There are some psychological patterns that come up in nearly every therapy session, with every client, because we ALL experience them. One that tops this list is our tendency to want to push away difficult thoughts and feelings. We don’t want to feel what we feel and often engage in a struggle against our thoughts and emotions.
There are many ways to push away what we’re thinking and feeling and most of them work…temporarily. But these coping strategies, while they have their place, don’t offer us a long term solution. When we try to not feel what we are feeling, we actually run the risk of making things worse. Have you ever found yourself feeling anxious about being anxious? Or depressed about being depressed? That’s what usually happens when we try to push feelings away instead of making space for them. We don’t have to like the feelings but it does help to try to make space for them.
No one has ever come up with a method or a pill to eradicate what we think and feel. Like the weather, we don’t usually get to choose how we feel or what we’re thinking. What we can choose, however, is what we do when difficult thoughts and feelings arise, as they often will. We can drop the struggle against the feelings and make room for emotion to move through and around us. Just like the weather, feelings are ever changing and we can trust that they will come and go.
Australian psychotherapist, Dr. Russ Harris, has a talent for explaining these sorts of concepts in goofy video animations. He uses an approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which I draw from a lot in my own work. This approach emphasizes highly practical methods for dealing with the thoughts and feelings that inevitably come our way. Check out his video below:
