The Seesaw Effect: Why Becoming More Real Often Means Going to Extremes Before Finding Balance

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

How the ‘Seesaw Effect’ Plays a Role in Your Transformational Journey into REALNESS

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about becoming more REAL is that, sometimes, you have to become at least little bit more UNREAL before you can find your way back to the truth.

This might sound a bit weird but it’s something that I’ve observed repeatedly over the years whilst coaching people through the process of transformation and integration:

Essentially, when people start becoming more aware of themselves, identifying the patterns that have been holding them back, and making a conscious effort to change then they can often go through a period of swinging from one extreme to another.

I’ve started calling this phenomenon the See-Saw Effect:

The basic idea is that when we recognise that we’ve been living with too much of one quality and not enough of its opposite then we consciously start cultivating the quality we’ve been missing.

Because we’ve spent so long suppressing, neglecting, or avoiding that part of ourselves, however, then we sometimes overcompensate and temporarily swing too far in the opposite direction.

This isn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, though – in fact, it’s often a necessary part of the journey towards wholeness and so understanding the See-Saw Effect can help you navigate your own transformation without getting frustrated, judging yourself unnecessarily, or mistaking one extreme for another version of the ‘truth’.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Why We Sometimes Need to Go to Extremes to Find Balance

Usually, when we reach the point where we genuinely want to change our lives, it’s because we’ve become aware of some tendency within ourselves that’s causing problems and holding us back from being whatever it is that we want to be in our REALNESS.

In other words, we reach a kind of point of no return where we know we have to change something – for example:

• Maybe we’ve noticed that we’re too emotional.
  
  
• Too serious.
  
  
• Too lazy.
  
  
• Too busy.
  
  
• Too passive.
  
  
• Too controlling.
  
  
• Too promiscuous.
  
  
• Too frugal.
  
  
• Too [whatever].

Whatever it happens to be, the point is that we’ve reached a stage where we recognise that something about the way we’re currently showing up within ourselves and our lives isn’t working and so it’s time to start doing things differently.

The See-Saw Effect is the process that people tend to go through as they try to balance themselves out in this way.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Somebody realises they’ve been lazy and inactive and so they suddenly go into an extremely active mode and start filling every available moment with exercise, projects, and productivity.
   
   
2. Somebody realises they’ve had unhealthy boundaries for most of their lives and so they turn up the volume and suddenly become extremely rigid with everybody, refusing to compromise on almost anything.
   
   
3. A man realises he’s been out of touch with his masculine energy and so he turns up the volume on being as ‘masculine’ as possible, perhaps becoming overly assertive, competitive, or dominant (depending on which idea of ‘masculine’ he picked up).
   
   
4. Somebody realises they’ve been terrible with money and so they become extremely frugal, scrutinising every penny and denying themselves things they could comfortably afford.
   
   
5. Somebody thinks they’ve been too promiscuous and so they become absolutely abstemious when it comes to sexual activity – perhaps treating even healthy expressions of desire as something to avoid.

In all these cases, the See-Saw Effect is consciously being set in motion because somebody is trying to cultivate new qualities within themselves and so they’ve recognised an imbalance and are attempting to correct it.

The problem, though, is that – initially – their approach is often just as unbalanced as the original pattern they were trying to escape because they’ve gone from one extreme to the other in an attempt to ‘fix’ whatever flaws they’ve noted in themselves.

What’s really interesting, though, is that his initial imbalance can be a necessary part of becoming more balanced and whole overall.

Let’s explore this in a bit more detail:

Bringing the Shadow Back Into the Light

One of the fundamental principles of real life transformation and integration is that many of the qualities we struggle to express in our lives are often qualities we’ve somehow been conditioned to suppress at some stage in the past.

The abridged version of this is that through our conditioning, experiences, relationships, and attempts to ‘survive’ the past then we develop certain ways of being that help us navigate the world as we understand it:

These adaptations to what we’ve been through are often useful and are usually necessary at the time – as we grow and our circumstances change, however, the same qualities that once helped us survive can start holding us back because they’re no longer aligned with reality.

