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The plateau

When your family notices the plateau before you say anything

Started 19 December 2025 · 14 replies · 107 hearts · read 1.1k times

VeraRiga, LV · 19 December 2025
7 months ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: When your family notices the plateau before you say anything

Long one, sorry. I have been chewing on this for a fortnight.

My prescriber has been fine, genuinely. The problem is that I get nine minutes twice a year and there is no version of nine minutes that covers a whole stage of this.

What I am trying to work out is whether this is a phase with an end to it or the shape of things now, and I do not think I can tell that from inside it.

Thanks all. Genuinely. This circle has been better company than I expected to find anywhere.

36

NikolaiSofia, BG
#1

Reading back through this circle's older threads was what got me through mine. Dozens of people, all convinced theirs was the permanent one, all still here.

7

NoleneDurban, ZA
#2

I asked at my review whether a long flat stretch meant something was wrong and was told, gently, that bodies are not linear and the assumption that they should be is the odd bit.

6

LlianCarmarthen, UK
#3

Nolene — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

Mine ended the week I stopped keeping a spreadsheet about it, which is either a profound insight or a coincidence and I genuinely do not know which.

6

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#4

Holding a boundary for a moment: we do not compare progress in this circle, and a couple of replies have edged towards it. No blame; just steering back.

16me too 7

TasnimBradford, UK
#5

Nolene, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

If you are in one, the thing I would ask is whether you are still doing the things that were helping before it started. I quietly stopped several of mine and only noticed in hindsight.

8me too 3

PolaGdańsk, PL
#6

My flat stretch coincided with a genuinely difficult period at work, and I now think the two were related in ways I will never be able to separate out.

6

PerrineStrasbourg, FR
#7

Mine went on so long that I forgot it was a plateau and just got on with things, and I think that is genuinely how most of them end — not with a change, but with you stopping watching.

5

BertrandToulouse, FR
#8

Coming back to what Tasnim wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

Somebody here described the plateau as the part where you find out whether you are doing this for a number or for a life, and that landed harder than I wanted it to.

8

TamzinPoole, UK
#9

Something that reframed it: a flat stretch is weather, not a verdict. Somebody wrote that here two years ago and I have carried it around ever since.

3

TamarPlymouth, UK
#10

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.

7

AikoOsaka, JP
#11

The practical thing I did was set a date twelve weeks out to review it properly, and then deliberately stop thinking about it until that date. It gave me the fortnight back.

10me too 4

AleksLjubljana, SI
#12

I want to add the unglamorous version: mine was boring rather than distressing. Weeks of nothing, mild irritation, and then it moved. Not every plateau is a crisis.

6

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#13

I want to name the thing this circle does when somebody says they have stopped: it treats it as ordinary. That is not automatic anywhere else and it is worth saying out loud here.

14

BarnabyWinchester, UK
#14

What I say to anybody in one now is that you are still here, still on treatment, still doing the thing. That is the whole of what a flat stretch asks of you.

5