Three Nitty Gritty Truths About Making Life’s Big Choices & What to Do If You’re Feeling Stuck

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • October 04, 2015

SUMMARY

Feeling stuck on a major life decision isn’t weakness and it isn’t indecision — it’s often the predictable result of a nervous system shaped by early experiences that made it unsafe to want things, trust yourself, or risk being wrong. This post covers three clinical truths about why life’s big choices feel so hard for driven women, what’s actually happening in your brain and body when you’re frozen, and what moves you from paralysis to clarity. If you’ve been circling the same decision for weeks — or years — this is for you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Decision You Keep Not Making
2. What Is Decisional Paralysis?
3. Truth #1: Making Life’s Big Choices Really Is Hard — and It’s Supposed to Be
4. Truth #2: Every Big Choice Involves a Loss — and That Loss Is Real
5. Truth #3: If You Didn’t Learn to Trust Yourself, Choosing Feels Dangerous
6. Both/And: You Can Be Stuck and Still Be Moving
7. The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Get Stuck in Particular Ways
8. How to Move from Stuck to Clarity
9. Frequently Asked Questions

The Decision You Keep Not Making

It’s 11 PM on a Tuesday. The laptop is open. The pros-and-cons list — the one she’s rewritten seven times in the last four months — is in a Notes app on her phone. Priya is a 38-year-old product director at a tech company, the kind of person who makes decisions about product roadmaps and headcount and go-to-market strategy with confidence and precision. She’s good at decisions in every domain of her life except one: this one. The question of whether to leave her job and build the thing she’s been quietly incubating for two years. Whether to bet on herself in the specific way that terrifies her most.

“I’ve thought about this so many times,” she tells me in session. “I know what I want. I’m pretty sure I know what I want. And then something just — stops. I can’t pull the trigger. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Nothing is wrong with her. What’s happening to Priya is one of the most common experiences I see in my work with driven, ambitious women: the gap between knowing what you want and being able to choose it. The frozen place between insight and action. The territory that most productivity advice doesn’t reach, because it isn’t a problem of information or strategy. It’s something older and more fundamental than that.

This post is about that frozen place. About the three truths I come back to most often when working with clients who are stuck on a major life choice — and about what actually moves the needle when conventional decision-making frameworks haven’t.

If you’ve been circling a decision for weeks or months or years — about your career, your relationship, your living situation, your sense of purpose — I want you to know: your stuckness is not evidence of dysfunction. It’s often evidence of something much more interesting than that. Let’s get into it.

What Is Decisional Paralysis?

DEFINITION

DECISIONAL PARALYSIS

Decisional paralysis — also termed choice overload or analysis paralysis — is a psychological state in which the presence of too many options, the perceived irreversibility of a decision, or the underlying fear of making the wrong choice leads to avoidance, delay, or inability to commit to any course of action. Barry Schwartz, PhD, professor of social theory at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, has demonstrated that an excess of options paradoxically decreases satisfaction and increases anxiety, particularly in individuals who tend toward maximizing — seeking the objectively best outcome — rather than satisficing, which means choosing something good enough.

In plain terms: When you’re frozen in front of a life decision — circling, analyzing, unable to land — it’s not weakness or indecision. It’s often the result of a system that is overwhelmed by the stakes, terrified of making the wrong choice, or simply hasn’t learned that it’s safe to want something and risk being wrong about it.

DEFINITION

SELF-TRUST

Self-trust, in a clinical context, refers to an individual’s capacity to access, believe, and act on their own perceptions, desires, and judgments — even in the absence of external validation. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has argued that one of the core consequences of relational trauma is a disruption of the body’s ability to accurately signal its own needs and preferences — what he calls interoceptive awareness. When internal signals become unreliable guides, choosing becomes profoundly destabilizing.

In plain terms: If you grew up in an environment where your feelings were dismissed, where your wants were treated as inconvenient, or where trusting yourself led to punishment — you may have learned to outsource your decision-making to other people, external frameworks, or the endless cycling of analysis. Not because you’re weak, but because trusting yourself felt genuinely dangerous.

Decisional paralysis is incredibly common among driven, ambitious women — and it’s also deeply misunderstood. From the outside, it can look like laziness, avoidance, or lack of commitment. From the inside, it often feels like the opposite: a relentless, exhausting engagement with a decision that never quite resolves. You’re not not thinking about it. You’re thinking about it constantly. You just can’t land.

In my work, I’ve come to see this kind of stuckness as information rather than dysfunction. It’s telling you something about what this decision costs, what it means, and what’s getting in the way — not just at the logical level, but at the older, more bodily level where the real decision-making actually happens.

