Idea | Bureaucracy Wounds – Healing the Overwhelm of Admin, Paperwork, and Logistics
A highly sensitive friend shared her screen with me on a Zoom call as she logged into one of her online business accounts. She’d asked me for support to accomplish an odious task. A faceless entity somewhere out there in the online ether required her to jump through an administrative hoop. The process involved unfamiliar web pages, filling in a digital form, and working through mind-numbing details. Also, a deadline.
The whole thing put my friend into a sort of fugue state. Her mental firing slowed down, she got distracted, she clicked on buttons before processing the options and had to backtrack. Exasperated, she harangued herself. “Why can’t I do this? It’s only a form. I don’t understand.”
I’d seen it before. As a young adult, I’d watched friends struggle to complete various soul-sucking administrative tasks. I sympathized, but also found myself offering to help, because I weirdly enjoyed logistical chores. My friends gazed at me as though I were an alien (I probably am). Those incidents occurred often enough that I began to notice patterns, and the incidents multiplied when my career path veered toward providing logistical support in one-on-one situations.
While working at an environmental organization, and then later at a rural public library, I taught basic computer skills to people who were fearful of admitting what they didn’t know about computers and couldn’t figure out on their own. The patterns I noticed in those people also cropped up when I worked with clients as a freelance bookkeeper, a managing editor at a publishing firm, and a writing coach. In all of those roles, I witnessed the same blanked-out, frozen responses in sensitive people who confronted seemingly impenetrable procedures or red tape. Their overwhelm brought up degrees of distress and triggered reactions of I’m too tired / dumb / bored / old / busy / uninterested / etc. to do this. I’ll deal with it later. Maybe.
Over decades of talking with and supporting clients and friends about this issue, I’ve come to suspect that the overwhelmed fugue state stems from what I refer to as bureaucracy wounds. Sometime in the past, something happened that prompted a trauma around the logistics of life. Yes, conditions such as ADHD affect focus, but I suspect bureaucracy wounds are a separate issue that can compound other conditions by, for example, stifling creativity around developing successful coping strategies.
Bureaucracy wounds trigger a mental shutdown. Whatever originally caused the wound—a teacher in grade school insisting you show your work when you knew the answer but didn’t know how you knew; a government official aiming a dead-eyed gaze of impersonality as they refused your request; a sustained red-tape process with a low return on your time and energy investments; or any of many other potential moments when a suggestion that you were inadequate to an administrative task popped up in your experience. Those types of experiences accrue and compound. Bureaucracy wounds show up in the present day to associate logistical processes with dread and feelings of inadequacy, despair, and incompetence.
For some reason, I managed to escape bureaucracy woundedness, which may be why I’ve been able to notice them as a pattern. Perhaps my kindly, artistic, patient, logic-loving, librarian, poet, administrator mother had something to do with it. I don’t know. Looking back, I can see the threads of how I was an odd duck in this way, even within my own family. When my little brother and I were children, we would sometimes present each other with special gifts when one of us was sick. His gift to me was to stand at the foot of my bed and perform little skits to distract me and make me laugh (such a sweet boy). How did I return the favor when he was sick? From my nerdtastic soul, with love, I offered him the best thing I could think of: carefully hand-crafted sheets of notebook paper filled with multiple choice tests, quizzes, and forms for him to fill out.
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With my friend on the Zoom call who wondered, “Why can’t I do this? It’s just a form. I don’t understand,” I suggested she remove her hands from the keyboard and take a big breath. The agitation of her bureaucracy wounds had ramped up the energy of fearful inadequacy to a point where she was no longer thinking. She was embarrassed and wanted to stop trying to fill out the form. Rather than walking away, she decided to push through to get it done.
“It’s okay to slow way down,” I offered. “Let’s just look at this web page together for a minute without doing anything.” As we carefully examined the process she was required to complete online, and as she talked about the emotional experience she was having, she realized suddenly that she literally had not seen the boldly colored button she needed to click to move to the next step. She registered the feeling of how her mind had slid away, withdrawing her attention from the task at hand to plunge her into panic, self-recrimination, and a dreadful feeling of not knowing what to do—to the point that her brain limited what she was seeing.
Calmer with that observation, she placed her hands back onto the keyboard and clicked the button. She didn’t try to immediately take the next action. Instead, she slowed down to the pace of her own process, which was very, very slow. A sign of bureaucracy wounds is trying to hurry. When she slowed to her actual, personal pace of figuring out the hoops to jump through to finish that online administrative process, she managed the task with no more problems.
The origin of many wounds for us sensitive, intuitive, creative folk stems from incidents in childhood when we were hurried along even though we wanted—needed—to go slower and tune deeper, to muse and loll and explore further, instead of moving on already.
If the above scenarios feel familiar and you think you might have bureaucracy wounds, knowing their origins is not required to heal them. Time and again, in a wide range of different circumstances when bureaucracy wounds were triggered, I’ve witnessed the relief that comes when space is made for a more natural pace. Bureaucracy wounds originally arise—and then are perpetuated by—the unrealistic societal stew of hurry-up in which we’re steeped over the course of many years.
If you go into overwhelm and shut down when confronted with certain types of administrative, paperwork, or logistical tasks, perhaps you can offer yourself extra space and time to process the experience—space and time you may not have been given enough of in the past.
Solace for bureaucracy wounds can come from slowing down, taking very small steps, addressing tasks in multiple separate sessions, enlisting a trusted helper or witness, talking through the experience in moment-by-moment detail aloud to yourself or to someone else, or asking someone else to handle the task for you. Self-compassionate experimentation with those or other approaches specifically appropriate for sensitive, intuitive, creative, empathic people can soothe and heal bureaucracy wounds and make room for more options, for more freedom and relief from internalized, oppressive self-expectations. The positive effects may come on gradually, seeping into new neural pathways over an extended time span.
A year after that Zoom call with my HSP friend, after she'd acknowledged her bureaucracy wounds and gone on to develop a practice of tackling onerous administrative tasks more at her own natural pace and in rhythms more suited to her needs, she told me:
“Through this bureaucracy wounds work, I’m having experiences where I’m saying no more often when something isn’t right for me. I’m demanding more from my quality of reality. I just feel more confident. This shift is coloring the rest of my life—health, relationships, all of it. I now know it will all be okay.”
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You are built for success, even regarding tasks as mundane and daily as life’s logistics. As with so many barriers we face, the key to finding the way through is to lean into becoming more like our natural selves, not less.
What if a part of you has known all along what your uniqueness needs in order to handle admin and paperwork? What if you allow yourself to have that?
The Photo Above | Amble
Gabriola Island in British Columbia is remote enough to offer a seemingly endless supply of secret paths through peaceful nature. This photo is from a 2010 springtime amble I took through woods and fields, during which every step warranted a stop to admire a new view.
I more and more consciously resist the rate-shaming that occurs in the American society I grew up in and live in. Slow is a comparison. My rate of living is only slow if compared to a faster rate. I prefer to call my rate normal, because it's just right for me.
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Photo by Grace Kerina
Grace Kerina is the author of Personal Boundaries for Highly Sensitive People and other resources for quiet people. She has more than twenty years of experience helping writers and other creators find their true voices. Get her free ebook 7 Liberating Life Hacks for Highly Sensitive People when you subscribe to her newsletter. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.