Sitting With Your Feelings

One of the hardest concepts for people to grasp in therapy is the idea of “sitting with your feelings.” Every time I have suggested this to a patient, I get the same response: a slight tilt of the head and a quizzical look. Seconds after I suggest the idea of sitting with their anger, sadness, or frustration, I get the inevitable question of “how?”

When I started going to therapy, the emotion I was most in touch with was anger. Sadness was buried. Happiness fleeting. Rage could be summoned with the wrong kind of look from a stranger or a stray thought about a real or imagined annoyance. I could be in that feeling all day long, often acting on it in subtle ways, mostly toward myself, sometimes projecting it onto others. I wasn't sitting in my feelings; I was stewing in them.

So what's the difference?

Stewing is a form of rumination where one dwells on a distressing thought, emotion, or situation on a loop. I often wouldn’t know I was angry; I would act out and then realize, oh, look, you're pissed. Once aware of the rage, I would fixate on something or many frustrating things, which would only increase the feeling, making me want to engage in more destructive behavior or thinking. I never stopped to try to understand where the feeling came from. I never asked myself “How did it start?” Or  “What precipitated it?” Or, “Now that I know I'm angry, what do I want to do with it? I reacted instead of responding.

Sitting with your feelings is different. After years of my own therapy, practicing observing myself in new ways, I am aware of my feelings not just in thoughts but in my body. I feel the feeling everywhere. Anger often appears as a tension headache or a stomach ache for me; sadness can feel like heaviness in my chest or legs. Once aware I’m having a strong emotion, I accept it and try not to judge it. As I attempt to understand where it came from and why I’m in it, I notice the feeling lessens instead of intensifying. Sitting with it lets it pass through me rather than getting lodged and stuck in places that cause discomfort or anguish.

Therapy is incredibly useful in practicing this skill in real time with another person. Another great tool I use is tarot.

When I feel like I’m teetering between stewing and sitting, I pull a card or give myself a full reading.  Every card is connected to an element and an emotional experience. If I am angry and I pull the Three of Swords (often associated with emotional pain and heartbreak), I let myself consider whether there are other emotions beneath the anger. If I’m feeling sad and can't quite put my finger on why, pulling the Six of Wands could help me consider whether the reason is that I am feeling overlooked or less confident in myself than usual. The card becomes the mirror that reflects back what I couldn’t see in myself on my own.  This allows me to be open to understanding my feelings in new ways, so I can sit with them long enough for them to move into a less active place, or altogether pass.

I know that when I say to a patient, “Can you sit with this feeling?” It can be scary and frustrating. It may even feel like I’m asking them to do the impossible; I know it's felt that way for me at times. But as they do it more, just as I did, the agency felt in being able to manage hard emotions in new ways is worth the moments of discomfort in the process. Sitting with your feelings will make them yours, something that you move through, not something that is moving you.

Working Hard and Still Feeling Stuck

Recently, I was a finalist for an award for something I’ve been working on for years. At first, I was elated just to be chosen in any capacity. After 36 hours, I wanted to win. One week later, I got the form email telling me I lost. The highs and lows of that week made me think about how this dynamic arises in the therapeutic setting.

Most of my clients work hard in therapy. They come to every session with thoughts about themselves and their lives and divulge their feelings about the most intimate aspects of their inner world. Many of them practice skills or habits outside of the therapy room to improve their routines and patterns. All of them hit walls where, no matter how hard they work, parts of themselves or their lives seem stuck.

I know how discouraging, enraging, and upsetting this can be because I too have been through it. Not just with this award but on an emotional level as well. As someone who began their career being trained in modern psychoanalysis, I have been in therapy myself with the same therapist for my entire career. Together, we have weathered many moments when I felt like I hadn’t made progress in various aspects of my healing. In those moments, I felt like all the work I had done was for nothing, and I wanted to quit. I never did fully quit, but in some of these periods, I have taken a break from therapy for a month or two. In the breaks, I never had any "Aha!" moments, but I did get some space from dealing with that issue on a weekly basis, which is what I needed at the time. Sometimes our defenses dictate what kind of work we are capable of, and my defenses were not ready to relinquish control long enough for a breakthrough.

In our society, we learn that if we work hard, success follows. Sometimes that is true, but often people are doing all the right things yet cannot make progress in therapy or in life. There are many reasons for this: institutional oppression, burnout, structural obstacles, intergenerational trauma or stress, and unhealthy relationships that keep us tethered to our patterns, leaving little room for change and making people feel like failures.

But sometimes success can be defined in different ways. Of course, in my mind, success was winning the award.  My friends, family, and even my own therapist reminded me that being a finalist is a success in and of itself. It is something that can be celebrated and used to increase my chances of winning another award of its kind down the road. It’s something to be proud of. I’ll admit that the day I found out I lost, I was not able to take in any of the encouraging things they were saying. But a few days after the news arrived, I added the accolade to my website and felt it was a new level of achievement.

When change doesn’t come quickly despite great effort, one may feel disappointed, hopeless, and self-critical. In therapy, I help people to sit with these uncomfortable emotions and explore what it means to struggle through them. We get curious about the feelings that arise when their effort doesn’t pay off, how past experiences may echo in what they feel now, and how perceived failure in the past plays into their current reaction to being unable to move into a new space within themselves.

Therapy is more than solving a problem. It is a place to experience emotions safely and build a greater capacity to endure difficult emotional experiences. What allows that to happen is the therapeutic relationship, which takes time to build but creates the conditions in which the skills being taught become emotionally possible to use.

While it may be hard for my clients as they go through the process, I see progress in less obvious, smaller shifts that precede a big behavior change. When a client understands what’s triggering them, feels less shame, or recovers more quickly from setbacks, that is success. When I see them tolerate difficult emotions longer and have more compassion for themselves, that is progress. Eventually, I do see these small changes culminate in the behavior change they were originally looking for.

I was hit harder than I thought by the disappointment of not winning. To me, that is an indicator that there is something I don’t understand about myself regarding rejection or competition, and I’m curious to find out more while also sitting with uncomfortable feelings for now. So I will talk about those feelings in therapy; I will explore what comes up with as much openness as I can, and I know progress is not measured in “feeling better” about it but instead in my being able to relate to the feelings in a new way through a deeper understanding of myself.