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 really the way that we survive. It 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 articulately describe them, is unhelpful. Feelings are intrinsically non-verbal, so let’s not fetishise their verbalisation.
A reasonable goal of therapy would be to help you just experience a range of available feelings, as 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.
Where we are at our best as humans is to be able to “go on being” – to respond to life organically. To be angry here, to be sad there, happy then, calm sometimes, a bit numb when we just need to be. These are all healthy responses.
Therapists are not here to force you to have feelings. And certainly not to lead you to feel shame you 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, what feelings are unhelpful.