Here are some common examples how this can unfold:

• We might become overly accommodating because we learned that expressing ourselves wasn’t ‘safe’.
  
  
• We might become passive because taking action once resulted in criticism or rejection.
  
  
• We might become excessively serious because our playfulness was never welcomed or got us in some kind of ‘trouble’.
  
  
• We might become too agreeable and ‘pleasing’ because our anger was seen as a threat and so we had to send it into hiding.
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.

All of these adaptations – and any like them – eventually become a cornerstone of our EGO whilst the qualities that we’ve suppressed end up in our SHADOW SELF (the disowned version of ourselves that is still very REAL and so don’t really go anywhere because what’s real is always real).

The important thing to understand is that these qualities don’t simply just ‘disappear’ because they’re still ‘part’ of us and lie in waiting to be acknowledged, accepted, and (re)integrated so we can be whole instead of fragmented.

Take the person who’s been acting in a ‘lazy’ way, for example – they might not actually be “lazy” at all and so what’s actually going on is that their capacity to act, initiate, and move towards what matters has simply been sent into the shadows for whatever reason (almost always because of the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma from the past).

When they finally recognise this and start taking action then they might initially ‘seesaw’ to the other extreme and so go a little overboard and so might might exercise religiously every for hours at a time day, start three businesses, reorganise their entire house, and suddenly decide that sleeping is an unnecessary inconvenience invented by people with insufficient ambition.

Obviously, this isn’t a particularly balanced or real approach but at, at the same time, it’s still an opportunity for the person in question to reconnect with an active, dynamic side of themselves that had been neglected for years and so they’re still actively engaged in the process of bringing something out of the Shadow Territory and back into consciousness.

The same principle applies to all the other examples that we explored above:

• The person developing boundaries is reclaiming their capacity to say “No”.
  
  
• The man exploring his masculine energy is reconnecting with qualities he previously neglected.
  
  
• The person becoming more financially responsible is developing a healthier relationship with security and resources.
  
  
• On and on it goes.

None of these characters are necessarily becoming something new – they’re just reclaiming something that was already within them and that’s exactly why the See-Saw Effect can be such an important part of the integration process.

Why You Sometimes Have to Overshoot the Mark

Think about an actual seesaw for a second:

If one person is sitting at one end with their feet firmly on the ground then the other person has to move in the opposite direction before the balance changes.

The whole point of the “Seesaw Effect” is that something very similar tends to happen when we’re trying to correct deeply ingrained psychological patterns.

Again, some more examples so you can see what I mean:

• If we’ve spent twenty years avoiding conflict then becoming slightly more assertive might not be enough to shift the underlying conditioning and so we (probably) need to spend some time being considerably more assertive than feels comfortable.
  
  
• If we’ve spent decades neglecting our physical health then a gentle commitment to exercise might not initially be enough to interrupt the old habits and so we (probably) need to throw ourselves into movement and experience what it’s like to be somebody who actually takes care of their body.
  
  
• If we’ve spent most of our adult lives being convinced that our anger is somehow ‘wrong’ then becoming somebody who can actually use this anger to protect our boundaries and to give us fuel for making healthy changes might involve being a bit ‘snappy’ for a little while.

In other words, we have to overshoot the mark sometimes so that we can get a sense of where the middle actually is and also to really feel whatever energy we’ve been denying in ourselves in a heightened way (so that it becomes something we can experience and become familiar with).

This is pretty important because in the scheme of the things as a whole because when we’ve spent so long living at one end of the scale, we often have very little experience of the other end.

When we don’t yet know what healthy boundaries feel like, what healthy ambition feels like, what it means to express ourselves freely, or to be comfortable with stillness then we have to experiment a little so we can recalibrate our relationship with these things (and, sometimes, experimentation means going a little too far).

The ‘trick’ is to recognise that the extreme end of the scale isn’t necessarily where we’re supposed to stay but it’s often somewhere we might need to visit to discover what we’ve been missing out on.

