Engaging Your Own Feelings

The better your language for feelings, the more effective you can be. The better you can feel what a feeling feels like in your body, the easier it will be for you to attune.

As clinicians who assist and walk clients through the difficult process of engaging their felt distress, we should be the first one’s to practice what we preach. There are several reasons why this is so important.

1. Practice what you preach.
   We can prescribe many fantastic interventions to clients. Do we practice them ourselves? Holding myself accountable to my own counsel to clients has had profound effects on me. It connects me with the reality of how common people’s struggles are - I struggle with them often myself! I am better able to connect to the actual felt difficulty what I am recommending. I also have experienced the benefit of progress myself in my own growth and journey.

2. The more familiar you are with your feelings, the faster you will be able to identify the feelings of another.
   We can find ourselves in deep water quickly when a client struggles with a feeling we ignore, deny, or pacify in ourselves. The more we engage all of our emotions, find language for them, and recognize their needs and longings, the faster and more fully we can connect to our clients’ experience and what they inherently need.

3. Engaging your own feelings helps you remember how hard it is to engage distress.
   It can be easy to get frustrated with clients who struggle. “Come on!” we say to ourselves. This usually means we’ve lost connection with the client’s distress. Understanding how hard it is to connect with distress can reduce our own frustration at client resistance.

4. The more we can have compassion for our own distress, the more compassion will have for clients’ maladaptive protective strategies.
   Our personal experience of the difficulty of connecting to distress we dislike in ourselves, particularly noticing the ways we escape, vent, or attenuate our own distress, the more compassion we’ll have for clients’ struggles. The more we engage our own struggle with vulnerability, the more understanding we will be with our clients’ difficulty of doing something vulnerable in their distress.

5. Asking a friend, therapist, mentor or supervisor to help you process distress also helps you continue to practice being vulnerable.
   It’s easy to be the one who knows in the therapy room. We should never forget the risk and trust required to disclose to a trusted other. Practicing confession keeps us humble, honest, and practiced in the feelings of vulnerable disclosure.