The other day I put my Therapist’s Angel hat on again. I found myself explaining to a friend why his therapist is encouraging him to feel angry. This seemed counterintuitive, or at least undesirable to him. He goes to therapy in order to feel better, and anger is associated with feeling worse. First off, we are not encouraging you to be angry, we are encouraging you to feel your anger. The difference here is important. The first is a state of being, and the second is the flow of existing emotion. In fact, as therapists, we want to help you feel all of your emotions, not just anger. Anger often comes first, and serves as a gateway to sadness and loss, and then, luckily, more good feeling. We all have a fantasy that we can just feel good. The pharmaceutical industry feeds this fantasy with its sparkly ads for antidepressants. Anger appears in many different forms, and doesn’t always look like yelling or dramatics. Often it comes in the form of feeling nothing much, numbness, a turning in your stomach, or a tightness in your chest. If anger is stuck in the space of numbness or in your physical body, it usually means that you learned somewhere along the way that you had to stuff your anger. Many of us got the message that our anger was dangerous or unwelcome and we unconsciously learned to absorb it into our self-concept. In its extreme form, this absorbed anger can be the source of depression and severe self-criticism. Feeling anger does not mean we are bad, or mean. It usually just means we are feeling vulnerable or hurt. I should add that letting ourselves feel our anger doesn’t necessarily mean we have to express our anger. Sometimes just letting ourselves know we are angry is enough to let the experience flow. As the anger flows, we create space for the other emotions we would all prefer to feel.
Remember when a parent might have said this to you? "Settle down!" Or if we were lucky, they might have said it without the exclamation point, in a calming hushed tone. But did someone ever help you settle down? Many of us might have been told to settle down, but lacked the guidance and comfort to actually settle down. Perhaps this is why we are currently experiencing a cultural surge of mindfulness meditation and yoga. We need help settling down. How did we become so overly alert? Why did our minds and bodies get so activated? Obviously there is no one answer to these questions. But in a general sense, we need a basic feeling of safety that things will be okay. If we didn't get this "safe feeling" pathway grooved into us when we were young, we are left trying to dig that groove as adults. What kinds of factors might have made us feel unsafe? It could have been anything from the more overt issues of poverty, physical abuse or an addicted parent, to the more subtle issues of an anxious-depressed parent, or a self-involved parent who couldn't really respond to our needs. When we have grown up in these kinds of conditions, our minds and bodies kick in to make sure we feel safe. It becomes our job to be on high alert. Later in life we take sleep aids, we anxiously make to-do lists, we develop fears that help us feel in control, all in the often fruitless effort to settle down. The newsflash here is that we need actual comfort to settle down, and all these strategies we developed aren't actual comforts, they are coping mechanisms for a kind of basic anxiety. We are never too old to learn how to receive comfort from others and learn to comfort ourselves, but don't get discouraged if you find it harder than you expect. These are deep and historic grooves.
Therapy is weird. You come in and talk to a stranger about your deepest feelings. This makes sense to some people because sometimes talking to a stranger feels less vulnerable. For others, it can feel really bizarre for a while. Maybe you are the type of person that enjoys keeping the attention on other people so the fact that therapy is a space for you to explore YOU makes you uneasy. But one of the elegant aspects of therapy is that how we feel in the room tends to mirror how we feel in other aspects of our lives. So when you first start, you might feel like you don't know what to talk about. You might find yourself making lists of topics. You might even feel yourself going blank when you come in the room. None of this is wrong, it just is. Part of the therapy process is helping all of us feel more comfortable with the things that make us uncomfortable. If you don't like to have the spotlight on you, then therapy can help you explore the underlying discomfort around this. Sometimes we have an implicit assumption that people won't listen or be interested. Many of us got the message that taking up space might be burdensome to others. Whatever the root of the discomfort, in order to be in meaningful mutual relationships with others, we need to learn to hold and take in attention.
What is guilt, anyway? One thing we know is that it feels crappy. The worst part of guilt for me is that it obscures any other feeling. When I feel guilty, I don't feel happy or sad or mad, I just feel guilt. That is when it occurred to me that that is the purpose of guilt; It ensures we do not feel our emotions. Knowing what we want and feel is often a lot harder than it should be. Why is this? Well, it is probably infinitely complicated, but imagine you are a kid and you want to go out with your friends. Now imagine that your caregiver is feeling a little down and would like your company. So, in the guilt free option, your caregiver notices his/her feelings but realizes that it is normal for you to want to be with your friends and says, sure, go ahead. In the guilt inducing option your caregiver may say something like, "You want to leave me all alone tonight?" or, "Fine, don't worry about me, I'll just be home all by myself." There you are, faced with feeling like your own desire is going to hurt someone else. Over time, this takes its toll and we can start to lose touch with what our desire is because we get so worried about taking care of other people. While it might seem like a viable option to just take care of others, it most often doesn't work out that neatly. Our disavowed desires come out in other ways that are often not that pleasant. But that is a subject for another post.
I am starting to refer to myself as the Therapist's Angel. I can't tell you how often I find myself answering questions about other people's therapy. Just yesterday two people asked me how they should break up with their therapists. In neither case had they told their therapists that they felt ready to end, or were dissatisfied with how things were progressing. When I asked why they hadn't brought this up with their therapists, they sheepishly realized that it had not occurred to them. Folks, I am here as your therapist's angel to say that this is the point of the therapeutic relationship. When possible, Just Say It. Obviously being direct is hard, and probably if it weren't, we wouldn't be in therapy. But it is- we want to protect others from hurt and disappointment. Most of us want to avoid conflict because somewhere along the way we learned that our bad feelings might be destructive or intolerable to others. Consider therapy a practice space for conflict. We are trained for this and we welcome your doubts and bad feelings. In fact, we welcome all feelings. That said, just because we welcome all feelings does not mean we will always be comfortable. Therapists are human and have all of their own experiences to contend with. Sometimes we may unintentionally say things or convey the message that something makes us uncomfortable. Well, you guessed it, say that too! If we invite you to express your disappointment in the therapy and then get defensive when you do, this is understandably discouraging. But the days of therapists' neutrality are long gone. We are people with feelings and not only is this not a bad thing, it is an essential part of the work. These reactions help us understand each other and working through them is what will help to transform all of your relationships. The measure of a good therapeutic relationship is not the absence of bad feeling, but rather how you work through bad feeling. If your therapist makes a mistake or makes you feel bad in some way, this is not in itself a problem. If your therapist cannot take responsibility for it or help you explore the feeling in a way that makes you feel safe, then you might have a problem.
Memory is overrated. Many of us live in a fantasy that we need to remember something in order for it to matter. It makes sense that we want this; it makes us feel more in control. What does it mean for us if things we don't remember matter? It is a disquieting reality. Suddenly we know a lot less and that can make us feel at sea. The good news is we are our memories. So while we may not remember specifics and details about what happened in our childhoods, we can understand the emotional impact because we live it everyday. The parts of ourselves that feel out of our control- the part that wakes up at 3 am and can't stop thinking about what we did wrong, the part that eats more and faster than we need to, the part that looks through our partner's phone, the part that feels anxious that someone is mad at us- these are our memories transposed on the present. Of course it would be helpful to remember where these feelings came from, but to focus on that may be a way for us to avoid feeling how much these experiences upset us. We all know when we are in states that feel like we are still children- this might be all we need to know. Our job, alone and with others, is to take care of these child parts of ourselves as if they were our own children. In essence, they are.
|
AuthorI am a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan and Brooklyn Archives
December 2015
Categories |