Bob and the Problem of Saying Too Much

Let’s imagine a man called Bob:

For most of his adult life, Bob has struggled to express himself in a REAL way and so he’s spent years holding back his opinions, swallowing his feelings, avoiding difficult conversations, and generally trying to keep everybody else comfortable and happy except himself. In fact, he’s become so accustomed to suppressing himself that he’s barely aware he’s doing it anymore.

Thankfully, through coaching, Bob has finally become consciously aware of this pattern and decides that enough is enough and so he’s going to finally start expressing the truth whenever he gets a chance…and so he does.

Now, galvanized by his new awareness, whenever an opportunity to express himself comes up, Bob takes it:

He tells people exactly what he thinks, shares every opinion, challenges all of the things he disagrees with, and refuses to hold back.

Go, Bob!

Initially, this feels liberating because he’s finally doing something that he’s spent years avoiding, discovering his voice, and experiencing the freedom of not constantly filtering himself through other people’s expectations (which are usually just projections of his own emotional ‘stuff’, anyway).

After a while, though, some shiny new problems start appearing in Bob’s life:

• People feel unnecessarily criticised.
  
  
• Some friends become reluctant to open up around him because they don’t know whether they’ll receive an unsolicited opinion or a lecture.
  
  
• Conversations become more confrontational than they need to be.

The jury is in: Bob has gone from one extreme to another.

Whereas previously he was suppressing his expression, now he’s expressing himself indiscriminately but the interesting thing – in relation to the Seesaw Effect, anyway – is that these new ‘problems’ aren’t necessarily evidence that Bob is failing.

They’re actually opportunities for REALITY to help him COURSE CORRECT so he can return to REALNESS.

Thanks to the feedback he’s receiving, Bob can now start to recognise that there’s a difference between expressing himself because it’s genuinely appropriate and relevant versus expressing himself simply because he’s trying to overcome an old pattern.

No longer does Bob need to ‘prove’ that he’s somebody who speaks his mind – he just needs to develop the capacity to CHOOSE when and how to express himself from a REAL place.

Sometimes, the realest thing to do will be to speak up. At other times, it will be to pause and actively listen. From time-to-time, it’ll be to challenge somebody outright and at other it’ll be to let something go.

The point isn’t to become a person who ALWAYS expresses himself (because, rarely is there an “always” in life – other than that things are always changing and real always work) but to become somebody who CAN express himself without being controlled by the old fear of doing so.

That’s a very different thing.

Reactive vs Responsive: The Difference That Changes Everything

This brings us to one of the most important distinctions in the whole process of real life transformation which he difference between being REACTIVE and being RESPONSIVE.

Here’s how you can look at the difference between the two:

• When we’re REACTIVE, we’re essentially operating from ‘old’ conditioning rather than consciously choosing how to respond to what’s happening.

This can happen in two ways:

First off, we might be reacting from an old pattern that we’ve never actually questioned – for example, whenever we automatically agree with people because we’ve learned that disagreement is dangerous, when we avoid taking action because we’ve associated visibility with criticism, or when we constantly stay busy because stillness brings uncomfortable feelings to the surface that we’d rather resist.

Secondly, we might even become reactive to the same patterns we’ve started noticing in ourselves and this is where the See-Saw Effect comes in:

• We recognise that we’ve been too passive so we become aggressively assertive.
  
  
• We recognise that we’ve been too serious so we become excessively frivolous.
  
  
• We recognise that we’ve been too accommodating so we become completely inflexible.

In all these cases, we’re still being controlled by something which is that we’re either acting from the old conditioning or reacting against it because we became aware of it and neither is quite the same as being REAL.

Being RESPONSIVE means something different:

• RESPONSIVE means that we’re no longer trying to BE anything in particular or ‘prove’ to ourselves and the world that we’ve changed – instead, we’re able to look at what’s happening in the present moment and make a choice based on what reality actually requires of us.

When we’re responsive we can answer a simple but powerful question:

“What’s the REALEST thing to be done right now?”

The difference between reactive and responsive is that with responsiveness we aren’t asking what somebody who’s confident would do, what a masculine man would do, what a productive person would do, or what somebody with perfect boundaries would do – we’re simply asking what’s true and appropriate in the situation we’re facing.

