Why you can be moving forward and still feel like you're going back

You can have a painful day and still be healing.

You can feel discomfort and still be setting a healthy boundary.

You can experience doubt and still be moving towards something important.

One of the greatest misconceptions about change is that the old experience must disappear before the new one can exist. 

But human beings are not that simple. This is the truth of duality; that two opposing experiences can and do co-exist.

In this episode of Shift The Field, we explore why we often mistake the presence of an old thought, feeling or sensation as evidence that nothing has changed — and why perhaps the better question is not “is it completely gone?”

But rather:

Which way is the scale beginning to tip?

© 2026 Shift the Field by AMDtherapie. All rights reserved. 

amdtherapie.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm AMD from AMD Therapy, and welcome to Shift the Field, the method I created to help you out of the patterns keeping you stuck. Each week we look at a short insight from inside the method. This week it's the truth of duality, where I've been thinking a lot recently about our relationship with opposites, because perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions we have about change is the idea that one experience must disappear before another can exist. We assume that if we have grown, we should no longer doubt, and if our body is improving, we shouldn't have any more painful days. And learning, for example, to hold a boundary shouldn't be uncomfortable. But that's really not how things work. If you take someone who spent years avoiding conflict because conflict has always felt threatening, then the first time they set a boundary, their heart may erase and their stomach may tighten, and every part of them may want to retreat. But was the boundary a failure because the discomfort remained, or was the discomfort simply evidence that an old protective system has not yet caught up with the new choice? And we often make the same mistake with physical pain. A person can walk around a city on holiday for miles and then struggle to walk around the supermarket at home. They can have weeks of improvement and then wake up with a painful morning, and instantly the mind asks, was any of it real? But perhaps that question comes from another misunderstanding. We treat the presence of an old experience as proof that nothing new has been created, as if confidence means the absence of uncertainty, and healing means the absence of sensation. Again, change meaning the complete disappearance of everything that came before. But life is not a battle where one side has to eliminate the other. And that's not what we're trying to do. We're never trying to eradicate one thing from another. Rather, the focus is then always of eradication of one thing one doesn't want instead of the focus on the desire of what one does want. And it's a continual negotiation between competing systems, memories, expectations, habits, and predictions. And the question is not whether the old voice still exists. The question is whether it's still the one making every decision. And this is where I think the image of the seesaw is really useful. Many of us stand staring at the side we want to remove. We're constantly checking whether it has gone. The pain or the fear or the hesitation or the doubt. But a seesaw does not move because one side disappears. It moves because enough weight has been slowly added to the other side, enough evidence, enough experiences, enough moments where your system experiences something different until one day you realize that the thing that once dominated your entire life is still there occasionally, but it no longer dictates the direction of it. So perhaps the question was never have I removed this completely, but instead, which way am I leaning? Because duality is not a contradiction to be solved. It is often the very nature of being human. If any of this resonated with you or you found it interesting, you can find shift the field at amdtherapy.com. See you next week.