Honor the Upward Spiral: The H in FLOURISH
This kid has been upward Spiraling since 1985
You notice it in the car, usually. Some version of wait, am I doing this again?
Maybe you just said yes to something you didn't want to do, felt the familiar flatness in your chest as the word left your mouth. Maybe you caught yourself managing someone else's feelings instead of your own, or noticed you'd quietly taken on a project nobody asked you to take on, or realized you've been shrinking your opinions in a meeting so nobody has to feel a certain way about you. And underneath the specific thing is a worse feeling, something closer to I thought I was past this.
That second feeling is the one I want to talk about. Not the pattern itself, but what happens in the half-second after you spot it. Because for a long time, my answer to am I doing this again was some flavor of quiet horror. I had done the work. I had the language for this. I had, allegedly, evolved. And here I was, forty years old, doing the thing again.
This is the last post in the FLOURISH series, and it's the one that makes sense of all the others. Because if you've been doing the work, F through I, you are going to end up back here. Because that’s sort of the point, Back, and Better.
This is H, Honor the Upward Spiral.
If you're new to the series, FLOURISH is my framework for burnout recovery, and it runs in two loops. The first loop is about seeing clearly. The second is about testing what you saw against your actual life.
Loop One:
Loop Two:
H — Honor the Upward Spiral (you're here)
Something nobody tells you when you start this work is that H doesn't lead to a finish line. It leads back to F. Not the same F. A higher one. That's the whole point of this post.
Recovery Was Never Going to Be a Straight Line
Somewhere in my twenties, I heard Derek Sivers tell a story about a music teacher named Kimo Williams, who took him aside at seventeen and told him he could learn two years of college harmony in five lessons, because there's no speed limit. "The standard pace is for chumps," Kimo told him. The system is built for the average person to keep up. If you're more driven, you can do more than anyone expects.
I loved this. I built a whole identity on it. Average is for losers, I decided, privately, in the smug way you decide things at twenty-six. I could go faster than the timeline everyone else was on. And in a lot of ways, I did. Degrees, jobs, the whole résumé version of a life, all ahead of schedule.
What that story didn't prepare me for was the part where I kept hitting the same wall. Not a career wall. A me wall. Codependency. People-pleasing. Saying yes at the exact moment my body was screaming no. Taking on responsibility for things that were never mine to carry. Staying small so the people around me could stay comfortable. Boundaries with more holes than fence. I'd do real work on one of these, feel the relief of having handled it, and then eight months later find myself standing in the same spot, having the same fight with myself, wondering what had gone wrong.
For a while I thought the wall meant I'd failed the "no speed limit" test. That I was, in fact, standard pace. Maybe even below it.
Then I noticed something. Each time I landed back at that wall, I wasn't quite the same person hitting it. I had new language. New reflexes. A faster read on what was happening. The wall was the same shape, but I was standing somewhere slightly different in relation to it. That's when it stopped looking like a wall and started looking like a spiral. Not a circle bringing me back to where I started. A spiral, bringing me back to the same angle, a little higher up.
Progress that looks like a straight line to a fixed destination is a two-dimensional idea. Real change adds a dimension. You hit the same coordinate on the map, over and over, but you're rising on an axis the map doesn't show. My job isn't to stop returning to that coordinate. It's to notice I'm there faster each time, and to bring a slightly more skilled version of myself to meet it.
Why the Spiral Beats the Circle
This isn't just a nice way of being easy on myself. It's closer to how researchers who study behavior change actually describe what change looks like.
James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente spent years studying how people actually quit smoking, and what they found upended the tidy, linear model most of us assume change follows. In their original research, only about 5% of people who successfully quit did it in one clean pass. Everyone else relapsed and came back around. But — and this is the part that matters — the people who eventually succeeded weren't circling. They were spiraling. Each time they relapsed and returned to the process, they carried forward something they'd learned the time before: a trigger they now recognized faster, a strategy that worked a little better, a shorter and less devastating slip. Prochaska and DiClemente built relapse directly into the model, not as failure, but as the mechanism the spiral runs on.
There's a parallel finding in positive psychology that I find almost more useful, because it explains why some spirals go up and others just... spin. Barbara Fredrickson and Thomas Joiner's research on what they call upward spirals found that positive emotion and what they term "broad-minded coping" build on each other over time. Feeling even a little bit resourced widens what you're able to notice and try. Trying something new and having it go okay produces a bit more of that resourced feeling. Round and round, each pass slightly wider than the last. The mechanism runs in reverse too, which is the less comforting half of the finding: shame and self-criticism narrow your options in exactly the same way positive states widen them. A spiral can trend up or down. What determines the direction, more than anything else, is what you do with yourself in the moment you notice you're back at the wall.
Which is where self-compassion stops being a nice sentiment and becomes, in my experience, the actual engine of the whole thing. Kristin Neff's research breaks self-compassion into three pieces: self-kindness instead of harsh judgment, remembering that struggling is a shared human experience rather than a personal defect, and holding the difficulty in balanced awareness instead of either drowning in it or denying it's there. Her work, and the research that's followed it, consistently finds that people who meet their own setbacks with warmth change faster and more durably than people who meet them with criticism. Not because the warmth erases the setback. Because shame is itself a drag on the system, an extra stressor the nervous system has to spend energy managing instead of spending that energy on the actual change.
Put those three findings together and you get something like this. The spiral is normal, maybe universal, for anyone doing real change. The direction of the spiral, up or down, is decided largely by whether you treat the return trip as evidence of failure or as data. And the fastest way through the low point of the loop is the same tool that widens what you can do at the high point, and it's kindness toward yourself, right when you're standing at the wall again.