Sometimes, the answer will involve taking action, others it’ll involve doing nothing, at other times will mean speaking up, and sometimes it’ll mean listening

Sometimes, we’ll need to be more YIN and sometimes we’ll need to be more YANG – the important thing is that we’re making a responsive CHOICE rather than automatically reacting.

Yin and Yang: Learning to Move Between Opposites

A useful way to understand the See-Saw Effect is through the lens of ancient Chinese concepts of YIN and YANG.

In simple terms, Yin (black on the image above – which is the symbol known as the Taijitu) represents the qualities in both nature and human beings associated with stillness, receptivity, reflection, and allowing.

On the flipside, Yang (the white) represents qualities associated with movement, expression, action, and dynamism.

Neither is inherently better or worse than the other and both are necessary aspects of a balanced life which also contain the seeds of their opposites.

When we become overly identified with one side over the other, however, then problems can start to emerge that take us out of the natural flow of reality itself.

For example:

• If we spend all our time in Yin then we might become passive, withdrawn, and disconnected from the opportunities that life presents. We might also spend so much time reflecting, processing, and contemplating that we never actually get around to doing anything real with ourselves as life passes us by.

• On the other hand, if we spend all our time in Yang then we might end up becoming restless, controlling, and exhausted because we eventually burn out. We might constantly push ourselves, chase achievements, and try to make things happen without ever allowing ourselves to stop and enjoy what we’ve created or letting certain things happen to us.

In either case, we’re missing out on REAL life which is where we find a balance of both qualities by learning to trust ourselves to do what we need to do (Yang) and then let go and trust life to do what we can’t do (Yin).

With the See-Saw Effect, people who have become aware of their own tendency to be overly Yin will often make a conscious attempt to become more Yang, and vice versa and so the person who’s spent years sitting on the side-lines suddenly starts taking action and the person who’s spent years pushing themselves suddenly discovers the importance of rest and allowing.

Initially, they might overdo it and ‘seesaw’ from one extreme to the other but, eventually, as they become more aware of themselves and their relationship with reality (which is always giving us feedback so we can course correct) then they start developing the ability to CHOOSE.

They no longer need to be permanently identified with either position and so they can finally respond by being still when stillness is appropriate and dynamic when action is required.

(Just as they can CHOOSE to be assertive without being aggressive, receptive without being passive, disciplined without being rigid, and relaxed without becoming avoidant).

In other words, they’re finally beginning to MERGE THE OPPOSITES and this is where real integration starts to happen.

If you’re ready to go deeper into building flow and integration then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

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How to Work With the See-Saw Effect in Your Own Life

So now we get to the practical part that shows you how you an you use this understanding to support your own transformation.

Here are five practical steps for realness:

1. Identify the quality you’re struggling with.

Start by becoming aware of the tendencies that are causing problems in your life in the first place – for example:

Are you too passive? Too controlling? Too serious? Too emotionally reactive? Too withdrawn? Too busy?

Be honest with yourself without turning the observation into another reason to judge or beat up on yourself by remembering that all you’re doing is identifying a pattern and not defining your entire identity.

2. Explore the opposite quality.

Once you’ve identified the pattern then it’s time to consider what might be missing from your life because of its hold over you:

• If you’re passive then perhaps you need to develop assertiveness.
  
  
• If you’re controlling then perhaps you need to develop trust and surrender.
  
  
• If you’re constantly busy then perhaps you need to rediscover stillness and learn to chill out from time-to-time.
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.

Ask yourself a simple question to start developing deeper awareness:

“What quality have I been neglecting, avoiding, or suppressing?”

This is often where the SHADOW WORK begins and you start to take your Awareness and turn it into Acceptance (so you can take real Action).

3. Give yourself permission to experiment.

Now it’s time to start consciously cultivating the ‘hidden’ quality you’ve identified by experimenting with it:

• If you struggle with expression then practise speaking up.
  
  
• If you struggle with discipline then create some structure.
  
