How I Help

Challenging the Myth of Happy

I often hear people refer to happiness as a goal, as in “I just want to be happy.” I humbly offer the possibility that good mental health is not characterized by just being happy, but by being able to feel all your core emotions – happiness, sadness, grief, anger, fear, excitement, guilt, disgust, and surprise. When we allow ourselves to feel our feelings to completion as they surface, we find ourselves more often in a state of inner peace, even when life is challenging. Happiness is just one of our core emotions, and it is dependent on external circumstances being good. Inner peace (also referred to as the joy of being), however, is available to us all the time no matter what is happening in our lives. It is a state we inhabit more and more often when we have full, regulated, and unfettered access to all of our emotions.

How Emotions Help Us

Simply put, emotions help us adapt to and create change. As life changes or needs to change around us, emotions serve as a bridge that takes us from an old reality to a new one. For example, if you get an unexpected raise, the emotions of happiness and excitement help you transition from a previous reality of having less money to now having more financial freedom. Once you fully feel these emotions over several days, they subside, and you are now adjusted to your new circumstances. Or maybe you just found out that you did not get the promotion you were hoping for. Sadness and disappointment surface to help you adapt to this new reality that is less than you were expecting, the loss of your unrealized dream. When you allow yourself to fully feel them, you arrive at acceptance. The emotions then fade away, having done their job. In similar ways, anger arises to help us assert a boundary or effectuate change, guilt helps us reflect on what we have done when our actions are not aligned with our values so that we can either change behavior or make amends, fear gets us to pay attention to possible dangers or risks, and disgust helps us push away what feels unwanted or toxic. Each core emotion has a specific purpose and way of helping us adapt to new situations in life or take action when needed to resolve a problem or threat.

Getting Stuck

When this natural emotional process is thwarted from playing out, especially when challenging emotions arise, we can get stuck in resistance or negative, looping thought patterns. We avoid feeling because we’re afraid it will be too painful, too much, or that it will never stop.

To avoid feeling, we often turn to external distractions, which our modern society offers in abundance. Or, our minds resort to two internal strategies to not feel. One way our minds help us do this is by shutting us down internally, creating a state of numbness, dissociation, lethargy, apathy, and, in extreme cases, the loss of will to live. This is called depression. The other way is by turning up the volume on the inside, almost like an internal white noise machine that drowns out the feelings we prefer not to feel. We instead feel restless, irritable, tense, have a hard time focusing and sleeping, and often experience an incessant buzzing in the chest or stomach. This is called anxiety.

When depression and/or anxiety are present, this is a significant clue that there may be an accumulation of unfelt emotion within us. Rather than treating depression or anxiety as the problem to fix, I see them instead as helpful signposts that there is emotion waiting to be processed.

Our Work Together

If you are experiencing depression and/or anxiety, we can be curious about what emotions might lie underneath; or, in the case of trauma, explore what has been too overwhelming to feel alone. Together, we will turn toward these emotions and help you process them in a way that feels tolerable. Then, over time, we will work toward restoring healthy access to all your emotions.

A toddler is a beautiful teacher of healthy emotional processing. When their world changes, they feel and express raw emotion in full force. Then, when the emotions have successfully helped them recalibrate to their new situation, the toddler is back in equilibrium and moves on as if nothing ever happened. Yes, our lives as adults are more complicated than that of a toddler, but the process of emotion is the same. The difference is that by the time we have become adults, we have often formed various beliefs that it is not ok to feel or express our emotions. What might your beliefs be?

Together, we will build a relationship where all feelings are welcome and are met with curiosity. We will notice when depression, anxiety or other inhibitors of feeling surface and we will work together to melt these defenses and help you gradually allow yourself to feel in the presence of a trusted other. This alone is often enough to begin to create significant shifts in one’s life and relationships. It is also the doorway into processing past traumas that have been too big and overwhelming to be felt up until now. Suffering is facing overwhelming challenges in life alone. Together, we will strive to undo this aloneness and, through healthy emotional processing, help you learn how to ride the rapids that life throws us while maintaining a feeling of vitality and peace inside.