By Elka Cubacub, LCSW
I’ve been hearing a version of this from a lot of clients lately: “I’ve been to therapy before, but at a certain point it felt like the therapist was just telling me to do the same things I was already telling myself.”
Most people who seek therapy are fairly intelligent adults. We don’t need another adult to tell us what to do or how to think. We need someone who can help us learn how to live more fully.
I remember a moment in my own life when I was sitting in a library, surrounded by books on psychology and the human condition, and I had a clear realization: there was not a single book there that could help me. I’ve always been a student, a teacher, and a thinker. When my mind gets hooked on something, I read everything I can find until I’ve exhausted the reading list.
So when I struggled with brain fog, chronic exhaustion, and emotional numbness, I received a depression diagnosis and then did what I always do: I read everything I could about it. This may sound arrogant to say, but it would have been hard-pressed for a therapist to tell me something I hadn’t already read. And yet, all of that knowledge didn’t change how I felt.
Now, I see therapy as primarily an experiential process rather than an educational one. Therapy isn’t about telling clients what to think or how to feel. It’s about helping them learn how to more fully experience what they are already feeling. And interestingly, when we become better at experiencing our emotions, we often no longer need the destructive ways of being in the world that once protected us from those feelings.
Let me explain.
Emotions are the sense of vitality inside of us. They motivate us. They keep us connected to the people around us. When we don’t experience emotion, we begin to feel lifeless, bored, and unmotivated. Life begins to feel dry, gray, and meaningless.
Emotions are also temporary and fleeting. The word emotion comes from “energy in motion.” When emotions are experienced fully, they rise and fall like waves in the ocean.
So what gets in the way of this process? Why do emotions so often feel like they swallow us whole, or linger as a persistent low-grade misery beneath the surface?
There are two main ways we block emotional movement. One is by trying to avoid the emotion. The other is by continuously recreating it. We avoid emotions through distraction, dissociation, numbing, or staying constantly busy. We recreate emotions through mental spiraling and rumination. When we avoid emotions, they are unable to move through us. When we recreate them through our thoughts and stories, they don’t pass because we keep generating them.
The antidote is learning how to fully feel emotions while stepping back from the stories we tell about them.
As I mentioned earlier, simply reading this won’t change you, just as all the books I read didn’t change me. This is an experiential process. Because of that, I’ll walk you through it in writing and offer an audio recording to guide you in experiencing it for yourself. This recording mirrors much of the work I do with clients and can offer some of the benefits.
Step One: Create Space
The first step is creating space by choosing an anchor point to focus on. This might be the movement of your breath through your body, or another physical sensation that feels neutral or pleasant. Some people like to focus on the feeling of their feet resting on the floor, their hands interlaced, or a particular object in the room.
Once you’ve chosen an anchor point, focus your attention there, either with your eyes open or closed. Each time you notice your mind wandering, simply notice where it’s gone without judgment and bring your attention back to the anchor.
What this accomplishes:
This creates a small amount of space between you, the emotion, and the stories that accompany it. It also paves the way for you to process the emotion without becoming swallowed by it, in the steps that follow.
Step Two: Name the Experience
Next, choose an emotion or experience that feels difficult or unresolved. Bring your attention inward and notice the whole of what this feeling is like for you. You’re not trying to analyze it or break it down yet, just noticing its overall tone, similar to the way you might sense the feeling of a familiar song before identifying its lyrics.
You can then ask yourself: Does this feeling have a name? Does it have a physical or emotional quality that best describes it?
What this accomplishes:
This gives direction to the work that follows. What may have been an intangible sense of unease or discomfort becomes something identifiable that can be contacted and processed rather than avoided.
Step Three: Observe with Precision
If you chose a familiar emotion, you’ve likely felt it many times before. But often, we haven’t actually experienced it with precision; we’ve only had a general sense of it.
I used to draw, and one thing drawing taught me is that art isn’t a different way of drawing; it’s a different way of seeing. You might know what a person’s face looks like, but if asked to describe the exact shape of their nose or the distance between their eyes, you’d likely be unable to do so. That’s because you’re not actually seeing their face, but rather your mind’s representation of their face.
The same is true with emotions.
In this step, we observe the emotion or experience with precision. We notice where it lives in the body, its exact qualities, boundaries, and intensity. We notice how it shifts or changes as we bring attention to it. We also begin to notice any thoughts that arise alongside it.
What this accomplishes:
Often, precise observation alone is enough to allow an emotion to move through and pass. When we’re no longer suppressing it or recreating it through stories, the wave is free to rise and fall on its own.
Step Four: Dialogue with the Emotion
The final step is getting to know the emotion at a deeper level. Here, we begin to ask questions, not to figure the emotion out intellectually, but to allow the embodied experience to speak for itself, without censorship or judgment.
You might ask:
- What does this feeling really want?
- Is there anything it’s trying to protect me from?
- Is there a positive action it wants me to take?
Rather than searching for the “right” answer, you allow whatever arises to be exactly what it is.
What this accomplishes:
This helps us get to the root of the emotion. And when the emotion is pointing toward a call to action, it allows us to receive and respond to that call in a productive, integrated way, rather than acting it out unconsciously or trying to push it away.
The purpose of therapy
When I work with clients, my goal is to bring emotion into the room, to get to the core of what’s being triggered or activated. Rather than avoiding those triggers, we intentionally bring them into the space between us, at times noticing how they show up in the therapeutic relationship itself.
This exercise will give you a taste of that work, while also acknowledging that there is something uniquely powerful about the relational component of being in the therapy room.