Sunday 14th June
A few weeks ago I wrote about The Moving Bar: the scoring system that resets after every achievement instead of ever declaring a winner.
The response to that letter was striking. So many people recognised the pattern immediately. They knew exactly what I meant by hitting a target only to find that the target had already moved
What I kept thinking afterwards was this: recognising the bar isn’t usually the hard part.
Over time I became less interested in helping people understand the pattern and more interested in helping them stand differently in relation to it. Most already understood it remarkably well.
This is something I’ve noticed repeatedly in clinical work. People arrive having done thoughtful therapy, read widely, reflected deeply, and developed genuine insight into why they think and feel the way they do. They can often describe the pattern with impressive precision.
And yet they’re still living it.
For a long time I assumed that meant they needed a better explanation. A sharper formulation. A cleaner intervention. More understanding.
I’m less convinced of that now.
Insight and the pattern seem perfectly capable of coexisting. In fact, understanding sometimes makes the running of the pattern more articulate rather than less automatic. It’s possible to narrate exactly what’s happening while still finding yourself following it.
That changed how I think about the work.
Instead of asking, How do we understand this better?, I find myself asking, What happens in the moment the pattern arrives?
With The Moving Bar, the crucial moment isn’t the achievement itself. It’s the instant afterwards, when the scoring system quietly resets and begins recruiting you into the next pursuit.
The bar moving was never really the problem.
Being recruited by it, instantly and without noticing, is the part worth paying attention to.
What often helps isn’t another explanation but something much smaller: the ability to see the reset happen before you’re fully inside it. To notice the thought arrive without immediately obeying it. To experience, even briefly, a fraction of a second between the bar moving and your whole system mobilising to chase it.
Though it doesn’t sound like a glossy intervention, in my experience, that’s where a surprising amount of change begins.
The literature on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy points towards something similar: the possibility of creating space between an internal event and the action that usually follows. Not eliminating the thought. Not arguing with it. Simply changing your relationship to it.
That half-second isn’t glamorous. It won’t feel like a breakthrough. In fact, it may feel so ordinary that you’re tempted to overlook it. But I wouldn’t.
If you’ve been treating your stuckness as evidence that you haven’t understood yourself well enough, it may be worth holding the opposite possibility. Your understanding might already be more than adequate.
The next step may not be another insight.
It may be practising the gap.
As always, hold it lightly.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand