Accepting new clients for telehealth!

How I Approach Emotional Healing

There are many types of psychotherapy, ranging from structured approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy to very open-ended and client-driven approaches like psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy. My training leans more toward the latter — I typically won't give you worksheets or homework, though I might ask you to pay attention to certain things during the week, or journal or meditate to practice noticing your feelings and relationship patterns between sessions.

Here are some things we may try to notice together in therapy:

Your current emotions, and barriers to these emotions.
What you are feeling in your body, such as anxiety signals, a tightness in your stomach, or a lump in your throat. Research has found that emotions are a physical experience, and we can learn a lot from noticing and allowing ourselves to feel them.
What you are feeling in the therapy with me, including your sense of whether I am understanding you. I make a habit of checking in with you about how therapy is feeling — because as hard as it can be to do this, the more honest you are able to be, the better I am able to help you.
Relationship patterns from the past and how these patterns repeat in the present, or even how they repeat with me in therapy.

Emotions

People naturally have a range of feelings in response to life. For example, at different times we all feel excited, or angry, or sad. These natural emotions are neither “good” nor “bad” – they just are. Often, emotions are trying to tell us something important. For example, the anger I feel when someone hurts me or crosses my boundary can help me take better care of myself by asserting my needs. We usually feel our best when we can let ourselves experience our emotions freely. An emotion can’t hurt you, and it never lasts forever. It’s like a wave in the ocean – it will always pass.

Barriers to Emotions

Emotions & Defenses: Problems arise when we learn not to let ourselves feel our feelings. This is often because, as children, it was not emotionally safe to show how we really felt. To protect ourselves, we had to learn ways of shutting our feelings down or avoiding them. For example, if every time I cried as a child, my mom told me to ‘cheer up’ and then became cold and distant, I would learn that it was not ok to be sad. Now, as an adult, I might feel very uncomfortable every time something makes me sad. And I might do things to avoid noticing or feeling the sadness I have within me. These types of strategies to avoid feeling helped us cope when we were young. But now that we are older, they have hidden costs. When we use these different strategies to avoid feeling, and when parts of our emotional experience are shut down, we may feel depressed or anxious, or find it difficult to have the love and closeness that we want in our relationships with others.

In IFS Terms: In Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), we would think of these as parts of ourselves that carry burdens, such as the burdened belief that it's not ok to feel sad, or that showing sadness means I will lose love and connection. In IFS, we get curious about these parts and their different roles. We seek to understand why they do what they do, and what they are afraid would happen if they didn't do these jobs. Using the inherent energy and connection of your core Self, you can help these parts feel less alone so that they are free to let go of the heavy burdens they carry.

The Goal of Therapy

Therapy can help us re-learn how to pay attention to what we feel. We will practice allowing feelings to exist as they are, without judging them or trying to shut them down. In this way, we can learn to ‘surf the waves’ of emotions, instead of being knocked around by them. Ultimately, we will feel more calm, connected, clear, and content.

Page updated

Report abuse