Tag: therapist

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Why Should I Feel My Feelings?

People are prickly about their feelings. Understandably. We have so many of them all the time, and so few of them are allowed out in polite society. Often it’s not just “a feeling,” it’s what I lovingly refer to as “a bucket of feelings” all piled on top of each other–challenging to tease out where they’re all coming from and why.

There’s a lot of reasons why clients show up to therapy having great difficulty either identifying what they are feeling, having very little language with which to discuss their inner experience, or frequently, being possessed of great powerful feelings and the paradoxical inability to show them on their faces or in their body language.

The work of therapy is in part the work of putting our minds, bodies, and hearts back together, in relationship with each other, so we can feel whole. So, why, besides being a good therapy client, should you feel your feelings?

Feelings are our early alarm system–feelings appear in our body long before our minds recognize the situation and what it is doing to us. We feel injustice through anger, concern for ourselves and others through worry, uncertainty about safety through fear, connection through love, grief through sadness, and we feel these things very rapidly in our bodies though often we have been socialized to ignore all the signs, the sweat, the heaviness, the beating heart. Our feelings connect our bodies, our minds, and our hearts–they are the connecting highway.

The point of feeling feelings isn’t to act on feeling, but to understand the source, how our feelings illuminate our needs and our hopes and longings. Once we know our longings, we start to know ourselves, and once we know ourselves, we can make choices that allow us to change our lives in the direction of our dreams.

So, that’s why I’m going to ask you how you feel, if we ever meet, and I’m going to ask you to do body scans, so you can learn over time where your feelings show up in your body, so when your body shakes you, you hear and listen.

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Treating the Whole Person In Psychotherapy

I’ve been really happy with some of the work I’ve been doing with clients lately and the frameworks I’m using in psychotherapy. I’m realizing that I have a really nice toolbox to work with a variety of different aspects of the human experience. As someone who only feels comfortable when I feel I’ve reached a level of mastery, and someone interested in continuous learning and growth, I’m feeling very lucky about having become a psychotherapist at this particular time in the field.

We’re able to do a lot of really interesting connecting the dots between psychotherapy, the human experience and brain (and other) science–for example Siegel’s notion of interpersonal neurobiology (which makes intuitive and professional sense to me)  For example, we already knew that people who have experienced trauma have challenges relating to regulating their nervous systems, and the nervous system’s impacts on their experiences of their brains and bodies. But, more and more, we know why, and we also know ways of providing significant healing experiences at a client’s pace. I’m thinking primarily here of both Brainspotting and Somatic Experiencing, each of which offer approaches that don’t rely on a patient’s ability to communicate using words.

This is a relief for me as a therapist, because I believe that knowledge/feelings/memories are sometimes stored in the brain and body in ways we can’t access with language and conscious thought. We can now do work directly with the nervous system via the body, and with memories via the visual field and the brain/mind. I deeply believe (based on my own life experience, and my experience as a clinician of observing my clients’ bodies during therapy) that as we work to integrate all knowledge about self-regulation and reworking negative experiences, therapists will increasingly treat the whole person. Bringing the unconscious into light and discussing drives, motives and past experiences is necessary and important work, but only part of the puzzle.

I’m really happy to say that I feel increasingly comfortable working with the following different aspects of people’s human experience to help clients. In my case this includes using some of the following approaches/strategies to inform my work:

  • For concrete assistance with improving client behavioral strategies and negative thinking: CBT.
  • For reducing overall distress/anxiety: Deep breathing, relaxation methods like progressive muscle relaxation and mindfulness exercises.
  • For insight: Object relations theory, narrative therapy, relational therapy.
  • For traumatic memories: Brainspotting.
  • For difficult body sensations: Sensorimotor Experiencing.
  • For understanding motivation for changing challenging behaviors/managing ambivalence: Motivational Interviewing.

I’m also a feminist therapist, and I use critical race theory to understand the more damaging aspects of how power works and replicates itself in our society’s functioning. These are also tools for considering the language we use to discuss the “isms” that permeate our lives.

There’s more, but this is a good start. In short, I believe in treating the whole person and helping people develop better coping strategies, experience more positivity in their lives, gain greater peace with their thoughts and bodies, and (of course) gain insights around patterns in their lives and how those patterns were inspired by history and personality.