Feel so human?

What to do when you feel so human

I am therapist, and recently, I’ve been waking up in the morning to hear myself say “wow, I feel so human today.” I recognize this is an odd thought, because of course I woke up today just as human as any other day. With all that is happening in our world and in my life there is a raw heaviness inside of me that holds this thought. I sigh, acknowledging some unreasonable belief that as a therapist I should not feel derailed by the emotional turmoil of this pandemic. Clearly one’s professional identity can propagate unrealistic expectations of self. Nonetheless, I am finding that exploring my own humanness has been helpful in allowing me to better navigate and support the experiences of those I work with.

So, what does it mean to “feel so human”? My sense is that it is an experience of vulnerability in your feelings.  Connecting with feelings that are difficult and uncomfortable. Feelings that feel so familiar and yet completely new at the same time. Young, nostalgic feelings that have dulled for a while and then emerged with full intensity. Adult feelings that are strange and hard to manage. Full human feelings of uncertainty, fear, sadness, and anger all felt with a sense of raw vulnerability. Feelings followed by an array of thoughts like: Who is protecting me and keeping me safe? How do I protect and keep myself safe? Can I protect the people I love? Will the people I love die? Why can’t my family understand me? How can my partner do that? Why do people think that way? When will this be over? Will it ever be over? I am so alone. I cannot do another video call. I miss my friends.

So yes, I want to normalize every single one of these feelings, thoughts, and experiences for people. They are real. There is something happening which is profoundly collective and at the same time profoundly personal. This pandemic creates a shared experience for us all, while also touching deeply into our personal vulnerabilities, fears, and uncertainties in ways we are just discovering.

I cannot offer a quick, 5-step solution for dealing with this pandemic, or for dealing with anything in life for that matter, but I can offer some suggestions and insight into managing your very human experiences.

Feel it all. Slow down, take deep breaths and give yourself permission to feel everything. Feeling requires limiting distractions and being with yourself and/or a caring other. The more you feel, the less you will ruminate and worry about what you cannot control. Feeling the hard feelings doesn’t mean you walk around with a smile. Be open to the messiness and patient with yourself in the process.

Be open to the collective and curious about the personal. Acknowledging our shared experiences through this crisis can lead to connection and support. We have no emotional blueprint for managing this pandemic and embracing the universality of this new experience is something that can bring us together. We can embrace the collective and be curious about the profoundly personal experiences that this crisis will touch into. Just as this crisis exposes the frailty of our socio-economic and political framework, it will also highlight the cracks in our psyche where awareness and healing are wanting to emerge.

So, what do you do when you feel so human? Embrace it. Feel it. Know you are not alone in it. Connect with it and let it connect you to others.

What’s the point of feeling?

What’s the point of feeling my feelings?

I realize that I am fulfilling a widespread stereotype about therapy when I ask the question, “and how does that make you feel?” I can feel the eye rolls as a response to this question, and I get it, emotions can be uncomfortable, especially when we feel them with others. I often hear from my clients “it’s annoying when you ask me how I feel” or “I don’t see the point in feeling this now.”   It would be easy to skip the discomfort and chalk emotional processing up to “therapy phooey,” but then, we would be missing out on what is essential for growth, healing, and lasting change.

The question, “And how does that make you feel?” serves a purpose; emotional awareness. Emotional awareness is important because our emotions are important. Our emotions make up the core of who we are as humans. They help us connect with others and they inform us about our needs and what actions we need to take. It is important for us to feel into the experience of our emotions and draw wisdom from them. Anger teaches us that we need to set boundaries, sadness brings healing, grief leads to acceptance, guilt can tell us that we’ve done something wrong, and joy allows us to connect to others in very deep ways.

Science now validates the importance of emotions. New research in affective neuroscience, neuroplasticity (brains ability to change), and emotion theory inform us that emotions are a powerful influence in our ability to change and transform. They are strong psychobiological forces within us that inform us about ourselves and our world.

So, what’s the point of feeling? Here are two benefits that most resonate with me:

Connection to yourself

Making space for what we feel allows us to understand our needs, motives, and priorities as humans. When we inhibit our emotional experience, we are distancing from the core aspects of who we are. People often come to therapy saying things like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or “I feel confused about what to do.” These statements represent disconnection from feeling and require getting reconnected with the experience of one’s own emotions.

Reconnecting with the experience of emotion requires more than just awareness of it on a cognitive level, emotions need to be experienced in the body to be integrated. I can tell you that I am sad because my mind is aware of it and yet my body registers anxiety and shame that inhibit my experience of the sadness. By exploring the experience of the emotion in the body, we become aware of the myriad of factors that can be inhibiting the felt sense of the emotion in the body. So, connection to yourself and your feelings supersedes the cognitive experience, we must also incorporate the body.

