Why Life Gets Hard Right After It Gets Good

Have you ever noticed that right when life starts to feel good—something happens?

In this episode, I (Susan Sutherland) share a personal, real-time experience of the “upper limit problem” (inspired by The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks) and how it shows up not just in success or money, but in relationships, joy, and everyday life.

After returning from a beautiful family trip, I found myself navigating relationship tension, business stress, and unexpected disruptions—all while learning about the very pattern I was living.

This episode explores:

•  Why we unconsciously disrupt ease and happiness 
•  How the nervous system pulls us back to what feels familiar 
•  The difference between self-sabotage and regulation 
•  How to build capacity for joy, connection, and success 

This is a lived reflection—not a perfect resolution.

A reminder that:
 You are not doing life wrong.
 You may simply be expanding your capacity to hold more good.

Transcript

When Good Times Get Checked

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Have you ever noticed when things are going really well at work or in your relationship, your life feels easy and in flow. Bam! Something happens. Either there's relationship drama or something happens at work or your car breaks down or there's a medical issue. Like there is always life to check that happiness. That is what I have experienced recently. And I want to bring you inside that journey because it has been one of revelation. It is not one that is resolved. I am bringing you to the inner folds of what I am working through right now. When I was uh just back from Switzerland, I was in Audible. I had completed my book on the way home on the airplane, and I was looking up some new books, and I'll tell you what on your wish list is on sale. And I just keep a running log of wish list items, both at the library, for me to check out the hard book and on Audible to see which I will do because I usually have one print and one listening book going at a time. Anyway, I saw this book on there. It's called The Big Leap, and I don't recall adding this book to my list. I don't recall ever having heard of this book. Lo and behold, the book that I don't recall but added to my list at some point is on sale for$6.99, and I went ahead and purchased it. Now, I started listening to the story as I am walking through, I am living these pages. This book is about our upper limits. And upper limiting is something that I have done work around financial abundance, uh, a money threshold that you get to your money threshold and you need to continue your healing journey to expand, to see yourself as worthy of more. Like we have a capacity for what we think we deserve and what we feel comfortable having. And when we reach that capacity, we have to do more work or the bills start rolling in to keep you where you are. So I understood that. Well, the big leap helped me understand that that is not just a financial abundance situation. It is a all the things situation, it is a life at ease situation, it is success, it is flow, it is relationship satisfaction. So what happened is we get home and we had a wonderful trip, and the family was cohesive and things were going well, and we felt, you know, the spaciousness of vacation. There's not urgency, there's not stress, you just live in this contentment. So we better fix that, shall we? Shall we, life? Let's just sort that right on out. And the Monday following vacation, Mark had an enormously bad day. It was one of those Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days where, you know, this project goes wrong and you lose this project and this, this, this, this, and this, you know, and all of the things went wrong for him. And that evening he calls and shat me out, not in a disrespectful way, but in the way when you've had a really bad day and you take it out on your loved one. That is what I received. And I will say, pat on the back to Susan, that I handled it very well. And it was just like, okay, okay. And so the next morning he wanted to lean right on into that and was like, I think we've lost our connection again. Things are going bad. This is very stressful, blah, blah, blah. Just this, everything is bad. And I just reminded him that he had a really bad day, and we had just been away, and everything was really good. And I think he just has to allow the bad day to move through a system and realize we're still good. Everything's still good. Now, the old Susan could have fought back pretty solid in that situation, but I didn't. And I just allowed him to have his bad day. And he was dealing with a lot of stress. We sold a building recently and we sold it and put it into 1031 exchange, which is a tax shelter. You have to then find a building to buy and put your money there. And when you do, your earnings are tax deferred, I guess. Well, maybe not even deferred. Maybe you don't pay tax on those profits because you've now reinvested in a new building. But you only have like a minute to identify the properties that you're gonna invest in, which is very stressful. And we were on the heels of our deadline to identify these buildings. So he had a lot of stress going on. So I was trying to help find the buildings, help look. We've got a realtor that is helping us, but we were just kind of all hands on deck. Let's look, let's find a building. So I started looking. Normally we go industrial, I started looking at medical offices and sent him a couple, and then whew, one of these will work. And it was like all of the stress was lifted up, you know, like, oh, this is really good. Turns out uh it's still available. A lot of times you identify properties and they've gone under contract, but this one's available and he starts breathing and was like, okay, thank you so much. I realized you were very right. I was just having a bad