If you’re reading this, there may be a part of you that’s tired of feeling low, confused or overwhelmed – and perhaps another part that is wondering if therapy might help. Let me ask you a question. How do you react when you feel sad and how do you cope with it? Long before I trained as a therapist, my response would have been to shut down or distract myself. Suppression felt safer than the vulnerability that came with sadness. I recall seeing a sad film with a girlfriend and crying at the tragic ending. She wanted to give me a hug, but I felt embarrassed and pushed her away. Anger felt more powerful than sadness. I didn’t know it at the time but like many people, I had learned to protect myself from the vulnerability of sadness.
Sometimes we hide from feelings that make us feel vulnerable and often we think that we need to escape them, through activity or work. Distraction, however, does not solve the problem and today we are going to explore why we need to explore so-called “negative feelings” and learn how to manage them more compassionately.
Common Misconceptions About Sadness and Mental Health
Recently I was working with a client who was new to counselling, and they were a little sceptical. They hadn’t been traumatised, bereaved, abused when they were young, or any of the ‘legitimate’ reasons why someone might go to see a therapist. In fact, they quipped, “I wish I had some horror in my past that would explain why I feel so bad.” He wasn’t being dramatic - just frustrated and confused, as so many people are when their pain feels real but inexplicable. We had talked a little about his upbringing, but he didn’t see the point in digging up memories from long ago. He had a clear understanding of the events of his life and didn’t see how talking about it could lead to healing.
This is not uncommon, many of my clients are coming to therapy because they can’t find an obvious explanation for their pain. They are struggling to understand why they feel stuck or depressed, or that everyone else is managing but they can’t cope, and that compounds their sense of failure. If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people arrive in therapy feeling exactly the same way.
I recognised what he was going through, I had felt much the same when I had walked through my therapist’s front door for the first time. I felt embarrassed. Why was I talking to this stranger about my life? My upbringing had been fine. I had memories that were good and bad but I knew what had happened and could talk about it, I had talked about it with a few close friends and some of my family and they had offered a sympathetic ear, but nothing had changed and I still felt bad so, reluctantly, I had found a therapist and had begun the slow process of unpacking my history and exploring the path that had lead from childhood to the present.
Breaking Old Patterns: Reframing your Emotional Story
The origins of our suffering are often more subtle than the feelings engendered by one painful incident. Usually, as I begin to work with a client a memory will emerge and this will form part of a pattern. It might be a teacher that belittled you at school which lead to a lack of confidence that became reinforced over time; or a beloved pet that died when you were young and those around you weren’t sensitive to your loss. Boarding School Syndrome is now a recognised psychological illness, but for hundreds of children being abruptly taken from your home and placed in an institution full of rules and frightening strangers with little or no contact with home for weeks at a time was considered a privilege and has left wounds that adults still struggle to understand years after the event. Even small moments - a frustrated teacher’s sigh, a parent’s dismissal or a lonely bedtime - can quietly shape how safe it feels to have feelings.
Parents don’t like to see their children upset and so will minimise an experience when what they needed was someone to just see how hurt they were. To our parents it may seem like we are making a fuss over something tiny, but in the world of a child it is a big deal and if you are told repeatedly that your feelings are silly or wrong or that you are being “too emotional” this will mould how you understand and process your feelings in adulthood. If our sadness or fear were ignored or not taken seriously then we learn to suppress them and fail to learn a valuable lesson about emotional regulation.
In therapy we often explore early years, not to assign blame, but to understand the emotional maps we were given. So many of our ideas about the world are formed in childhood and psychological templates can be set down that become fixed in our mind and shape how we expect to be treated. This is why messages like “big boys don’t cry” or “angry girls aren’t attractive” can do such harm when absorbed into our world view. Men would be a lot happier if they could admit to their sadness and sit with it without feeling less of a man and women should feel able to express their rage sometimes (there is a reason why Sally Wainwright’s television series Riot Women struck such a chord at the beginning of the year).
Why Recognising Your Feelings Is the First Step to Healing
To put it simply, no one gets through childhood unscathed and if you weren’t encouraged to express the full range of your feelings and understand them then you won’t know how to deal with them in later life and these emotional wounds remain unaddressed. Every child grows up thinking their upbringing was ‘normal’ because what else do they have to compare it to? But the strategies you learned back then may no longer be serving you well and if you find yourself feeling down, or overwhelmed, or confused about what to do next, your mind is telling you that something needs to change. You don’t need to have everything figured out before you come to therapy. Bringing your confusion, your hunches, or just the feeling that something isn’t right is more than enough. You deserve to be heard. With this deeper understanding you can find your own answers, and this is where true resilience lies.
If some part of you is wondering whether talking might help, I’d be glad to walk alongside you. You are welcome to reach out whenever you are ready.