  
• If you struggle with boundaries then start saying “No” when something genuinely isn’t right for you (say “Yes” to the real stuff and “No” to the unreal stuff)

Don’t fall into the trap of expecting to get everything perfectly balanced immediately – in fact, you might need to hop on the ‘seesaw’ and spend some time exploring the opposite end of the scale before you understand what a healthy middle even looks like.

(Of course, experimentation isn’t an excuse to disregard other people or cause unnecessary harm and you can challenge your conditioning without abandoning consideration and even common sense).

4. Pay attention to reality’s feedback.

As you experiment then make an effort to notice what’s really happening:

Are your new behaviours helping you move towards wholeness or are they creating a different set of problems that take you deeper into fragmentation?

Are people responding differently to you?

Are you feeling more integrated or simply more identified with a new way of behaving?

Don’t automatically interpret every uncomfortable consequence as a sign that you’re doing something ‘wrong’ because – more often than not – real growth involves discomfort.

Always be willing to learn from the feedback you’re receiving, though, because this is how you start COURSE CORRECTING and returning back to REALITY.

5. Regulate, Integrate, Accelerate.

Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond reacting to your old patterns so you can start responding to reality from a grounded place that moves you towards a real vision for who you want to become next.

This requires three things:

• REGULATE: Learning to regulate your nervous system so that you’re not constantly operating from fight, flight, freeze, or other survival-based responses. Instead, you can give yourself enough space to see what’s actually happening.
  
  
• INTEGRATE: Acknowledging and working through the emotional ‘stuff’ connected to your old conditioning by allowing yourself to feel what needs to be felt rather than suppressing it or acting it out unconsciously.
  
  
• ACCELERATE: Once you’re grounded and more integrated, then it’s all about taking action from that place of awareness and acceptance so you can make choices based on what’s real rather than trying to compensate for who you used to be.

This is the movement from REACTION to RESPONSE and it’s where the See-Saw Effect eventually starts to settle down.

The Final Word: Beyond the See-Saw & Finding Your Way Back to Wholeness

Ultimately, the See-Saw Effect is a natural part of many people’s journeys towards REALNESS:

When we’ve spent years – or even decades – living in ways that lead to a disconnection from certain aspects of ourselves then we shouldn’t necessarily expect to find balance as soon as we start making changes – in fact, sometimes, we have to swing to the opposite extreme to discover what we’ve been missing.

In other words, sometimes we have to become a little too assertive, a little too active, a little too disciplined, or a little too expressive before we understand what those qualities actually mean when they’re fully integrated.

The important thing is not to become attached to the new extreme and to over-identify with it:

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because we’ve finally ‘discovered’ something that’s been missing from our lives then we now need to make it our entire identity but that’s just another version of the same old problem.

-If you’ve spent your life being passive then you don’t need to spend the rest of it being aggressively assertive.

-If you’ve spent years being excessively busy then you don’t need to become somebody who refuses to do anything ever again.

-If you’ve suppressed your masculinity then you don’t need to turn yourself into a caricature of what you think a masculine man ‘should‘ be.

All you need to do is integrate which means that you start to develop a relationship with those ‘exiled’ qualities that allows them to emerge naturally as part of the natural drive towards wholeness that’s always unfolding in our lives.

REALNESS isn’t about becoming ‘more’ of one thing or ‘less’ of another but about becoming WHOLE enough to choose.

When you reach this point, there’s no longer any need to constantly swing between opposing extremes because you can stay regulated (because your self-image isn’t under ‘threat’) and then embrace Yin and Yang, stillness and dynamism, action and conscious non-action, strength and surrender, without being controlled and ‘defined’ by either side.

You’re no longer trying to ‘prove’ that you’ve changed or need to compensate for the person you used to be – you’re simply responding to life as it unfolds.

And that’s the beauty of integration:

You don’t have to keep trying to BE something because you finally have access to the full range of what you already ARE.

The goal isn’t to spend your life balancing on a seesaw but to get off it, stand firmly in your REALNESS, and move with whatever life requires.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to start growing real and bringing more balance and flow into your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take steps towards integration.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want. 

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