day. We're good. Breathe, right? So that night we have been late at a soccer game, get home, and Mark goes to take a shower, and we have no hot water. So he goes down to the storage room where the hot water heater is, and y'all, there is splish splash. We have so much water coming, and it is still pouring out of this tank, which is very stressful. It's one thing to deal with uh water all over the floor. It is another thing to deal with water all over the floor while it is still rushing out. We are in the middle of a huge leak. So we're trying to deal with that, get the water turned off, get our stuff moved. Fortunately, the storage area is for my seasonal storage and ski storage, and most of the stuff is in crates, so everything wasn't ruined, but it is a very stressful situation, and so we start dealing with that the next day. Fortunately, because we are in real estate, I have a guy, I've got a guy, and he was actually working on one of my houses, so I pulled him off that job. Like, hey, we've we've got a situation here. So he comes over, and in less than 24 hours, we have a new water heater installed. Mark had gone to get a shop back, and he and I were up till 11:30 that night vacuuming the water out of our storage room. But it was just a situation, it was another, like we we dodged this bullet and get through this stressful situation. And then here comes a physical situation for us to deal with. Here is a very wet situation for us to deal with. And then we got through that one, but it has been just this series of okay, dodge that bullet or that bullet just grazed us, we're still walking, but this has been how it's been going. And all the while I am listening to this book that is teaching about this very subject about a lot of times when these things come up for us, it is because we have hit our upper limit. At first, I was like, oh, I don't like it, because in the first page that he's reading, essentially, they're talking about a billionaire and relating success to that. But he very much adapts success to being how content you are in your life, how much fulfillment you have in your life. And financial abundance may come from that fulfillment, but that is not the drive of all of it. So if you do start listening to the big leap, stay with it past billionaire, if that is something that propels you, because there is more to it. It is about having relationship satisfaction and fulfillment in your life and living in joy and ease and spaciousness with your time. So there's all of that there. And so I'm listening to this while I am walking through these landmines and watching them go off and being like, okay, lost a foot, let's keep going. And that's been my experience. So, what I do know is we all have these upper limits and we all experience this period where you're like, oh, life can't get any better. And then you get clubbed over the head and it's like, settle down, let me let me give you some humble pie. And that's how it feels. And for a little while, I guess I understood that as self-sabotage. Like, I my nervous system has to keep me safe. And it keeps me safe by pulling me back to these parameters that I already know. What my reflection after this book has allowed me to do is change the language of that. I feel like the book offers the awareness of identifying the problem, and where it falls short is helping you figure out how to change your upper limits, how to deal with the upper limit when you have identified it. Because the upper limit problem is not just for business owners or for entrepreneurs or for finances, it is not related exclusively to money or success. It's about how much goodness your nervous system can hold. And that's not conceptually, that is somatically and relationally and emotionally. So, what happens when our life expands? For me, it was Switzerland and family time and ease and spaciousness, is our system opens. This is good, this is working, and then something disruptive enters. There is tension in the relationship, there is external stress through the 1031 exchange, there is a freaking flood in my storage room that is a physical disruption, and it is not because things are going wrong. So, this is what I've had to shift my mind to understand. Things aren't going wrong. This is my system asking can we really live in this spaciousness, in the goodness that you were experiencing? And so, what I am having to tune into is learning how to grow that capacity, not just bring awareness to when I've hit an upper limit and asking if there is a relationship conflict instead of seeing it as you're doing this to me or I don't feel whatever, identifying it first as, ooh, we've reached an upper limit. How can we expand through this? And understanding that, I realized that my response to Mark when he flipped out on me essentially was what I was doing. I was growing my capacity, I was growing safely to say, in this, in this couple, we are still safe when one of us dysregulates. When you dysregulate, I can hold the foundation of our relationship. That's not an ongoing and will not always be the stabilizer, but I now can see that that was an opportunity for me to see when you have a bad day, I can hold down the fort. And perhaps I've done that before, but this has given me language around it and it has given me direction that that's what I want to experience. And so instead of seeing it as, oh, he's crapping me out again, it's oh, this is how we expand our capacity. And doesn't that feel better? Sometimes when we shift our language around something, it's not things are going wrong for me. It's I'm pushing against the capacity that I have known and I am expanding into more. That feels way better than life is testing me. Our real work is not to just have awareness, it is to build this capacity. That's that's the game. It's a capacity-building game. I used to see myself perhaps as unworthy of happiness, unworthy of ease, unworthy of