Things I want my kids to know

“What was that?”

My supervisor paused the recording.

This was nine years ago. We were in a group supervision session, watching a tape of one of my client sessions, along with two of my peers, so I could get feedback from all of them. This is something we had to do every week.

This particular one changed a lot for me.

I looked at my supervisor a bit nonplussed. I didn’t know what he was referring to.

“She started to cry, and you made a joke.” He looked at me.

I didn’t really know what to say, because I didn’t really know what he was getting at.

He continued, with a patient, enquiring tone. He was an excellent supervisor. This wasn’t a telling-off. It was a teaching moment.

“What do you think that says to her about her emotions?”

Again, I wasn’t really sure what to say.

“I think it tells her that her emotions need to be swept aside or pushed away. Or maybe even that her emotions make you uncomfortable. The two of you end up talking about what she can do to change things, instead of just spending a moment acknowledging how she feels and letting her be upset, as she has every right to be.”

I told him I could see that.

“What’s that about, do you think? Are you uncomfortable with emotions yourself?”

Now this is nine years ago. I had already been working with patients for six years and I was good at it. Generally, my patients liked me and I got good results.

But he was right: I was uncomfortable with emotions. As daft as that sounds.

In my personal life, I generally avoided (and still do, really) things that make me uncomfortable. My wife often wants to watch documentaries about difficult subjects and the thought of spending an evening feeling angry, anxious or upset is just never ever appealing.

You might think “But why would you be a therapist then? Surely you have to face difficult things there?” You would be right to ask the question, but here’s the thing: as a therapist, I felt I could do something. I could hear someone in pain and I could offer something that might help then feel better, or less alone. It wasn’t emotion that wasn’t going to go anywhere, it was emotion we could do something about.

Up until this point, that is how I had seen my job: to help people to feel better, to feel less pain, and that the way to do that was to offer kindness and support, but also some ways to deal with it.

This moment with my supervisor was a changing point for me. We spoke some more in the group and he explained that part of helping someone to deal with their emotions is to help them sit with them, understand them, and to not be afraid of them. When we are feeling scared, angry or sad but we can’t sit with that feeling, it makes us do things to run away from it and generally the most effective things are deeply unhelpful. Drinking, overworking, distracting ourselves, checking things a lot, isolating ourselves. There are so many ways we try to avoid feeling, and those things can cause problems in themselves.

Also, most of the time our feelings are completely reasonable, but often part of the problem is that we don’t see them that way. We see them as irrational, silly or stupid. Sometimes that means that being taught ways to “manage” them or get rid of them misses a vital step:

Offering ourselves care and compassion for the way that we feel.

This session changed the course of my therapy career. I am a much better therapist as a result. Don’t get me wrong, I still make jokes and I still go through ways of dealing with things, but my first intention is always to help someone to see their emotions as reasonable, and to allow them to sit with them longer, to not feel afraid of them.

In my personal life, I still avoid the difficult documentaries, but I am better at facing the things that bother me. I am better at being kind to myself when I am anxious or sad and I would rather not be. I am better at giving myself some time to just feel how I feel, rather than endlessly running. Sometimes that looks like spending a bit of time writing down how I feel, or giving myself space without my head in a book or my headphones on, just to let my mind wander. Sometimes it looks like actually letting myself cry if that’s what is going on, rather than trying to shut it out all the time.

Sometimes the way to deal with emotions is to let them be, and to be kind to yourself while they do what they do.

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Thanks for reading. Until next week,

Ted

P.S. If you do want to try out the writing things down, I would recommend moving away from turning it into a to-do list. The point is to let yourself feel, to sink into it for a few minutes. To let it come up and then pass, like a wave. To do that, try starting with “I am feeling…” and just keep writing, unfiltered, until you run out of stuff to say.