Truth #1: Making Life’s Big Choices Really Is Hard — and It’s Supposed to Be

Here’s the first thing I want to say to anyone who’s been berating themselves for their inability to decide something: the difficulty is appropriate. Not in a minimizing way. In a factual way. Major life decisions — about career, relationships, location, identity, the direction of your one wild and precious life — are genuinely hard to make, for reasons that are well-documented in psychology and neuroscience.

Jim Bugental, PhD, existential psychotherapist and author of Psychotherapy and Process: The Fundamentals of an Existential-Humanistic Approach, wrote that “personal identity is always in the process of being formed by the very business of making these endless choices. We are, so to speak, constructing the vehicle even as we attempt to ride in it and steer it.” This isn’t just poetic language. It’s a description of what’s actually happening when you make a major decision: you’re not just choosing between options. You’re choosing who you are. You’re constructing, in real time, a self that will have to live with the choice.

That’s a lot. It’s supposed to feel like a lot.

Barry Schwartz, PhD, professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, has documented in his research on choice overload that the proliferation of options doesn’t make decisions easier — it makes them harder. His studies showed that when people are given more choices, they’re more likely to experience decision regret, less likely to feel satisfied with the choice they make, and more likely to avoid making a choice at all. This is the paradox of modern life for driven women in particular: you have more options than any generation before you. Your career can take you in dozens of different directions. Your relationships can be constructed in ways your grandmother couldn’t have imagined. Your sense of identity isn’t circumscribed by the role you were born into. And all of that freedom — as genuinely wonderful as it is — comes with a corresponding weight. The weight of being responsible for choosing well in a landscape that doesn’t have a map.

There’s also a neurological dimension here. The prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain responsible for complex decision-making, long-range planning, and the integration of emotion with rational thought — is doing something genuinely complex when you’re weighing a major life choice. It’s not just running through pros and cons. It’s integrating past experience, emotional memory, future projection, risk assessment, and values alignment simultaneously. When those systems are in conflict — when your emotion says one thing and your logic says another, or when your values are in tension with each other — the result can be what feels like paralysis but is actually the brain working very hard on a genuinely difficult problem.

So if you’ve been making yourself wrong for not being able to decide — please consider giving yourself the same compassion you’d offer a client. You’re not broken. You’re human, navigating something hard, in a world that offers too many options and too little clarity.

The question isn’t why this is hard. It’s what’s specifically in the way for you — and that’s where we go next.

Truth #2: Every Big Choice Involves a Loss — and That Loss Is Real

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

MARY OLIVER, “The Summer Day,” New and Selected Poems

The second truth is one that most decision-making frameworks skip entirely: every major choice involves a real loss. Not just a theoretical one. A genuine, irrevocable loss of the path not taken — and that loss deserves to be grieved, not just calculated.

When we talk about decisions, we tend to focus on what we’re gaining by choosing one option over another. But the other side of that coin is always present: choosing one path means un-choosing another. Every yes is simultaneously a no. Every commitment closes off other commitments. And if you haven’t given yourself permission to grieve what you’re giving up — if you’ve been telling yourself you shouldn’t feel sad about the paths you’re leaving behind, because you’re choosing something better — you may be experiencing that unacknowledged grief as stuckness.

This shows up constantly in the decisions about career trajectory — do I stay or do I go? — but it shows up just as powerfully in relationship decisions, geographic decisions, and decisions about how to spend the finite years of a life. Choosing to build something means choosing not to build something else. Choosing to stay in a city means choosing not to live somewhere else. Choosing a partner means choosing not to choose every other possible partner. These aren’t just logical trade-offs. They’re losses. And when we don’t name them as losses, they tend to resurface as ambivalence, as prolonged circling, as the sense of not being able to land anywhere.

In my work with clients who are stuck on career decisions in particular, I often find that what looks like indecision is actually unmourned ambition. They’re not just choosing between two jobs. They’re choosing between two versions of themselves — and one of those versions has to be let go. That letting-go is a grief, even when the version they’re choosing is the better one, even when it’s what they most want. You’re allowed to mourn the self you didn’t become. In fact, doing so is often what makes it possible to fully inhabit the self you did become.

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Priya, whom we met at the beginning of this post, discovered this when she finally named what she was actually afraid of. It wasn’t failure — she’d failed at things before and survived. It was grief: specifically, the grief of closing the door on the version of herself that was a “safe” employee, reliably housed and benefited and structured. Leaving that job didn’t just mean gaining freedom. It meant losing an identity she’d built over a decade. That loss was real. And once she named it — once she gave herself permission to feel sad about it instead of only analyzing it — the decision came faster than she expected.

The practical implication: if you’re stuck on a decision, try asking not just “what do I want to gain?” but “what am I afraid to lose?” — and then let yourself actually feel the grief of that loss before you make the choice. Not as a reason to stay stuck. As a way of moving through the stuckness with all of yourself intact.

