The Difference Between Doing and Being 

You’re a busy gal. There are a million things to do and no matter how many tasks you tick off the list, there is always more things to do. Life is hectic. Perhaps you pride yourself on being a super workaholic, having an immaculate house, being super social and always out and about, having a load of hobbies, or being an excellent ‘multitasker’. However, even if you did get an elusive afternoon free, could you actually slow down, rest and just be? What would it be like to simply just be in the moment, with no distractions and check in with yourself? If the prospect of this is starting to feel a little uncomfortable, there might be something else going on.  

Doing has become a way of not feeling. 

Busyness can be an excellent distraction, masking what’s sitting underneath.   

Why Doing Feels Safer Than Feeling 

In Schema Therapy, this pattern has a name. Jeffrey Young, the psychologist who developed the model, describes a couple of coping modes known as the Detached Protector and Detached Self-Soother, states in which a person numbs and disconnects from their own emotional experience to avoid the pain of an underlying negative belief being triggered (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2003).  

When busyness becomes automatic, when stillness feels unbearable rather than restful, it's often these Detached Protector modes running the show. The Detached Self-Soother mode is a pattern in which a person copes with overwhelming emotion not by going blank, but by staying stimulated: through work, achievement, constant activity, or a to-do list that never ends (Young et al., 2003). This is a close cousin of the Detached Protector mode, which numbs and disconnects more directly, but the function is the same; keeping feeling at arm's length by keeping the body and brain occupied. 

Underneath these protector modes there is usually what we call early maladaptive schemas, a core belief about yourself or the world that formed in response to unmet childhood needs. What we see in our work is that there are a few common schemas that are often underlying for people who cannot sit still with their own experience. Emotional Deprivation is the belief that your need for nurturance, empathy, guidance or protection will never really be met, so there is little point trying to get it (Young et al., 2003). Emotional Inhibition and Unrelenting Standards belong to what Young called the over vigilance and inhibition domain, schemas that tend to form in families that were demanding, perfectionistic or uncomfortable with open emotional expression, and that show up as an internalised pressure to suppress feelings and keep performing (Young et al., 2003). In plain terms, if no one showed you what to do with a big feeling, achievement and control became excellent coping strategies.  

Being still is not the same as doing nothing. 

Doing nothing, when a self-soothing or protector mode is running the show, is just stillness with the discomfort turned up; you're still absent, just not moving. Being is different. It's staying present with yourself, connected to the part of you that can hold a feeling without needing to fix it, escape it or perform through it. In Schema Therapy this part is called the Healthy Adult; the part of you capable of noticing what you feel, making room for it, and trusting that it won't undo you (Young et al., 2003). Doing, in the way we mean here, is what happens when you lose contact with that Healthy Adult part. Being is what it feels like to stay close to it; whether you're on the couch or halfway through a to-do list. 

The Beliefs Underneath the Avoidance 

What we see in our work is that the worry isn’t necessarily about the emotion itself. It is the belief about what will happen once the emotion starts. 

Psychologist Robert Leahy calls this a person's emotional schema, the set of beliefs someone holds about their own emotional experience rather than the emotion itself (Leahy, 2015). Leahy's research found that people who interpret their emotions as uncontrollable, shameful, incomprehensible or lasting indefinitely are significantly more likely to struggle with depression, anxiety, rumination and avoidance than people who understand emotion as temporary, valid and connected to what they care about (Leahy, 2015). This is the belief many clients describe to us: if I let this in, I will not be able to get it back under control, it will consume me and I’ll never recover. Once you name it as a belief rather than a fact, it becomes something you can test rather than something you must keep obeying. 

Where do these beliefs come from? A useful piece of the answer sits in the work of psychologist John Gottman, who spent decades studying what he called parental meta emotion philosophy, the largely unspoken attitude a parent holds about emotion itself (Gottman, Katz & Hooven, 1997). Gottman found that families tend to fall into an emotion coaching pattern, where a child's distress is treated as an opportunity for connection and teaching, or an emotion dismissing pattern, where negative feelings are viewed as something to minimise, hurry past or shut down as quickly as possible (Gottman et al., 1997). Children raised in emotion dismissing households do not usually learn that their emotions are dangerous through a single event. They learn it through thousands of small moments where a feeling was met with silence, distraction, irritation or a bigger feeling from someone else, until the safest strategy became managing emotion through action rather than staying present with it. 

