Feeling stuck: an existential & Buddhist perspective

Prefer a shorter read? Try Why do I feel stuck?

Few experiences are as quietly distressing as the feeling of being stuck. Clients often arrive in therapy describing it in strikingly similar language: "I know something needs to change, but I can't move." "I feel like I'm watching my own life from behind glass." "Every direction seems wrong, so I go nowhere." Stuckness is not, in itself, a diagnostic category. It can accompany depression or anxiety, but it can also arise in people who are, by conventional measures, functioning well — holding down jobs, maintaining relationships — while privately feeling paralysed, flat, or trapped.

This article explores stuckness through two lenses that speak to each other with surprising ease: existential therapy, a philosophical approach to counselling rooted in European thought, and Buddhist psychology, a contemplative tradition more than two millennia old. Both traditions take seriously the idea that suffering is not merely a malfunction to be corrected, but a signal — an invitation to examine how we are living. For someone considering therapy, understanding these perspectives can reframe stuckness from a personal failure into a meaningful, workable human experience.

What do we mean by "stuckness"?

In everyday language, stuckness describes a felt inability to move forward: in a career, a relationship, a grief process, or simply in one's sense of self. Psychologically, it often involves a painful combination of awareness and immobility — we can see the problem clearly, yet cannot act on it. Researchers in experiential psychotherapy have described related phenomena as "blocked processing" or an interruption in the natural flow of emotional experiencing (Greenberg, 2015). In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a related concept is experiential avoidance: the attempt to escape unwanted thoughts and feelings, which paradoxically narrows life and keeps us fixed in place (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012).

What these accounts share is the insight that stuckness is rarely about a lack of information or willpower. People who feel stuck usually know what they "should" do. The stuckness lives somewhere deeper — in how we relate to choice, uncertainty, loss, and ourselves.

The existential view: stuckness as an encounter with freedom

Existential therapy grew out of the work of philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and was developed clinically by figures including Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, and Emmy van Deurzen. Rather than treating symptoms as problems to be eliminated, existential therapists understand psychological distress as arising from our confrontation with the basic conditions — the "givens" — of human existence. Yalom (1980) famously identified four such givens: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.

Stuckness, from this perspective, is often a disguised encounter with freedom and its accompanying anxiety. Sartre (1943/2003) argued that human beings are "condemned to be free": we cannot avoid choosing, because even refusing to choose is itself a choice. Every genuine decision involves loss — to say yes to one path is to say no to others — and this can feel unbearable. Kierkegaard (1844/1980) described anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom": the vertigo we feel when we look into the open space of our own possibilities. Seen this way, stuckness is not the absence of movement but a defensive posture against the anxiety of moving. We freeze because choosing would make us responsible for our lives in a way that feels exposing.

Stuckness can also signal a crisis of meaning. Frankl (1959/2004), writing from his experience of the concentration camps, argued that human beings are fundamentally motivated by a "will to meaning," and that when meaning collapses or was never truly our own — when we have been living out a script written by parents, culture, or fear — we experience what he called an "existential vacuum": boredom, apathy, and a sense of inner deadness that closely resembles what clients describe as stuckness.

Existential therapy, then, does not rush to "unstick" the client with techniques. Instead, it invites a careful, honest exploration: What is this stuckness protecting me from? What would I have to face, feel, or give up in order to move? Whose life am I actually living? Van Deurzen (2012) describes the therapist's role as helping clients examine their assumptions about existence across physical, social, personal, and spiritual dimensions, so that they can live more deliberately and authentically. Paradoxically, when the anxiety underneath stuckness is faced rather than avoided, movement often returns of its own accord.

The Buddhist view: stuckness as clinging

Buddhist psychology approaches the same territory from a different angle. The Buddha's foundational teaching, the Four Noble Truths, begins with the observation that ordinary life is marked by dukkha — a Pali word often translated as "suffering," but perhaps better rendered as unsatisfactoriness, friction, or, tellingly, stuckness. The second truth identifies the cause of dukkha as tanha: craving, grasping, or clinging (Gethin, 1998).

