23. Resolving Unwanted Feelings

One of my goals as a therapist is to help people learn that there is nothing wrong with them; to help people discover that it is what they have been trying to do to solve their problems that has not worked and has perhaps contributed to making things worse.

Many forms of counseling attempt to try to figure out where problems originated and understand why we feel what we do, which generally keeps us stuck rehashing and reliving our past difficulties, problems, and traumas. It is not very beneficial to focus our attention on what’s wrong with us and explore how we became broken. We just make up another story about ourselves and believe it is true.

It is very challenging to ever know where our problems come from and even if we did know, what difference would that make? It is usually insufficient to enable us to change.

I operate from the premise that feelings and intellect are like oil and water.

Another primary intervention in the mental health field is prescribing medications. This approach is intended to treat the symptoms (mostly by suppressing them), yet does not deal with the deeper psychological patterns and programs that have been operating and perpetuating the problems.

For lasting change, we need to work with our underlying unconscious patterns and programs that we experience as unwanted feelings, that repeatedly recreated our problems. Outdated and ineffective old tapes from our childhood are playing in our heads, directing our thoughts and controlling our experiences.

Through therapeutic processes, we work with unwanted feelings and find a pathway to have and utilize new and better choices to get what we need from within, allowing for deep healing.

Case example: I conducted an assessment with a client who came in for therapy due to severe depression. Prior to our meeting, he had seen a doctor, who had prescribed an antidepressant medication. After 6 months he did not feel relief from his problems.

I asked him, “What is going on in your thoughts and experience that contributes to feeling depressed?” Summarizing his response:

I tell myself that I’m never good enough and judge myself for not doing things right. This makes me not want to try things for fear of failing. Then I beat myself up for being a procrastinator.

Living with that repetitive internal dialogue would be very depressing! These thoughts characterize the old messages he had carried with him that needed to be resolved and released to successfully diminish his feelings of depression. His initial therapeutic goal was: To understand why I am depressed and where it stems from (this is a common goal for many of my clients). We clarified what he hoped achieving that goal would do for him: To be happy. We then defined a behavioral measurable sign of change:  To complete a task that I want to do.

In our sessions, the client was guided to communicate with the part of him that was so negatively judgmental with himself. He found that it was trying to help motivate him, to help him be his best. (A very positive intention, although not achieving what the part intended, and was now, in fact perpetuating his depression.) Through working with this specifically identified part of himself, he was able to develop other methods to motivate himself to achieve in more positive ways and was ultimately able to be more productive.  

We must access our feelings, the very source of information needed to identify the patterns and programs within us that interfere with moving toward what we want. We can work with our feelings to create deeper resolution to our self-sabotaging thoughts, feelings and behaviors. We can begin to have choices with our inner experience, to learn to change our thoughts, feelings and beliefs and find ways to be kind and gentle with ourselves. This is an essential component of resolving the experience of depression and creating and maintaining change in lasting ways.