It makes me happy when clients come to session in the midst of emotional discomfort.
Now, I know what you must be thinking, so please allow me to explain. No, I’m not a sadist. I don’t take pleasure in my clients’ pain. But I do know an opportunity for healing when I see one.
What I mean is this: When it comes to emotional pain, most of the efforts people make to stop feeling it end up having the opposite effect. The more they try to numb or escape the emotion, the more they end up suffering. This numbing can come in various forms. For some people it’s drugs and alcohol, for others it’s work. Some people dive into relationships to escape unpleasant feelings, others dive into chocolate cake and ice cream. While some of these approaches are more dangerous than others, they all have the same underlying motivation: to avoid, suppress, distort, or deny whatever’s going on inside. We all have our own methods for doing this, and we can all likely agree that even if they seem to work a little at first, the relief doesn’t last. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a deep wound—some of the surface gets covered, but the real affliction remains untreated.
The reason I get happy when clients come in feeling bad is that I know they’re in the perfect position to heal themselves. That’s because when it comes to the emotional stuff, you’ve got to feel it to heal it. This might seem like unfortunate news—after all, who wants to make direct contact with something that feels so awful? But you need to know that it isn’t all bad. You see, what you’ll come to find when you begin to practice healing through feeling is that you start to feel better much sooner than when you attempt to numb and avoid. Ever heard the expression what we resist persists? Well, it applies perfectly here. Whenever we try not to feel what we’re feeling, whenever we try to push out the pain, we end up getting even more tangled up in it. We add an extra layer of suffering to something that’s already agonizing.
When my clients sit across from me in a state of emotional distress, I have them start by inviting their pain to the proverbial table and asking it to have a seat. This begins the process of keeping company with the emotion. It also begins the process of relieving the pain. Next, I have them identify the emotion as specifically as possible. This is based on research that shows people who are able to identify their emotions and distinguish one from the other are more effective at coping with them. I have my clients track the physical manifestations of the emotional pain throughout their bodies. They might find that nervousness feels like a tightening in the chest or sadness feels like heaviness in the shoulders. Getting in touch with the embodied aspects of the pain furthers the process of addressing and healing it. The rest of the work is a deliberate and compassionate practice of making room for the emotion, learning from it, and trusting that it will pass. It always does.
If therapy or any form of self-work is to be effective, it has to go directly to the source. We have to be willing to go inward and visit the places we don’t want to go. We have to learn how to keep company with all of our emotions, not just the ones we like to feel. We have to make a practice of tuning into our internal experience and asking ourselves the difficult question: What am I trying to keep myself from feeling?
When you feel bad it’s natural to want to feel better; but once you start practicing this stuff, you’ll never again want to settle for feeling better when you know you can actually get better. You are capable, and you are worth it.