Faced with ‘bad’ emotions, it’s natural to want to lock them up. As a therapist and a patient, I’ve learned to let them run
Not so long ago, one of my best friends was sitting at my kitchen table, crying. He and his partner had just broken up, and I could feel his desperate sadness and the crushing weight of grief at losing someone he loved so much. I stood by the counter feeling so helpless. Confronted with his suffering, I was desperate to lift him out of his misery, to tell him that they would get back together, that things would be OK. It felt like an emotional emergency, and I wanted to call in the feelings police to lock his bad feelings up.
One of the hardest things for me to do, when I was training to be a psychotherapist, was to stop trying to make my patients feel better. It is of course a very natural response, if someone we are with is feeling bad, to want to make them feel good. We feel it in our bones – feeling bad is bad, feeling good is good, and we want only good things for those we care for. Emergency! Shut this thing down!
Continue reading… Faced with ‘bad’ emotions, it’s natural to want to lock them up. As a therapist and a patient, I’ve learned to let them runNot so long ago, one of my best friends was sitting at my kitchen table, crying. He and his partner had just broken up, and I could feel his desperate sadness and the crushing weight of grief at losing someone he loved so much. I stood by the counter feeling so helpless. Confronted with his suffering, I was desperate to lift him out of his misery, to tell him that they would get back together, that things would be OK. It felt like an emotional emergency, and I wanted to call in the feelings police to lock his bad feelings up.One of the hardest things for me to do, when I was training to be a psychotherapist, was to stop trying to make my patients feel better. It is of course a very natural response, if someone we are with is feeling bad, to want to make them feel good. We feel it in our bones – feeling bad is bad, feeling good is good, and we want only good things for those we care for. Emergency! Shut this thing down! Continue reading… Counselling and therapy, Life and style, Mental health, Health, Society