From this view, we become stuck not because life stops moving — Buddhism insists that everything is impermanent (anicca) and always in flux — but because we stop moving with it. We cling to how things were, how they should be, or a fixed story of who we are ("I'm the kind of person who...", "I can't be someone who..."). The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or non-self, suggests that this fixed self-story is itself a construction: useful in some ways, but a prison when held too tightly (Rahula, 1974). Much of what clients experience as stuckness can be understood, in Buddhist terms, as clinging to a self-concept or an outcome that reality is no longer supporting.

Buddhism also offers a precise account of how we keep ourselves stuck moment to moment. The teaching of the "second arrow" (Sallatha Sutta, SN 36.6) observes that pain is inevitable, but that we add a second layer of suffering through our reactions: resisting, ruminating, blaming ourselves for feeling what we feel. A person stuck in grief, for instance, suffers the grief itself (the first arrow) and then suffers about the grief — "I should be over this by now" (the second arrow). It is very often the second arrow that produces the frozen, churning quality of stuckness.

The Buddhist response is not to force change but to cultivate mindful, compassionate awareness: turning toward experience as it is, with curiosity rather than resistance. Modern clinical adaptations of this principle — Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2013) — have a substantial evidence base for depression, anxiety, and rumination, the cognitive engine of much stuckness. The meditation teacher Pema Chödrön (1997) captures the spirit of this approach: the way through difficulty is not to escape it but to soften toward it, to "stay" with what is uncomfortable until it reveals its workability.

Where the two traditions meet

Although existentialism and Buddhism emerged from very different worlds, scholars and clinicians have long noted their deep resonances (Batchelor, 1997; Claessens, 2010). Both traditions hold that:

Suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, not an anomaly. Existentialists speak of the givens of existence; Buddhists speak of dukkha. In both cases, the message to the stuck person is profoundly de-shaming: you are not broken; you are human, and you are meeting something real.

Avoidance deepens suffering. Existential therapy sees stuckness as a flight from the anxiety of freedom and finitude; Buddhism sees it as clinging and resistance. Both prescribe the same counterintuitive medicine: turn toward what you have been avoiding.

Impermanence is both the wound and the cure. Heidegger (1927/1962) argued that honestly facing our mortality — "being-toward-death" — is what frees us to live resolutely and authentically. Buddhism likewise treats contemplation of impermanence as liberating: because nothing is fixed, no stuck state is permanent either. The very impermanence we fear guarantees that stuckness cannot last unless we actively maintain it.

The self is more fluid than we believe. Sartre's claim that "existence precedes essence" — that we are not born with a fixed nature but create ourselves through choices — parallels the Buddhist teaching of non-self. Both dissolve the sentence at the heart of most stuckness: "But this is just who I am."

There is one important difference of emphasis. Existential therapy centres on meaning-making and choice: it asks you to author your life. Buddhism centres on letting go and awareness: it asks you to loosen your grip. In practice, these are complementary movements — like an in-breath and an out-breath. Many contemporary therapists integrate both, helping clients first develop the mindful stability to face difficult experience, and then the existential courage to choose in the light of what they find (Nanda, 2010).

What this might mean for you

If you are considering counselling because you feel stuck, these perspectives suggest a few gentle reframes:

Your stuckness makes sense. It is very likely protecting you from something — an anxiety, a grief, a loss of identity — that once felt too big to face. Therapy offers a supported space in which it no longer has to be faced alone.

You do not need to know the answer before you begin. Both traditions agree that clarity emerges from honest engagement with experience, not from thinking harder while standing still.

The goal is not a life without difficulty. It is a different relationship to difficulty — one marked by awareness, self-compassion, and the freedom to choose your response. As Frankl (1959/2004) observed, even when circumstances cannot be changed, we retain the freedom to choose our attitude toward them.

Stuckness is impermanent. However solid it feels, it is a process, not a fact — and processes can change.

Existentially informed therapy, sometimes enriched with mindfulness practice, will not hand you a five-step plan. Instead, it offers something arguably more durable: a way of understanding your stuckness that restores your dignity, and a practice of meeting yourself that, over time, restores your movement.

This article is intended for general information and reflection. It is not a substitute for professional mental health assessment or treatment. If you are experiencing significant distress, please speak with a qualified counsellor, therapist, or your GP.