When we achieve connection to self, we experience authenticity, reduced anxiety and depression, and a more coherent narrative of who we are. We cannot fully understand ourselves and out needs when our connection to emotion is inhibited and defended against.

Connection to others

Our emotions help us connect with others. We are a bonding species, we need each other. Yet often our relationships are a point of contention and distress in our lives. People often seek out therapy when they notice this distress in their relationships and are wanting a change. They come to therapy wanting to feel seen, understood, and validated by their partners and friends, yet it is often their own internal conflicts that interfere. What is helpful to understand is that the very complaints we have of others are often small projections of the way we treat ourselves. We may desperately want to feel heard by our partners, yet every time we feel anger towards them, we dismiss the feeling, grin and say, “that’s fine.”

I’m reminded of a patient who felt so hurt and frustrated with his friend for discounting him. As we worked together in the session, we discovered my client’s own internal conflict around validating his anger. “Do you notice that as we try and stay with this frustration you judge yourself quite harshly for experiencing it?” I asked. “Well I think it’s dumb that I even care this much,” he responded. What unfolded in the session led us to see that my client’s own way of responding to his anger was discounting. We were able to identify patterns of dismissing his anger towards others, and turning the blame and self-attack towards himself, which was something that greatly distressed him and his relationships.

So, there is purpose in feeling your feelings. It is not just something your therapist asks you when they haven’t been listening and don’t know what else to say. Making space to experience our feelings in our body reconnects us to ourselves and others. What brings more joy than that?  

Transformational Therapy

We focus and reflect on transformation in order to accelerate change.

A transformational approach in therapy is one that privileges strength and the capacity for survival and healing over pathology (disease). We need to notice and focus on this drive for healing because it is an important part of who we are and how we’ve adapted. Therapy is a great place to learn about this transformational drive because it is often what causes us to make the call, send the email, or step through the door for help.  It is important to realize that despite the chaos, problems, pain, and suffering, there also exists a strong transformational force that wants to bring us healing and growth. This is a powerful and important force to pay attention to.

Experiential Therapy

We go to therapy to have an experience,
and we want to make it a good one.  – Diana Fosha.

Fellow uses experiential interventions to integrate mind, body, and emotional experience.

Experiential modes of therapy focus on the “here and now” of what unfolds in the therapy session. We may spend time talking about the past or future, but the goal is to check in and see how this narrative is experienced in the present. Experiential questions sound like this: “How is this for you now? What do you notice internally (bodily or physical sensations) as you talk about this? What feelings do you notice now?”

Experiential practices help us access the cognitive, physical, and emotional parts of ourselves and integrate them. Our high functioning lifestyles and culture tend to favor our cognitive experience (thinking, analyzing) over our emotional or physical. While this can be adaptive and functional, it can also leave us feeling disconnected from our bodies and emotions. Experiential practices are used in therapy to help people gain access to and deepen the emotional and physical parts of oneself.

Relational Therapy

Healing occurs within a caring and supportive relationship. This approach values the relationship and works to create a safe, enjoyable, and trusting interaction. The relational aspects of therapy provide individuals with a corrective relational experience that allows for deeper connection with oneself and others.

Research consistently shows that the common factor that indicates a successful outcome in therapy is a positive therapeutic relationship. This can be described as feeling safe, connected, and seen by the therapist. The safety of the relationship becomes the foundation and launching point that facilitates deep emotional work. Part of a relational approach in therapy is noticing what is happening between the patient and therapist. As humans we often reenact old relational patterns in our present relationships. Therapy provides us the opportunity to notice and change the relational patterns as they unfold in the session.

Emotion Focused Therapy

Emotion focused approach connects individuals to their emotional experience in therapy and works to enhance emotional expression. This approach values emotions as adaptive and necessary agents that help us navigate our environment and feel integrated as humans.

Our emotions make up the core of who we are as humans. They help use connect with others and they inform us about our needs and our actions. It is important for us to feel and draw wisdom from our emotions, but the reality is that many of us learn to avoid, distract, and defend against them. This learned pattern of tamping down on our emotions is often formed in early childhood as a way of pleasing our caregivers and maintaining our attachments with them. It is not all bad to tamp down on our emotions, at times we need to. We need to be able to titrate our feelings and discern when is the correct time to fully feel and express. But, patterns of defending against emotion become maladaptive when defenses become hardwired and we can no longer access, feel, or express our emotional experience.

Research in affective neuroscience and neuroplasticity (the brains ability to change) has shed light on the primacy of emotion and the important role it plays in our ability to change. This research informs many psychotherapy practices to privilege emotion as an agent of healing and transformation.