In psychotherapy we do not simply aim to understand difficult feelings and experiences, but to develop the capacity to carry them without being flooded by them. To be able, that is, to feel, to think and to process our experience at the same time.
When there has been a traumatic experience or chronic relational difficulties, this capacity is often disrupted. A person may be in a state of hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, anger) or hypoarousal (numbness, freezing, dissociation). In these states, cognitive understanding on its own is rarely enough, since the organism is operating primarily in survival mode rather than at a tolerable level of arousal that allows experience to be processed and integrated.
Intellectualisation is a defence mechanism in which a person turns to logic, analysis and explanation in order to interpret their own story. While it is a first step towards understanding, people can get stuck there, using it as a way of avoiding or disconnecting from the difficult emotional experience.
I recently saw a woman who, after years of psychotherapy, was able to explain her difficulties and her traumas with great precision. And yet, as she spoke about them, one had the sense that the emotional experience remained cut off from her narrative. She could describe what had happened without really being in contact with her feelings.
It is very different to know that my father was emotionally absent because he had a difficult childhood, and to come into contact with the sadness, the loneliness or the anger I felt as a child because of that emotional absence.
Interpretation without relationship cannot easily transform, because it is the relationship that creates the conditions in which an interpretation can become lived experience.
The quality of the therapist’s presence, the safety, the authenticity, the sense that someone sees us, hears us and stays in contact with us even within difficult feelings, are fundamental factors in therapeutic change.
According to Leslie Greenberg, therapeutic change comes about not only through cognitive understanding but through processes such as emotional awareness, emotional activation, the making of meaning from experience, and emotional transformation.
“I know I have a problem with rejection because my mother was very critical when I was little.”
This is cognitive understanding. It is an accurate explanation, but on its own it does not entail change. At that point the therapist needs to help the client turn from the explanation towards the experience:
“As you talk about your mother’s criticism, I notice that your shoulders draw in and you look down… what are you feeling?”
The client stops and notices:
“I think I feel sad…”
As we stay with her experience, it becomes more alive.
“It wasn’t just criticism… I remember showing her something I’d made, full of joy, and her being indifferent, or telling me what I should have done better. It was as though she was rejecting the whole of me. I wanted so much for her to be proud of me…”
Out of this lived experience, new meaning emerges:
“I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove that I deserve to be loved. When I meet someone, I’m afraid that if they really get to know me, they won’t think I’m enough.”
Shame, the sense of inadequacy or self-rejection begin to lose their power — not because they were analysed better, but because they came into contact with new emotional experiences.
We do not change because we understand our feelings. We change because we experience them in a new way in the present.
“Working on myself” means something more than understanding my history. It means being able to exist within a relationship not only with my thoughts, but with the whole of myself: my feelings, my needs, my vulnerabilities and my contradictions. Because awareness opens the road towards change, but change is born out of lived experience.
