But how will it make me feel better?
Asks my client as they drop their head back onto their couch. Their eyes are flung back into their skull and their eyelids are slowly blinking over as if trying to blanket their exhaustion through their eyes. They are clearly frustrated and overwhelmed by sadness, pain, and despair.
I smile, lovingly and knowingly. I’ve been here too. Wishing someone, a provider, a loved one, a relative, a stranger even, could take away all my pain as easily as they could order doordash, as easily as a flick of a wand, as easy as a spoonful of sugar.
In today’s session, we’ve working on a looping track they have stuck in their heads that’s been preventing them from journaling and getting into the work. The loop goes something like this: I hate them… it would be easier if they died… Why is this happening to me? Why are they that way? etc.
The loop begins playing at night when they’re looking around their house at the piles of things they “should be doing” or “should have done” or “should be working on”. But instead of journaling, or studying for exams, or preparing for class they slump on the couch in a ball, call their sibling, and cry. The track is playing in their head like the song that never ends…
I am encouraging them that rather than slumping on the couch and listening to this annoying tune to write it down in a journal everyday for a week. This is where they ask me “but how will that make me feel better?”
My answer: it may not. The goal, of course, in writing down the track is that there is both an honest documentation of what is going on in their heads and the opportunity to see if playing it on paper will reveal a new tune or a new question. Is this tune a mental block they need to work through or is it a mental block that creates or promotes unproductive thinking and use of life force? These are the questions that without data we cannot answer.
My goal is not to make them feel better. I want them to sit with their pain everyday for a week. Most people hear that and think, “But I’ll drown in it! Please just take it away!” This may be true. In fact most people, I think when they go looking for help is they look for a lifesaver, a raft, a booey. Something immediate that can pull them out of the storm.
But our storms come up in life purposefully. Our storms deserve our respect and reverence rather than immediate relief. The trick is knowing how to swim through the storm without mental suffering. Thus it is not my goal to ever help a client feel better, but my goal to help my clients swim through without the mental suffering but the mental tenacity to handle their own storm.
When we are doing our work, we may feel real shit, real pain, real sadness and grief. Hard emotions. When we cater too much to relief there is little healing and more coping without significant change.
As we go into this new year, may I impart some of my client’s wisdom to you. We don’t ever need to feel better when doing the work. That’s not the goal. The goal is to sit with our horrible emotions, thoughts, memories and put them into a container where we can observe it from a distance like the pensieve spell in Harry Potter.
When we place our pain in a pensieve (a journal, a video, a blog, a painting, etc.) we are not shying away from our pain. We aren’t experiencing immediate relief. We are experiencing our pain, and from our pain we learn how to look at it for clues, information, data (emotional, physical, mental) that can, in time, be a liferaft.
This next year, may your pain be a guide to your work. May you seek not relief but comfort. May you not feel better, may the storms not be quelled, may the emotions roar, and rage, and move. May you allow yourself to feel all of it from the safety of yourself and know that you can swim.