead of an estimate built up from current results, you place the estimate required when the present is seen from the destination. Placed that way, it does not contradict your current results, because it states the position of the criterion rather than an evaluation of the present.

It shows up in how the thing gets phrased. Declare I can do this in the present tense and it collides with experience. Place it as I am heading there, so my current position is partway along and it does not collide. The two say something similar, and the location of the criterion differs.

Right after resetting, a gap appears. Placing the criterion first makes the distance from the present visible. Because the distance is visible, what stands out immediately after placing it is the shortfall. Read that shortfall as a failure of placement and you pull the criterion back within reach. Pull it back and the gap disappears, and at that moment the criterion has returned to where it was. That is where the fork sits.

Once the Direction Has Changed, the Place Where Resistance Appears Moves

When the return point moves, the same function works in the opposite direction. The resistance does not disappear; the place it appears moves.

Previously, resistance appeared when you tried to put something out in a new form. With the direction changed, resistance appears at continuing in the old form. The strength of the force has not changed. The place it pushes back toward has, so the direction of the push is reversed.

Work with conditions that used to be unremarkable now catches when you accept it. A schedule that used to fill as a matter of course now feels unsettled. These are not increases in dissatisfaction; they are the signal that appears when the position has shifted.

During the transition, both sides pull. Neither the old position nor the new one is settled yet. So the direction of the pull changes from day to day. One day you advance into the new form, another day you move back toward the old one. That instability is a form that tends to appear mid-transition.

Read it as the block is still there and you go back to removal work. Nothing is left over; the two are simply coexisting for a period. The coexistence continues until one of them settles. It carries its own discomfort: returning to the old position does not settle you, and being in the new one does not either.

That is not because one of them is wrong. A sense of position is built by spending a certain time in it, so mid-transition neither has had enough residence. It is a function of time, not a function of correctness.

So making have I stopped feeling resistance the indicator means never reaching it. The indicator is whether the place where resistance appears has moved. Set disappearance as the goal and a month in which you merely did not touch the edge gets recorded as achievement. A month without contact is not a month in which the position moved; it is a month in which nothing was measured.

There is one further change that is easier to observe from outside. The words used to explain the work change. In the old position, the words for explaining your work are the names of tasks: what gets made, how many hours it takes, how far the coverage extends. The explanation runs from the side of the thing being handed over.

Once the position moves, explanation begins from the receiving side: whose situation changes, and what happens afterwards. This is not an improvement in speaking technique; the place you are standing changed, so the view changed. And once the explanation changes, the responses coming back change too. In exchanges that used to open with negotiating the figure, questions about the content start coming first. This change tends to appear on the outside before any change in the size of the resistance.

What Moved Is Read from the Place of Resistance and the Candidate Set

The checking work begins with records. It begins by recording, not by judging.

First, record where resistance appears. What were you about to do when it became heavy? Write the situation down concretely, without judging it good or bad. Mix judgement in and the record becomes the result of a judgement rather than material for one.

Second, line the records up at regular intervals. What is being looked at is not the strength of the resistance but whether the place it appears is the same as before. Appearing in the same place means the position has not moved. Appearing in a different place means it has. The strength is unchanged in either case. Misread this and you conclude nothing has moved while it is moving.

Third, check the candidate set. Have options you would not previously have considered begun to come up as things to examine? If they have, the range has widened. What is looked at is not whether you acted but whether it entered the candidate set.

Action follows afterwards. What is not in the candidate set does not become action however much will is poured into it. Conversely, once something is in the set, the devices that lower the cost of starting begin to work straightforwardly. The three standard removal methods finally mesh here, because the object has become specifiable.

The question asking whether a block exists changes shape here. Which area is at the edge right now, and where has the return point been placed? Both have answers, and questions with answers can be finished.

None of this asks you to welcome resistance. Resistance is heavy and it genuinely stops the hand. What can be stated is that the weight is a signal of position rather than a signal of malfunction, and that a signal of position is something to read rather than something to remove. Treated as something to read, the same weight becomes material for the next move.

How many months until the place moves, how many candidates count as enough. No figures are placed here. Any figure handed over from outside is produced without knowing how many times the reader has touched one. What remains in your hands instead is three records and the two questions read from them.

Action that has not come up as a candidate at all produces no resistance signal to begin with; that state is treated in not acting is not a failure of will, how daily behaviour settles once the position has moved is in change the return point before changing the habit, and the order in which the return point itself is reset is in self-transformation does not last because the order of changing is reversed. Where this function sits within recognition as a whole is in what cognitive science shows is that behaviour is generated out of the world being felt.