We are Meant to Bear Difficult Feelings

Did you know you can feel upset, for no clear reason, and NOT judge yourself for feeling this way?  Despite being a therapist, this was a revelation for me.

To be mentally well is often confused with being happy all the time or to have an explanation for all of our feelings.  When we do not feel happy, I think we can be made to feel like we are doing something wrong, or that we are not doing something enough.  But to feel sadness and disappointment is a healthy part of being human.  It is also normal to not have a clear reason for our feelings all of the time.  The mark of true mental health, I have come to realize, is that no matter how you feel, you can maintain a positive self-regard and treat yourself with love and respect.

We have to accept we will feel sad, we will have doubts and regret, the goal is NOT to erase these experiences or feelings nor is it to become immune.  I have had to learn this as a therapist.  It is not always my job to neatly package difficult emotions and experiences for my patients, complete with a pretty bow.

Counterintuitively, I have found more connectedness with my distressed patients when I sit with them in their emotional space and take in, with them, the crazy, confusing mess that are their feelings.  This is what it means to accept, rather than fix.

This discovery is a personal one also. I have tried very hard all year to be the ideal in terms of my mental health.  The analogy I use is this: who wants to go to a dentist with bad teeth?  So whatever tools I give my patients, I use myself.  I therefore have been meditating and reflecting.  I have been reading and journaling.  I have been attentive to my emotions...or so I thought.

What I did not realize was that I tended to these feelings like a warden running a prison.  I policed the parameters for any run-away emotions and when I found any, I would wrestle them into submission with a neat explanation before carting them back to where they belonged.  I pictured them in straight jackets, stuffed in a white box.  I thought I was processing my emotions in a healthy way.  It was what I was doing with my patients afterall!  But then my patients were not getting better, and I began to feel unsure and stagnant with them.  Were my insights failing them?  I felt the increasing weight of the responsibility that I had to know the "why?" and "now what?" behind every emotion my patients had.

I am so humbled to admit that I was caught in a classic defense mechanism against difficult emotions: intellectualization.  Google it and the following definition appears: "intellectualization is a transition to reason, where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic."  But these feelings, gosh darn it, demand to be felt.

And so the day came when the dam broke and I became awash in sadness, feelings of unworthiness and self-pity.  My brain was so tired of trying to analyze and organize, it gave up and wept too.  By day 3, still in bed under the covers I whimpered, "Why does feeling sad have to mean I hate myself too?"  And something in my brain whirred to life, quietly working on this connection I had created unconsciously and assumed was truth.  Over the next couple of days, I began feeling a little lighter, and by day 7, sadness and self-hatred, like an ill-suited couple, finally broke up with one another.  I found I could tell myself that I was a good enough therapist and a good enough person, sad or otherwise.

One of our main jobs as we grow into our independence is to learn how to tend to ourselves emotionally.  Sometimes, to do this means being with our feelings whatever they may be, and to accept they do not always make sense or feel good.  It is to know that when this happens, the step toward resilience is to deepen your commitment to love, care and respect yourself.  You are made for this.