Truth #3: If You Didn’t Learn to Trust Yourself, Choosing Feels Dangerous

The third truth is the one that requires the most tenderness, because it gets at something foundational: if you grew up in an environment where your feelings weren’t safe to have, where your wants were treated as inconvenient or wrong, where trusting your own perceptions led to punishment or dismissal — you may have learned, at a very early age, that your internal experience is not a reliable guide.

This is one of the core legacies of childhood emotional neglect: not dramatic trauma, not obvious harm, but a quieter pattern of experiences in which your feelings were not mirrored, your needs were not consistently met, and your sense of your own inner life was subtly undermined. The result, in adulthood, is often a woman who is extraordinarily capable in domains that have external feedback loops — professional performance, intellectual achievement, caregiving — and profoundly uncertain in domains that require her to trust herself as the final authority.

Decisions are one of those domains. A major life choice ultimately comes down to: what do I want? What matters to me? What is my sense of the right direction? And if your connection to your own inner compass was disrupted early — if the signal got scrambled by an environment that told you repeatedly, in ways subtle or overt, that your wants weren’t trustworthy or worth honoring — then making a major choice can feel not just difficult but genuinely dangerous.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how trauma disrupts interoception — the body’s ability to accurately read its own internal signals. “The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind,” van der Kolk writes. For women with a history of developmental trauma, that process of re-establishing ownership — learning to trust what their body and their gut are telling them — is often the core work of healing, and it’s deeply intertwined with the capacity to make decisions that feel genuinely self-authored rather than driven by anxiety, people-pleasing, or the internalized expectations of people who are long gone.

The practical implication here is that the work of getting unstuck often isn’t more analysis. It’s learning to slow down enough to hear what you actually want — underneath the noise of what you should want, what other people want for you, what you’re afraid of wanting. That kind of listening often requires support: therapy, trusted relationships with people who know you well, and the willingness to sit with some discomfort before the signal gets clear.

If patterns of intergenerational trauma are shaping your relationship to choice — if you inherited a family system in which wanting things for yourself was dangerous or selfish — understanding those patterns is part of what allows you to move past them. Understanding the full weight of family estrangement and its relational costs can also shed light on why certain decisions feel so loaded with loss before you even make them.

Both/And: You Can Be Stuck and Still Be Moving

Here’s a Both/And that I find liberating for clients who’ve been in the frozen place for a long time: you can be completely stuck on a decision and still be doing meaningful work. The circling, the sitting with the question, the refusal to make a choice before you’re ready — this is not nothing. It is, in fact, a form of movement, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

The cultural pressure around decisions is to move quickly, to be decisive, to have a bias toward action. This is useful advice for some contexts — and it’s deeply unhelpful for others. Some of the most important decisions of our lives can’t and shouldn’t be rushed. They require gestation. They require sitting with the discomfort of not knowing until enough clarity emerges to move forward. The impatience you feel — the pressure you put on yourself to just decide already — may itself be part of what’s keeping you stuck. Because urgency tends to produce anxiety, and anxiety tends to narrow the range of options you can see.

Jordan is a physician in her early forties who spent two years deciding whether to leave a subspecialty she’d trained for ten years. She describes those two years as feeling like failure — like she should have been able to decide faster, like her inability to choose was evidence of weakness. “I kept thinking: just make a decision. You’re a surgeon. You make decisions under pressure every single day.” She eventually recognized that the speed she brought to clinical decisions — which were bounded, clear, and reversible if wrong — was completely inappropriate for a career identity decision that would reshape every other dimension of her life. “Those were different kinds of decisions. I needed different timelines. I needed to stop punishing myself for not being done yet.”

The Both/And here is: you can be in the process and not yet at the conclusion. You can be a decisive, capable, effective person and genuinely not know yet what you want. You can be moving toward clarity even when clarity hasn’t arrived. These things are not contradictions. They’re the honest reality of what it looks like to make a decision that actually fits your life.

This is worth exploring in the context of trauma and difficulty visualizing the future — because for many women with relational trauma histories, the inability to imagine the future is part of what makes choosing feel so impossible. You can’t choose a future you can’t picture. And healing that particular limitation is often part of the path through.

The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Get Stuck in Particular Ways

The experience of decisional paralysis doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside a specific social and cultural context — and for driven, ambitious women, that context includes some particular pressures that make already-hard decisions harder.

First: the cultural expectation of the driven woman as a decision-maker. If you’re a leader — in your organization, your family, your community — there’s enormous pressure to project confidence and decisiveness. This means that the moments when you’re genuinely uncertain, genuinely stuck, often happen in private, because uncertainty feels incompatible with the image you’re expected to project. The result is that you’re navigating some of your hardest personal decisions with less support than you’d have if the difficulty were visible. You don’t get to workshop it. You don’t get to say “I’m in the middle of something really hard” at a leadership meeting. You just carry it, in the spaces between everything else you’re managing, until it resolves or exhausts you.

