Category: Therapy Counselling Relationships

People sometimes don’t know how they’re feeling because sometimes it may feel safer not to feel.

I want to talk about something I think is really important. I remember this clearly from my own time as a lawyer. There were moments I genuinely didn’t know what I felt. Imagine if you let yourself feel just how overwhelming or anxiety provoking something really was. Sometimes it felt safer not to feel.

That’s something I now see a lot. When you’re immersed in something demanding, under constant pressure, running on deadlines and performance, it’s genuinely hard to access what you’re feeling in the moment. So we learn to cover feelings over. We lean into thinking, analysing, conceptualising, as a way to cope and keep going. It works, until it doesn’t. That’s often when burnout, anxiety or chronic stress start to show up, this can show as a breakdown in one single crisis, or more slowly where the cost of never quite letting yourself feel what was happening underneath starts to eek away at the connection you have with yourself and others.

We also learn about our feelings through our relationships with others. That’s part of why we talk things through with people, their reactions can either be rejecting or validating. If you have had experiences where it is not ok to talk about feelings again you may not want to feel or know how to identify how you feel. And it’s completely normal to have multiple feelings about something, even contradictory or conflicting ones.

So why does it matter to know how you feel? Feelings are a bit like messages. There’s a bodily response, via the nervous system, that connects up to an emotional feeling, and that feeling tells you something about your experience, or about how you’re experiencing someone else. If you’re angry, something might be wrong. If you’re happy, you’re probably doing something that feels genuinely good. Those are useful things to know, especially in high pressure professions where the instinct is often to push feelings aside and keep performing.

This is part of why, in the therapy room, I ask about feelings, and why it can take time to build a space where difficult feelings feel safe to talk about. For people who haven’t had their feelings understood, seen or validated by someone else, this is genuinely hard to do alone. We internalise the ability to do this for ourselves largely by first having someone else do it with us, and having that be a good experience.

If any of this resonates, and you’d like to talk more, about feelings, about burnout or stress, about how you think, or anything else I’ve raised here, please get in touch.

Notes On is a series of short reflections about therapy, relationships, and the inner world. These pieces are written for anyone who is thinking about starting therapy, or curious about how therapy works, as well as for therapists and trainees who are thinking about psychodynamic ideas in practice. Each note is intended to be simple, conversational, and reflective. A way of opening ideas that can sometimes feel complicated and making them easier to think about.

There are many types of therapy. But I’m going to put down here a bit about how I work, so you can get a sense of what it would be like talking to me as your therapist or counsellor.

The important thing to understand here is really that none of us are these people who just operate on our own. What happens in psychotherapy or counselling is much like any other relationship. Ideally, because it is a boundaried relationship, people feel safe in it. They can then open and trust. The gist of it is that you talk and you start to form a relationship. In a sense, you internalise what it is that you talk about, or how it is that you feel and experience the sessions. In so doing, change then starts to happen from the inside.

For example, we might be talking about relationships in the past where things felt very inconsistent. Or you didn’t feel that you could depend on others because they were unreliable. Therapy and talking with a therapist, for example, would hopefully give you a sense of consistency and reliability. This is because it is typically done week to week. What happens inside the room is that we talk, maybe repeatedly, about the same sort of thing. Here is a chance to gain new insights or perspectives and start thinking differently about something that might have felt quite stuck. It can also give feelings that never had a chance to be expressed, or even identified, room to emerge. This might then form part of your sense of being. In a way, this can bolster parts of yourself or add more support to yourself. You might start to think and feel in ways that were different and more supportive of yourself.

If you like, it’s a bit like putting a little deposit in the bank. Then you put a bit more in the bank. Eventually, you have saved up something that feels substantial to you. It is something that you can start utilising outside the therapy room. For example, the next thing that might happen, if you’re using the therapy and we’re talking, is that you might start to think, “Ok, so I understand this about myself now. I’m going to do a little test of what it would be like to be more expressive about myself. I’m going to express my needs more with people that I think could be more trustworthy.” This is particularly so if you’ve been let down and understandably feel more guarded about opening with people.

So, this is a way of giving you an idea of what therapy is about. It is also a way of explaining what this client/therapist relationship is for. It is a space to lay out feelings and maybe understand and know what they are for the first time. It is also a place for a therapist to validate your experiences. This is so important if you have not had this consistently.

In short, therapy is a space where something can begin to take root. Through talking, being heard, and slowly understanding yourself in new ways, you may begin to feel more supported inside yourself and more able to take that understanding into your life and relationships.

Coming next

Next time, I’m going to talk about why a therapist might keep asking, “How do you feel?”. I’ll also be thinking about trust: how it builds, and how you might learn to trust yourself and others, especially if you have been let down. What might that look like?

After that, I’ll talk about projection, what can happen in family dynamics, and why understanding these dynamics can help you begin to separate yourself out from them.

I hope this gives you a small sense of what therapy can feel like, and how something meaningful can begin through talking.

If this resonates with you, and you feel you might like a space to begin talking things through, you are welcome to contact me for an initial conversation at:

 emiliayaucounselling@gmail.com

Tunbridge Wells, and Online Worldwide