All feelings welcome here

How avoiding painful emotions can snuff out joy

Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash

It often begins in childhood when often, well-meaning parents offer sweets to appease an upset toddler or remove favour until a sulking 10-year-old ‘takes that look off their face and cheers up’. This isn’t a post berating parents, most of whom are doing their best often in stressful circumstances. It is merely an observation that from a young age many of us learn to swallow difficult feelings or turn to external sources such as food as a means of comfort, rather than finding healthy ways of expressing emotions or learning to self-soothe. We soon learn that the expression of certain feelings are more socially acceptable than others and this is where we begin to label some feelings as good and others as bad.

Unhealthy habits or addictions are often formed as a way of avoiding or stifling emotional pain and difficult feelings and these can carry a high price tag, costing our physical health, damaging relationships, and preventing us from reaching our full potential. There is a lot at stake here. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to keep a lid on pain, we may go to great lengths to avoid certain situations, wipe ourselves out with constant busyness, or use drugs or alcohol to numb the pain. What many do not realise is that though we may succeed for a time to numb the pain we cannot do this without also numbing ourselves to the full experience of other emotions such as joy, gratitude, hope and love. This is why many people who come for counselling say things such as ‘I feel nothing, I am numb’, ‘I have lost a sense of self’, ‘I don’t feel connected to others or to the world around me’, and ‘I just don’t know who I am anymore’.

Although some coping mechanisms such as extreme busyness, addictions, or avoidance strategies may not serve us well today it is important to recognise that we turned to these coping strategies as a way of managing our lives often in extreme circumstances where we became overwhelmed and unable to bear the physical, mental, or emotional pain we felt. We did what we did to survive tough times. Judging ourselves harshly for this is counterintuitive, often giving rise to feelings of shame which unaddressed keep us in a vicious cycle. The therapeutic relationship can be the basis of learning more supportive, life enhancing coping strategies and a place where difficult feelings and what gives rise to these can be explored.

The old question that counsellors often ask of their clients ‘So, how does that make you feel?’ does have an important purpose, because often a client has lost touch with their feelings and will struggle to answer the question. An important part of the work of therapy is to help a client get back in touch with their feelings and listen to what they may be able to learn from them. Feelings are signals that alert us to the fact that something within us needs some attention or a healthy form of expression.

 Although some feelings are more difficult to experience than others, they are in fact neutral, and in and of themselves unharmful. What we fail to express we repress and often repressed emotions seep out in ways that are harmful to ourselves and our relationships with others. Counselling offers a supportive space which invites and welcomes all feelings and allows a client to learn to express themselves freely, in healthy ways, without fear of reproach or judgement.

In tuning into our feelings, naming them, and listening to the messages they are transmitting we open parts of ourselves that previously we may have ignored or shut down. Learning to turn to these parts of us with curiosity and compassion can lead to a new sense of wholeness where previously we had felt incomplete or broken. This may feel strange at first as though the anaesthetic is wearing off after an operation, it may take time to get used to the new sensations. Feeling a full spectrum of emotions can seem a lot when we have spent a long time with a limited capacity to feel feelings. However, just as taking sunglasses off on a bright sunny day can at first feel like too much and dazzle us, eventually our eyes adjust so we can take in and enjoy the scenery. Similarly, we can adapt and learn to experience life with a full range of emotions, responding to and expressing them appropriately. A counsellor can help the client learn techniques and can equip them with tools to help calm their nervous system, which is often dysregulated, this is an important foundation of any counselling work that involves revisiting difficult experiences.

Author and grief psychotherapist Julia Samuel says that ‘pain is the agent of change’. When we avoid feeling emotional pain (which is understandable), we remain stuck and unable to progress in certain areas of our lives, and our growth as a person is limited. The support of a counsellor can help a person discover where the pain is rooted and with care begin the work of unearthing the experiences that caused us to shut down our feelings or withdraw from parts of ourselves and others emotionally. This isn’t easy work, but nor is living a life of avoidance or a life void of the full spectrum of emotions available to us as humans which help us experience full and meaningful lives.