abundance. And I have done a lot of work around that. So if you haven't done that, start there. Start at the low-hanging fruit that says, girl, you are worthy of living a life that is full of satisfying and fulfilling relationships and success and abundance. Once you know that, then you don't have to question, like, well, am I good enough for this? I am. But there is still tension. My nervous system still leans toward familiarity, not necessarily retracts. I mean, it retracts not to keep me safe, to keep me familiar. This is what I'm familiar with, and I guess familiarity is safety, but I have to consciously push against that. And I've been thinking about how to do that, and we kind of covered that a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about joy, about staying in joy longer. That is how we expand our capacity to experience joy is to rest inside of it. Instead of quickly moving on to the next thing, we say, actually, let me linger here because currently it's not complacency, it's not stagnation for me to rest here. I am building my capacity to experience and remain in joy. Our systems, your system and my system may be more practiced at solving problems or holding responsibility than it is at sustained ease and relational harmony or spacious success. So when things get good, our system unconsciously creates movement back into what it knows how to manage. And that's not sabotage, that's regulation, that is putting itself in the familiar because that is the known system. That is the known mode of operating. And that's not a problem. So when we stop seeing it as, oh God, I effed up again, oh gosh, things always go bad for me. Just when things get good, something happens. When we see it as, oh, I am pushing against a threshold here. Let me A not collapse into the problem. When we can witness a problem, oh, okay, I've I've got a situation here, let me address it. When we can have presence and move through a situation, move through, let a wave carry over us without pulling us under. You're aware, okay, I'm getting wet right now. This wave is bigger than I thought. It's gonna go over my head. But when we don't allow it to pull us under, that builds capacity. When we acknowledge this is what's happening right now, my life is not broken, my relationships are not broken. I am not a failure. I am ready to move to a new level. So let me pause for a second here. Let me realize what's happening and then be really, really good at staying in the moment when things are good. That's how we build that capacity. I kind of am getting a visual now of hiking up a mountain. And when you do it, I've never done this. When you do a hike at a super tall mountain, they give you days for acclimation. You have to adjust to the altitude. You don't just barrel up the mountain and then say, Summit, I did this. You have to acclimate to the altitude so you can breathe. So sometimes we have reached new levels, we have reached new spaces. We are going to have to adjust to the altitude. We need to settle in and say, okay, I am safe here. Even telling yourself, and this will beat any affirmation you've ever put on your mirror, if you can experience joy and happiness or moments of real connection with your partner or your family, and remind yourself, I am safe in this joy, in this experience, I am safe. A lot of times we have that affirmation, we have that kind of conscious talk when things feel scary. It's like just a reminder, you are safe. You are safe in your body, you are safe in this experience. When we remind ourselves that we are safe in joy, we are safe in receiving help, in receiving money, we are safe in living at ease. I've done a lot of practice around that lately. I've told you about having to shift out of performance metrics in my home. When somebody gets home, I need to be doing something, otherwise, I look lazy and really talking myself through. Actually, it's okay for them to walk in the door and me be sitting on the patio reading. I am safe. I am safe in my stillness. I am safe in my ease. And I've gotten better at that. Sometimes I'll still kind of feel this pull to do, to perform, too. But I have done a lot of practice of I am safe to be at ease. This is okay. And I think I need to do that more with joy. And now Mark and I are doing some morning work together and really cultivating depth in our conversations. And he is somebody that I feel like because of the stress of his work and how much he puts into his relationships with his clients and his employees, I have found him largely emotionally unavailable for me a good bit of the time. Not because he's asking for that, but almost like, I know you have been pulled for hours and hours of the day. And I choose not to put that on you here. And our connection in the morning is now really opening up this space for us to connect on a level that I have craved and also is very new for us. I will say it is allowing us to talk through kind of patterns and skills we would like to improve on. But having these conversations when you are not experiencing a problem is so rewarding to be able to say, okay, this is kind of how I see some patterns that come up for us. Not when you are experiencing the pattern, but when you were just having coffee and a chat in the morning has been like, wow, incredible. So it's probably my favorite thing we have done together as far as nurturing our relationship. And that is a level up. It is requiring me to have an altitude adjustment to say I am safe to experience this relationship at a depth that I haven't known yet. Maybe I need to be going with a scuba tank. We are at a new depth, and maybe there's some altitude adjustment there, depth adjustment, where it's like, let me recalibrate to this new depth before I go further. And so I'm having to remind myself this is safe. It is safe to feel this kind of connection with my husband. And I know that sounds ridiculous because of