Permission To Feel & Heal
How Therapy Helps You Feel Safe Enough to Witness Your Own Pains and Free Yourself From Them
In therapy sessions, I often come across people wanting feel happier and finding it difficult to allow themselves to feel those darker emotions. If they admit that something was bad, then it feels dangerous, almost like opening Pandora’s box and not being able to close it. Then they might feel guilty becoming happier, because it can feel like they aren’t remembering those they have lost, or like they are dishonoring themselves by not holding onto what had hurt them. It is a troublesome process!
This is why therapists will often spend time developing safety in the therapeutic relationship at first. You need to feel safe enough to actually feel your feelings in order to move on from them towards happiness.
Many of us spend a lot of time ignoring our feelings, to where we don’t think we have any, and can’t really feel them. Therapists will sometimes start with noticing our thoughts about something, inviting feelings to eventually join in as we focus on that something that has been on the mind. What tends to get a lot of people to let feelings is a therapist asking, “Where do you feel that in your body?”
The first time I was asked to notice feelings in my body, I was so confused. I wasn’t sure what was being asked and I burst out crying. Though, from that day on, it became so much easier to recognize what I was feeling, because I was no longer ignoring the physical experience of my emotions.
The importance of feelings those feelings is to help move through them. Experiential therapists, like myself, tend to believe that many of our problems come from avoiding our feelings. We might feel anxious about a task we need to do because we are avoiding the feeling of shame and disappointment if we were to get it wrong. We get angry at our partner for not taking out the trash because we are avoiding the sadness we feel when we see signs that they don’t care about our comfort, that they don’t care about us. We burnout from overworking because we are trying to avoid not feeling good enough. Notice what feelings you might be avoiding if you want a head start on what needs to heal within you.
Then once we feel the feelings, it is important to understand why they are there. It is a part of us protecting ourselves from harder feelings buried deep within? Or are the feelings we are feeling injuries from a long time ago that haven’t been resolved? We explore these truths about our feelings together in the safety of the therapeutic relationship, and we handle them gently.
As you move towards understanding, we attempt to create a felt experience of changing something about the circumstances that surround that feeling, from a space of confidence and self-compassion. We help you emotionally feel and recognize that what happened in the past isn’t here anymore, and you have grown more capable of handling difficulties. You free yourself from those burdens, giving yourself the signal that it is safe to be happy and free again.
This can look different depending on the therapeutic approach taken, but that is generally how healing happens: you allow yourself to feel your feelings, and then eventually you give yourself permission to be happy and have fun again.
If you like the symbolism behind giving yourself a physical permission slip like these pictured, you can find them over at Barnes & Noble. The one I went to, in order to take these photos, was over at the Chandler Fashion Center mall off of Chandler Boulevard and the 101 freeway, but I imagine they have them at other locations too!