What This Actually Looks Like
A client of mine, a few months into working the F through U steps, described the exact moment I'm talking about. She'd done real work on over-responsibility. She could name the pattern fluently, had caught herself mid-rescue a dozen times, had started actually letting things land on the people whose things they were. Then a family situation came up that hit every old button at once, and she found herself, three days in, having quietly taken over the entire logistics of a crisis that wasn't hers to run.
Her first reaction was disgust. I know better than this. Her second reaction, once we talked it through, was noticing something she wouldn't have caught a year earlier. She'd taken it over, yes, but she'd also said out loud, to one person, "I don't think this is actually mine to carry, and I'm doing it anyway." A year ago that sentence wouldn't have existed. She was still at the wall. She just had a flashlight this time.
Another client, further along, described catching an old contempt-flavored resentment rising in her during a meeting and, instead of stewing on it for a week like she used to, named it to herself within the hour, something like there's the resentment, that means a boundary got crossed somewhere, what is it. Same trigger as five years earlier. The gap between the trigger and the recognition had gone from a week to an hour. That gap is the whole game.
Neither of these women "finished" their pattern. Both of them moved up the spiral without ever fully leaving the coordinate that pattern lives at. That's not a consolation prize. In this model, it's the actual definition of progress.
A Few Things to Try This Week
Not homework. Just a few ways to work with the spiral instead of fighting it.
1. Time the recognition, not the relapse. Instead of asking "did I avoid the old pattern," ask "how long did it take me to notice I was in it." Days, hours, minutes. That number, tracked honestly over months, is a far more accurate progress marker than whether the pattern showed up at all. It probably will show up. The question is how fast your flashlight comes on.
2. Name what's different this loop. When you catch yourself back at a familiar wall, pause and ask what you have this time that you didn't have last time. A phrase. A friend you told. A boundary you actually said out loud, even imperfectly. Write the one-sentence answer down somewhere. That's your altitude reading. It's easy to miss the fact that you're higher up when the wall looks identical.
3. Use the self-compassion pause at the exact moment of noticing. Not later, not after you've built a case against yourself. Right when you catch it. Kristin Neff's own suggestion is disarmingly simple, a hand on your chest, a phrase like this is hard, and I'm allowed to be kind to myself right now. A few seconds. The point isn't to feel better immediately. It's to stop the shame spiral from grabbing the wheel before the actual spiral gets a chance to go up.
4. Slow down at the top, speed up at the bottom. Picture a planet in an elliptical orbit, moving fastest at its closest pass to the sun and slowest out at the far edge. I try to do the opposite on purpose. When I'm doing well, functioning, clear-headed, I try to slow down and actually register it, instead of rushing past it toward the next goal. When I catch myself back at an old wall, I try to move through that part quickly. Notice it, name it, run one small experiment (this is where R comes back in), and get out, instead of setting up camp in the shame.
The Part Underneath the Framework
Here's what I actually think this post is about, underneath the spiral metaphor.
I used to hide my slide-backs. Not from everyone. From the people I suspected thought I had it figured out. There's a particular flavor of ego that shows up once you've done some genuine growth work, done a good relapse into a pattern that's supposedly beneath you, and then quietly panicked that someone will notice you're not as evolved as they think. I've watched this in clients too. The shame isn't really about the pattern. It's about being caught not having arrived, in front of someone who you'd let believe you had.
That's the tension this whole framework runs into eventually. Somewhere underneath the tools and the steps is a belief that recovery has a finish line, and that the finish line is where you finally get to stop worrying about being seen. But there is no finish line. There's only the question of how you want to keep spiraling, and what you're optimizing for while you do it.
For me, that question comes down to two things. Kindness and growth. Not niceness, which is often just conflict-avoidance wearing a friendly face, but a kindness with some grit in it, the kind that tells someone the true thing because it respects them enough to. And not growth for its own sake, which just turns into another achievement treadmill with better branding. Growth in service of something, kindness as its compass. I'd trade every other value I hold, courage, generosity, autonomy, achievement, all of it, before I'd trade those two, because if I catch myself growing without kindness, or being kind without any real growth attached, something in me knows it's off.
What I eventually understood is that self-compassion isn't a separate practice from those two values. It's the ritual that runs them both at once. Being kind to yourself in the exact moment you notice you're back at an old wall is kindness, aimed at the one person you have permanent, unavoidable access to. And it's what actually lets the growth happen, because a nervous system busy managing shame has less room left to learn anything. The slide-backs stopped being evidence against me once I saw them this way. They became the place where the two things I care about most actually get to operate. Which means, oddly, I look forward to them a little. Not the discomfort. The chance to notice, again, that I'm higher up than the last time I stood here.
Where This Goes
A blog post can name the spiral for you. It can even give you language for the exact moment you're standing in, next time you catch yourself back at an old wall. What it can't do is stand there with you while you figure out what's different this time, or help you tell the difference between a genuine constraint and a story you've been telling yourself so long it feels like one.
That's the work I actually do. If you want support moving through your own version of this loop, with real stakes and real relationships attached, Regenerate + Relaunch is where we work through the full FLOURISH process together. If you're a leader trying to build this kind of resilience into a team rather than just your own life, Speaking and Training is where that happens. And if someone in your life just came to mind while you were reading this, the referral program is there for exactly that.
This is the last letter in FLOURISH. Which mostly means it's time to go back to F, a little higher up than you were.
