REASONS TO FEEL AS IF TRAPPED
You feel suffocated and weighed down by some kind of invisible force.
You’ve simply outgrown your current life:
Here’s the thing, people are not static beings. As human beings, we are forever changing, evolving, and transforming.
Anything that does not change, dies, as we can quite clearly see in the world around us. When species, ecosystems, and even business and trends don’t evolve, they fade away into oblivion. This natural law is evolution in process.
And the same goes for us as people: we are changing each and every day. We might not be consciously aware of it (because we’re usually evolving in minuscule ways), but we are not the exact same person as we were this time yesterday.
Ask yourself, “Am I the exact same person as I was a year ago?” Likely, your answer will be no, you’ve changed! And this is completely fine!
Feeling trapped is therefore often a product of simply outgrowing your current life. Perhaps you don’t have much in common with your friends anymore, your career interests have changed, or you just don’t relate as deeply to your partner anymore.
This is all completely normal, yet as humans, we tend to pathologize change. We become neurotic and fearful about it because we desperately want to control life to give us a sense of comfort and security. But the truth is that change is inevitable – resistance is futile!
When you aren’t willing to upgrade or change your life, even when you’ve outgrown it long ago, you feel suffocated. Just imagine how uncomfortable it would be squeezing yourself into the clothes you wore ten or twenty years ago! Yes, you might feel comforted in some small way … but is the comfort and familiarity you feel worth the experience of dying inside?
Remember that it’s completely normal to not want to let go, so be gentle and compassionate towards yourself. It’s OK to grow and change. It is your birthright.
You’ve taken on too many responsibilities:
Responsibilities are a normal part of life; they teach us to be mature, accountable, patient, and empathetic.
But there can come a point in our lives when we take on more responsibilities than we can handle … and we start to feel TRAPPED.
Why? Usually, we fill our lives with pointless or excessive commitments because we’re trying to escape from something, whether that is our pain, our insecurities, our past, our traumas, or some kind of buried emotion that haunts us like grief, emptiness, or anger.
If you’re feeling trapped, closely examine your life. Have you bitten off more than you can chew? Why? And furthermore, what can you do to decrease your workload?
Soul loss and lack of life purpose:
Probably the biggest reason why many of us undergo the excruciating feeling of being trapped is soul loss.
When we have lost contact with our souls we feel the unshakable sense that ‘something is missing’ from our lives.
This feeling is accompanied by loneliness, emotional numbness, emptiness, restlessness, irritability, and of course, anxiety and depression.
Soul loss occurs for many reasons such as a traumatic life experience or simply situations where we’ve had to consistently shape ourselves into who others want us to be (causing us to feel repressed and withered inside).
The ego is our false self, the concept of “me” that we have inside of our brains which is based on stories about the past or future.
The more we serve our ego and its desires, the more empty and unfulfilled we feel because the ego is obsessed with power, control, and self-gratification – something that is ultimately unfulfilling.
Our soul, on the other hand, is focused on love and unity: on learning how to love, behaving from a place of love, speaking with love, and ultimately, embodying love as our true nature.
When we are in contact with our souls, we discover our unique life purpose which helps us to stop feeling trapped by our circumstances. We start to feel empowered and begin to listen to the voice of the heart rather than the voice of the mind.
Feeling trapped, therefore, is often a sign that you’re undergoing not just a loss of soul connection and therefore lack of life purpose, but you’re starting to “wake up” on a deeper level. You’re beginning the spiritual awakening process where you sense that there’s much more to life than meets the eye.
