There’s an idea held by many people, certainly by many therapists, that feelings are the gold standard response to anything and everything. If you can’t feel it, then you are in some way repressed or unable to fully experience what it is to be a human being.
I believe that’s too simplistic. Because we can’t always feel things deeply, and indeed some of the defenses we have against feeling things deeply are just the way that we get through life. They may be an important part of our way of functioning.
Having “too much” feeling is itself problematic. A lot of people who come to therapy suffer from exactly this. They’re unable to feel appropriate levels of say fear, or abandonment, or insecurity in a given situation. They are overwhelmed by the strength of their feelings.
There’s obviously some sort of middle ground, that can include sometimes not feeling things. Or not feeling them deeply. The idea that therapy insists on you always feeling the right thing, or being so connected to your feelings that you can always articulate them, is unhelpful. Feelings are intrinsically non-verbal, so let’s not fetishise their verbalisation.
That’s not to deny that a reasonable goal of therapy would be for you to experience, only if possible, a wider range of feelings appropriate to the different situations you find yourself in. Not so narrowly, deeply, or continually that they’re a chronic state you’re stuck in; nor so shallowly or insufficiently that you feel detached from yourself and others.
When we are at our best as humans, we are able to just “go on being” – psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s term for how we healthily respond to life, organically and fluidly. To be angry here, sad there, happy then, calm sometimes, a bit numb when we just need to be a bit numb. These are all healthy responses; things go wrong if we’re stuck in a particular one.
Therapists are not here to force you to have feelings. And certainly not to lead you to feel shame for not having them. At most, we’re helping you discover what feelings might make sense in certain situations, if they’re available to you. And also, when feelings are unhelpful.
Image credit: Victor Yuan
