“I know how I feel. I just don’t see what good it does to talk about it.”
Fair enough. Knowing you’re angry doesn’t resolve an argument. A good cry doesn’t bring back what you’ve lost. And paying someone to listen to you talk about your childhood can seem like an awfully roundabout way of improving your life. So why does therapy place so much emphasis on feelings?
What can a feeling tell you?
We tend to judge feelings by what they accomplish. Does expressing anger solve anything? Does acknowledging disappointment make it go away? But there’s a difference between deciding that a feeling isn’t worth acting on and deciding it isn’t worth knowing about.
Say you rarely think of yourself as angry. Anger strikes you as childish or unproductive, and you pride yourself on being reasonable. Yet you regularly find yourself exhausted by other people’s demands, quietly resentful, and mystified by how often you give more than you get back.
In therapy, you might talk through the last time a friend asked for a favor. You said yes without thinking, then spent the rest of the day irritated with them. Your therapist might ask what you wanted to say when they asked. Maybe it was “I can’t this week.” Or maybe it was “I wish you’d ask how I’m doing before you ask me for something.” Either answer gives you a better idea of what bothered you and what you might want to say next time.
Why are some feelings harder to acknowledge?
Our attitudes toward emotions have histories. A person who considers sadness self-indulgent may have learned something quite important about the consequences of needing comfort. Someone who dismisses anger may associate it with cruelty or loss of control. Over time, these attitudes can become so familiar that they no longer register as beliefs. They feel like common sense, or simply like part of who we are. And often, they’ve served us well.
The difficulty comes when an old solution continues operating long after the circumstances that required it have changed. We can become exceptionally skilled at managing experiences we’ve never given ourselves much opportunity to understand.
Can therapy help if I’m skeptical?
It can. You can bring that skepticism into the room, especially if you keep finding yourself in situations you don’t understand or repeating patterns you meant to leave behind. Maybe your life looks perfectly good on paper, but something still feels missing in your relationships. You can start there.
You don’t need to agree with a therapist that feelings are inherently valuable. In fact, the conviction that they’re not valuable may be one of the more interesting things to explore. You could start by saying exactly what you said at the beginning: “I know how I feel. I just don’t see what good it does to talk about it.” That gives you and your therapist something concrete to discuss. What would make talking about it worthwhile to you?
Sometimes what changes in therapy is how much choice you feel you have. Once you understand why saying no feels so unreasonable, you might find you have a little more room to decide when you actually want to say yes.
If you’re curious about therapy and still wondering what you’d get out of it, bring that question to a consultation. At Therapists of New York, we’ll talk with you about what you’d like to change and help you find a therapist whose approach feels like a good fit.