Second: the pressure to choose optimally. Driven women often have the maximizer tendency — the drive to find the objectively best choice, not just a good-enough one. This is enormously useful in professional contexts. It’s often exhausting in personal ones. Because in personal life, especially in the big decisions about values and direction and meaning, there often isn’t an objectively best choice. There are just different choices, with different costs and different gifts, and the task is to choose one with as much honesty and self-knowledge as you can muster. The maximizer tendency can keep you in analysis indefinitely, because there’s always more information to gather, always another perspective to consider, always a scenario you haven’t fully modeled yet.

Third: the particular weight of making choices after a relational trauma history. Women who grew up with childhood emotional neglect or developmental trauma often carry an additional complication in their decision-making: the old messages about what they deserve. What they’re allowed to want. Whether their instincts can be trusted. Whether choosing something for themselves — as opposed to for everyone else — is even legitimate. These aren’t just intellectual obstacles. They’re embodied ones. They live in the hesitation before speaking, in the instinct to consult everyone before committing, in the particular anxiety that comes with imagining being wrong about something important.

Understanding these systemic pressures doesn’t make the decision for you. But it can help you stop attributing systemic problems to personal inadequacy — which is itself a shift that creates more room to move.

If self-isolation is part of how you navigate difficulty, it’s worth noticing whether it’s also part of how you’re navigating this decision — whether you’re doing this work completely alone when you don’t have to be.

How to Move from Stuck to Clarity

When I work with clients on major decisions, I’m not trying to give them the answer. I’m trying to help them get clear enough about themselves to hear their own answer. These are the practices that most consistently help.

Name what you’re actually afraid of. Not the surface fear (what if I fail?) but the older one underneath it (what if I’m not worth betting on?). The surface fear is usually manageable. The older one is what keeps you from moving. Naming it — in writing, in therapy, out loud to someone you trust — begins to metabolize its power.

Separate the decision from the urgency. There are very few decisions in adult life that are truly as urgent as they feel. The urgency is often anxiety-generated — a sense that you need to decide now or the opportunity will disappear, or that staying in uncertainty any longer is intolerable. Sometimes this is true. But often the urgency is something you can set down long enough to think more clearly. Ask yourself: if I had six more months on this, would I use them? And if yes, what does that tell you about where you actually are?

Try the “10-10-10” question. Suzy Welch, author of 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea, suggests asking: how will I feel about this choice 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now, 10 years from now? The disproportionate weight you give to immediate consequences often shifts when you take the longer view. The fear that feels unbearable today may feel manageable in a year. The choice you’re afraid to make may feel like the obvious right move a decade from now.

Notice the body, not just the mind. Pay attention to how each option feels in your body — not your thoughts about it, but the actual somatic experience of imagining it. Does one option produce a sense of constriction? Expansion? A gut-level “yes” or “no” that you’ve been overriding with analysis? Your body often knows before your mind catches up. Learning to listen to that signal is part of what therapy — especially somatic or trauma-informed therapy — helps develop.

Get support. This one sounds obvious but is consistently underdone by driven women. Support doesn’t mean asking everyone you know for their opinion. It means finding the right container — whether that’s a trusted friend who knows you well, a therapist who understands your patterns, or an executive coach who can help you think through the professional dimensions of the decision — where you can be genuinely honest about what you want and what’s getting in the way. We’re not meant to navigate our most important decisions entirely alone. The most capable woman in the room still needs someone to think out loud with.

Give yourself permission to choose imperfectly. There is no perfect choice. There is no version of the decision that will have zero regret, zero loss, zero uncertainty. The goal isn’t to eliminate the risk of being wrong. The goal is to make the best choice you can with the information and self-knowledge you currently have — and then to trust yourself to navigate whatever comes next. That trust is built by making choices and living through them, not by waiting until you’re sure you won’t have regrets.

Priya did finally make her choice. She gave her notice in November. She describes the period after as one of the hardest and most alive she’s ever felt — full of uncertainty, full of fear, and also full of something she’d been missing for years: the specific vitality that comes from betting on yourself in a way that’s actually scary. She didn’t wait until she wasn’t scared. She learned that scared and ready can coexist.

That coexistence — of fear and movement, of uncertainty and action, of not-knowing and choosing anyway — is, I’d argue, the fundamental human condition. Not a problem to be solved. A terrain to be navigated, with as much honesty and support as you can muster.

Related Reading

Barry Schwartz, PhD. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Ecco, 2004.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Antonio Damasio, MD, PhD. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam, 1994.

Jim Bugental, PhD. Psychotherapy and Process: The Fundamentals of an Existential-Humanistic Approach. Addison-Wesley, 1978.

Suzy Welch. 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea. Scribner, 2009.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women -- including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs -- in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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