A Word on ADHD 

It is worth pausing here to name something that is easy to miss. Constant motion and difficulty being still are not always about avoiding feeling. They can also be part of how ADHD presents, and current research shows a genuine and complicated overlap between the two. Studies looking at adults with ADHD have found that emotional dysregulation is a core and consistent feature of the presentation, and that childhood maltreatment appears to intensify emotional dysregulation further in people who already have ADHD, making the two very difficult to tell apart from the outside (Kenézlői et al., 2025). Difficulty concentrating, restlessness and trouble managing feelings can show up as a trauma response, as ADHD, or, for a lot of people, as both at once. 

It is worth pausing here to name something that is easy to miss. Constant motion and difficulty being still are not always about avoiding feeling. They can also be part of how ADHD presents, and current research shows a genuine and complicated overlap between the two. A 2025 study comparing adults with ADHD to healthy controls found that adults with ADHD show more pronounced emotional dysregulation overall, and that childhood maltreatment appears to further exacerbate emotional dysregulation within this group (Avci Buyukdogan, Sertcelik & Nebioglu Yildiz, 2025). Related research comparing ADHD and Borderline Personality Disorder has similarly found that emotion dysregulation and impulsivity often sit right alongside, and can be difficult to distinguish from, the effects of childhood trauma, which is part of why careful assessment matters so much for accurate diagnosis and treatment planning (Kenézlői et al., 2025). Difficulty concentrating, restlessness and trouble managing feelings can show up as a trauma response, as ADHD, or, for a lot of people, as both at once. 

This is not a detail to sort out on your own. If restlessness and difficulty settling feel like a strong and lasting pattern for you, one that shows up regardless of what is happening emotionally, rather than something tied to specific moments of overwhelm, that is worth exploring properly with a suitably trained clinician, like a psychiatrist or clinical psycholgist who can help you understand what is actually going.  

What Actually Happens When You Stay 

 Psychologically, the fear that an emotion will not stop once it starts is understandable, especially if you never experienced a caregiver co-regulating with you and helping to soothe you back to a regulated state.  

Emotion researcher Leslie Greenberg, who developed Emotion Focused Therapy, describes emotions as fundamentally adaptive, carrying information about what matters to you and what you need, and argues that avoided emotion needs to be identified, felt and allowed to move through rather than managed from a distance (Greenberg, 2017). Left alone, without being pushed down or acted on, most emotional states peak and begin to settle. The difficulty is that very few of us have had the chance to practise staying present for long enough to learn that for ourselves. 

How We Would Work With This 

 If this is resonating with you and you are starting to notice how these detached protector modes might be playing out for you, please know that it is 100% possible to work with this pattern. At CSC we tend to work integrativly, blending a range of therapeutic modalities to work with this pattern. Schema Therapy and Parts Work gives us a very helpful map and some shared language to name the Detached Protector modes directly, understand which early schemas they are guarding, and work out what the most vulnerable parts of you needed and did not get. Parts work also helps us to identify your inner resources and healthy adult parts which we draw from heavily to help you have a felt sense of being present and accessing helpful and affirming ways to manage when emotions come up. EMDR, grounded in the Adaptive Information Processing model developed by Francine Shapiro, works with the foundational experiences or memories that taught you showing emotion led to dismissal, punishment or being left alone with it. Those experiences are processed using bilateral stimulation, so they stop firing the same alarm in the present (Shapiro, 2018).  

What happens when we have an opportunity to work with this pattern is that you start to grow in your capacity to notice emotions without defaulting into autopilot, and the Detached Protector modes learns that they don’t always have to be on.  

If busyness has become your default setting, our EMDR Immersive programs offer a structured space to slow down and find out what is actually there when you stop. Reach out to book in a call with Hannah our friendly Admin and Client Support Officer who can answer any questions you may have.  

References 

Avci Buyukdogan, G., Sertcelik, S., & Nebioglu Yildiz, M. (2025). The impact of childhood maltreatment on emotional dysregulation in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A comprehensive study. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 32(4), e70129. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.70129 

Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1997). Meta emotion: How families communicate emotionally. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Greenberg, L. S. (2017). Emotion focused therapy (Rev. ed.). American Psychological Association. 

Kenézlői, E., Balogh, L., Somogyi, S., Lévay, E. E., Halmai, Z., Nemoda, Z., Unoka, Z. S., & Réthelyi, J. M. (2025). Emotion dysregulation and impulsivity as overlapping symptoms in adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and borderline personality disorder: Severity profiles and associations with childhood traumatization and personality functioning. Annals of General Psychiatry. 

Leahy, R. L. (2015). Emotional schema therapy. Guilford Press. 

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2019). Attachment orientations and emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 6 to 10. 

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy: Basic principles, protocols, and procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press. 

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema therapy: A practitioner's guide. Guilford Press.