It is important to remember that emotional pain also shows the caring you could express if you could get unblocked, build up a needed capacity, or love and adapt to your nature. What helps is to learn what you care about, and how to decipher, understand, accept, and direct that caring more effectively.
Much of mental-emotional life has to do with concern. Signals for concern are desire and anxiety. Those emotional experiences point to meaning. Concern implies care is in the equation somewhere. For us, frustrated desires and unwanted anxieties linked to love, hatred, or fear are forms of caring or seeking caring. (Caring or seeking care are two sides to the coin of mattering. Mattering is linked to meaning.)
Good therapists sniff out the caring that you unconsciously encoded into problems of anxiety, anger, fear, hopelessness. Good therapists help you discover how and why you ‘do’ that. Sometimes, they get to show you how you’re doing it right there in the session!
A good therapist maintains an ever developing but secure container for that process by
1. modeling and helping in the search for clarity of understanding
2. showing real but controlled caring about what they understand (or do not yet understand)
3. helping you decode, retrieve, and integrate your original caring, and
4. modeling how to cope with the imperfection of human clarity, understanding, and caring
Sure, it’s inconvenient and vulnerable to do live psychotherapy with a real person. But so is anything that is worth doing right. You see, only a real person has a chance of understanding you and showing you that you can be vulnerable while also safe and strong! Take your chance on it today and call. You won’t regret it.
Image: Juan Pablo Rodriguez