course, but when your nervous system is programmed to respond to a relationship in a different way, it will create the capacity for you to return to your baseline until you remind it that this is okay. This is it is safe for me to be here. It is safe for me to share in this way, it is safe for me to feel genuinely happy and connected in my relationship. So that is how we have been pushing and growing over here. And it is just mind blowing to me that this book showed up. I mean, uh, when will I stop being surprised? Surprised at the magnificence of the universe. I mean, it just sometimes it just really blows my hair back. But that this book came and it was like, we're gonna talk about upper limit problems, and you are going to live in real time upper limit problems. We have a lot of changes going on right now, and I think this is just an important process for me to go through, a really important lesson for me to learn, so that I have the capacity for change, so that I have the capacity to remind myself as things shift that I don't need to make problems out of them, even as I understand identity shift approaching a little bit for who I see myself as, as I have kind of unwound some titles and unwound some expectations of myself and just kind of identifying who I am in a new way that has shifted how I see myself and expanding into being joyful with that, not feeling that as contraction, because I can feel at ease with that. But our family has changes coming up too. My son graduates in a month and a half, and that is going to shift dynamics and just kind of shift how we relate to each other. And I think tools like this in identifying upper limits, but also in understanding how to expand capacity, capacity to walk through these changes and allow them to still nourish us. This doesn't have to be the end of something. I know there is going to be hard times as a mommy. Like I'm not delusional, it hurts. In fact, I looked at his college schedule for next year and he has, oh, I feel tears coming. And I've done really good this year. They they haven't caught me off guard too often, but I looked at the calendar and he has a different spring break next year. And our spring breaks, I love them. We have a really great time together, and that hurts me a little bit. To even think of going on spring break without him hurts me. So um I am going to expand my capacity to allow that relationship to shift and blossom into something that is beautiful, even if it is different. And we have to teach ourselves that different is not bad. And a lot of times we resist change and assume change has to be hard. And I want to expand my capacity to understand that even though my heartstrings may pull, we can move through this and adjust altitude together. We can embrace a new phase of our life and allow that to be really magnificent too. I mean, who's to say he and I don't have a mother-son trip to Italy in his spring break? I think I am going to lobby for that now. I also know that he'll be like, Dad, can we go skiing my spring break? And I will lose because he'll never ever say that to me. Mom, do you want to go skiing? No. But anyway, change doesn't have to be awful. And success does not have to come with hardship. And joy doesn't mean that there's going to be impending disruption. And if there is, it is because we need an altitude adjustment. We have got to expand our capacity. So that is what I am walking right now. I haven't gotten it all figured out, but I wanted to share it because it is my lived journey. And I know, I know, I know, I know some of you are going through similar situations yourself. If you want to check out the book, it is called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. And just remember that he will bring you to awareness, but it is your job to expand capacity. And that moves awareness beyond so that you can really work on your comfortability in staying in joy, in recognizing when things are easy. Often we bring our attention to when things are hard. When our day doesn't go well, it gets all of our attention. When it goes easy, it kind of goes unnoticed. Start noticing, start noticing and building the muscle for I am safe to live in ease and joy and relational happiness. You are worthy of living a life you love, and we just have to build the capacity to do it. Have a great day. Oh, I have something so exciting to share. Next week, I have Katriana Reed joining me on the show. I mentioned to you that I have a new pen pal. She watched my video on the missing pages of Mary Magdalene on YouTube and ended up reaching out to me and just said that that transmission was super impactful for her. And we began an email exchange. And I have her number, but it has been so refreshing to have somebody who we don't have just little back and forths. It is really well thought out emails, and it's really interesting because we have walked very different paths, but have some of the same things that we're walking through, our relationship with truth, our relationship with identity and ourselves and how we serve others. And it has been a beautiful relationship for me. I told her, I mean, she is like my my wise elder, even though she feels like she said I feel like a peer to her, but she feels so much smarter. So um, it has just been an incredible relationship, and I feel a little selfish keeping that from you guys. So I'm bringing her on the show. We're gonna have a series that I'm gonna call Conversations with Kate when she's available to share with you. But we are planning a retreat in the fall for us to walk with Mary Magdalene and really bring some of the embodied feminine into her retreat space, which is in California. It's called Manzanita Village, and it is uh adjacent to Sacred Land and a really beautiful space. So I am so excited to bring her onto the podcast next week. Don't forget to check that out. All right. Have a great week. I love you. Bye.