Clients come to me asking if I can help them stop feeling a certain way:
- “My marriage is breaking down because I have anger and jealousy outbursts – can you help me to not feel my emotions?”
- “I feel so resentful and overwhelmed because I keep on giving and sacrificing myself to my children/colleagues but they are so ungrateful – can you make me not feel resentful?”
- “I feel that my partner is going to leave me so I’m making sure I’m on my best behaviour and this is exhausting to the point that I feel numb inside – tell me what I should do that she wouldn’t leave me?”.
Can you feel the emotional weight from these requests? And it’s only a drop in the ocean of the reasons people seek counselling.
Why people want their feelings ‘removed’
The people I counsel initially come with a mindset that their feelings and emotions need to be obliterated. It’s simply because they were not taught and shown what to do with them, so they are scared of them or unsure what to do with them. They think their emotions and feelings are useless and get them into trouble, so they need to be gone!
They learnt that an emotion was a “bad thing to have” because their parents may have told them: “What are you crying about, I’m not even beating you?!” when what (then a child) the client was crying about was fear and confusion and they needed reassurance and an embrace from their parents. This may result in a client wondering “Why do I feel so much?”.
Or perhaps a client was bullied so they had to hide their true self and what makes them unique so that they’d protect themselves from the bullies, in return creating a strong Inner Critic (“there must be something wrong with me to get this kind of treatment?”).
Or it could be that their mum said a few times: “if you’re like this (sad/angry), people won’t like you”; this is how a person might develop a belief that only a sunny predisposition in social circles is accepted.
So when they feel sad or angry or many emotions, they suppress these feelings thus creating more tension each time, these natural energies in the body come up. Essentially, feelings carry a lot of unprocessed information, which feel heavy and ultra-uncomfortable in a myriad of ways, so from a limited perspective and fear people don't want to feel.
The Victim Mindset
It’s not surprising that emotions are treated as the enemy because in a world where efficiency, logic and façade are so valued, it’s hard to treat one’s emotions otherwise. Sadly, this way of thinking forms a victim’s or “I’m powerless”mindset. It's because if the psychological trauma occurred at a young age, when children are dependent on their caregivers and listen to their restricting instructions (like mentioned previously), these imperatives settle like limiting beliefs in an adult’s subconscious and this way people may develop a weird relationship with authority.
It means that your limiting/mistaken beliefs are a learnt helplessness. And the good news is that if you learnt it, you can unlearn it. You can start by reflecting on your behaviour, feelings and thoughts to bring the suppressed information from your subconscious into your consciousness.
To be transparent, I understand my clients because a big part of my life was also around disrespecting my emotions, needs and wants. Fortunately, my and the people I counsel lives have changed because of my decision to delve into understanding of the need for emotion.
We need to understand that people’s behaviours are fuelled by their feelings and emotions. Emotional cycles perpetuate if the emotions weren’t allowed to be felt (fear around dad yelling, about no reason to cry, inability to fight back to the bullies or agreeing to mum’s education about being sad/angry and feeling confused what to do about those feelings when they come up), so they look for another opportunity to resurface, again and again until a reflexive person has courage to pass the emotion through their conscious mind.
To stop unwanted behaviour we need to understand the origin of the emotion that is driving that behaviour. We need to work together to widen the gap between the trigger and the reaction. We need to be allowed to feel our feelings from start to finish - I talk about this more in what responsibility looks like in the healing section. This way we will create the distance needed to gain clarity* in your thinking and will help you improve your quality of life. So, this means that you’ll end up feeling your emotions but learn the skills on how to manage them. Just remember that you are not alone in this.
*Clarity, in my opinion, is a better word for rationality, because we are not after comparing what’s better: emotions or logic but we strive for something even better: clear mind.
What Therapy Actually Does
Attending regular sessions with me will help you understand your emotions, needs, wants and personal values. You will learn how the situations you get in over and over again, were formed in the past and you will realise that it’s not working for you anymore so it would be pointless to continue; hence we’re going to look into your preferences for the future you.
You will also increase the capacity of the part of you called the Observer (or the true self, or your consciousness as opposed to your personality and ego), which is crucial for your wellbeing. It’s because we need a conscious and compassionate observer to witness the pain we sustained. After working with me you will have the tools you need to give yourself compassion and respect you deserve.
What Responsibility Looks Like in Healing
It’s worth it to remember that your emotions are not something to fight against or suppress, or something to identify with. Your emotions are signals inside you to the environment outside you; when you fight, suppress, identify with, you create your unwanted emotional overwhelm and this is how you lose your vitality. You may be asking yourself “Why do I feel so much?” whereas what you may be doing is resisting the emotion, thus creating even more discomfort within yourself thinking that your emotions are a bad thing. So, I suggest being curious about this statement: your nervous system will relax when you stop fighting, resisting and/or wallowing.
It’s vital for you to drop the expectation that in therapy and counselling I will fix you (as I said, you learnt it, so can unlearn it). The caveat in thinking that you’re defected, so you must be fixed, is going to make the therapy ineffective because of the resistance on the subconscious level.
As I already mentioned, it’s the resistance that creates the emotional pain. And my job here is to hold a confidential and compassionate place saturated with curiosity, so that you could explore your limitations and progress safely.
If you are after a real change, you can start by thinking about the phrase “I get to keep the beliefs I’m fighting for” and then choose what kind of beliefs you want to keep and defend. This is the reason I invite you to participate in our therapeutic relationship and be honest in our conversations, because together we can work to explore your new beliefs, and the tools needed to live by them.
EMDR
It may seem daunting to pass 30 years (or whatever your age is) of emotional suppression through your conscious mind in a few seasons of counselling. Fortunately, this is where EMDR can be helpful for a single stressful and traumatic event or for chronic neglect in your earlier years.
EMDR helps your brain and nervous system process painful events you witnessed or participated in by removing the emotional charge by leaving the memory. Think of it like a plumber plunging out a clogged pipe system: the pipes remain but the debris is out. It’s fascinating how it works! Bear in mind that we will need to do some training to evoke the sense of safety and the Observer within you. After a plunge, emotions that were not neutralised, will surge up most likely. Like I said, your body will calm down when you stop resisting the surging energy (emotions). It’s also worth remembering that if you stop resisting/ fighting/ suppressing identifying with, it doesn’t mean that you will agree and approve the bad things that happened to you. Stopping resisting means you allow the energy in your body to take the course and complete itself, it’s something that feelings and emotions are after. I would love to show this to you!
If you’re tired of fighting your feelings and ready to understand them instead, trauma-informed therapy like EMDR may help you move forward without shutting yourself down emotionally. I invite you to lead your therapeutic journey with a desire for curiosity and self-respect for our work to be effective. I always invite my clients to switch on these two characteristics so that our work would not be about me “fixing” you but you becoming so curious and resilient, that you end up creating life on your terms.
