Purging of emotions in psychotherapy

Probably not the sexiest title, but one all the same that highlights the importance of not wasting time in counselling—the time might as well be put to good use, provided feelings are accessed in safe ways, which is crucial in that it is ‘therapy’.

Reviewing a psychiatry text from when I did my graduate studies, it talks about catharsis—from the Greek—meaning, purging.  It’s the process of experiencing pent-up emotions and becoming curious about what came up.

In this fearless enquiry into what occurred, even within what we’d call ‘triggering’, there’s the potential to grow beyond the self-constraining limits of, “Oh, I won’t go there, because I’m scared it will harm me.”  The reverse possibility exists.  You may not even purge and therefore you might stagnate when you could’ve risked and grown past the fear.

I remember working with a guy who, without fail, experienced very strong emotions—bitter and guilty tears—each and every session.  When we did a particularly heavy and gruelling session—one designed to go up to a few hours—he experienced painful release for several weeks afterward.

I think we were both worried that something was wrong, but we both trusted the spiritual and psychic process, and along with some pastoral care (he trusted me unequivocally), it all resolved over a month or two.  And he didn’t look back.

Psychotherapies can be lifegiving while also painful, because purging those memories, feeling those feelings, isn’t easy.  But in safety, at a pace set by and comfortable to the client, enormous emotional and spiritual growth can come—again, simply by release.

We’d think catharsis was just another way of saying it’s positive.  But catharsis literally means purging or releasing, and so many of us want opportunities to purge or release something; a hurt, a hang-up, a habit—and the feelings that abide that we wish didn’t.

The process of psychotherapy, therefore, is underpinned by trust sufficient to surrender to what needs to be inherently safe.  There’s nothing hazardous in experiencing our emotions in a safe therapeutic environment.

That’s the caveat you see.  There are charlatans around who might mess with your head and heart for their own schadenfreude.  But those who are committed to serving your best interests can be trusted, because specifically, they’ll work slowly, respecting your limits.

We were all called to live an abundant life.  We cannot face such a life until the baggage we carry around is sufficiently dealt with.  It’s worth trusting our resilience to a bit of pain, and in some cases trusting a process that stretches us to (but obviously not beyond) capacity.

Just think, the experience of purging, if nothing else, shows us what we can endure, and it shows us we can bear pain.  Rather than focus on the pain, we can focus on the strength we show in bearing it.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough, the pace of the work, and how hard to lean in, must be set by the one who is vulnerable.  They know when too much is too much.  The counsellor’s responsible for checking in and respecting the client’s limits.

As we practice experiencing feelings, we learn our limits, even as we test our limits—pushing up to them, again not beyond them.  Where the fear is, is also where the growth is.

Just be sure you’re confident you’re in safe hands, and it can take a while to figure that out.

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Mental health challenges herald the wounded healer

You’re hardly qualified to help those who need help if you haven’t been helped yourself. When you’ve been helped you understand what helped and how much it helped. You’re then convinced of the value of that help, and you want to ‘pay it forward’.

The wounded healer is someone who not only journeys with the wounded in their healing, but who also is counted amongst the wounded.  They’re a brother or sister, and just perhaps a little older in life experience, a sojourner who has been to the sacred place of restoration.

I’m sure as I look at the craftwork of wounded healing that God has kept me close to brokenness for this very reason: to be able to empathise within the recency of my own personal experience for others who are challenged in regard to their mental health.

Those who are not challenged, and worse who have never been challenged, typically stand aloof from connecting with, answering, and addressing the maladies of soul that make of their conquest our mental health.

People certainly want and need a spiritual helper or guide who is trustworthy and reliable, someone who is well informed, who has successfully charted their own recovery.

This doesn’t mean they’ve mastered recovery.  There is no spiritual perfection.  Only progress.  They’ve made significant progress.  It keeps them humble.

It’s humility in a guide that makes them the asset a struggling person needs.

It’s also their innate interest in those who struggle that creates the conversations that need to occur for connections to be made.

Therefore, it’s important that wounded healers are on an ongoing journey with their own mental health challenges.  These don’t need to be sustained clinical depression or anxiety or trauma disorders.  But to have regular mental health challenges, like laments or anxiety, or the occasional reminder of the triggering of trauma; these serve to keep us connected to other sufferers.  Mental health challenges prove our humanity.  If we cannot always guarantee our physical health against illness and injury, why should we expect our mental and emotional health would be impenetrable?

And those occasional mental health days and experiences keep us grounded in the knowledge of where our strength is—i.e., in our vulnerability.

Underneath much anger is anguish

There are, I find, generally two forms of anger, that which is accounted for, and that which isn’t.  I want to focus on the former in this article.  The kind of anger that overlays anguish, which I define as a meld of sorrow and fear.

None of us are beyond sorrow or fear, especially men.  As men, we struggle to communicate our sorrow and fear, for fear of being seen as weak.

And yet, the more we struggle to face it, the more sorrow and fear build into anguish, which often comes out in anger.

Anger, of course, the former penitent variety I mean, produces shame and guilt.  And experiences of shame and guilt, because they are so loathsome, lead to an avoidance of facing, even when facing is the only way we can alleviate guilt and shame if we’re proactive.

Do you know the number of times I’ve been angry with life and anything really that rubs me up the wrong way that I’ve just needed someone to be bold enough to say, “Are you okay?  I mean, can you help me to understand...”

I think this is why I’ve been able to pacify some people amid their conniptions.  What people often need in the midst of an outburst is compassion enough to curiously seek to understand where they’re at, and if you’re not game, wait until they settle.  It’s the expression of empathy.

Many angry outbursts are actually the triggering of trauma.  As the person suffers their existential crisis (think despair) there’s little wonder there’s a giving up, a sabotaging of hopes, desires, and dreams.

It couldn’t be worse to judge a person on their anger when it’s really trauma that underpins it, though yet again, there must be the fruit of repentance; to eventually see and account for their wrong.

Also, we must endeavour to separate out those for whom the outburst is perhaps a bit out of character. Could it be sadness, fear, or soulish anguish?

Imagine the relief in a person who is triggered when you calmly and quietly, though confidently, seek to understand what’s going on and ask if there’s any way you can help.

The anger we’re talking about is the panic-of-spirit type of anger.

Countless times I’ve seen the person who is beside themselves in a panic of spirit begin to settle in minutes.  Compassion is a connection with the other person that THEY know is FOR them.  It’s 100% belief in the person.  It’s a viewing of them as 10/10 in every way, much the way God views us because of Christ.

When a person is angry and they know we’re FOR them in a complete sense, they should tend to settle down if it’s anguish that’s driving it.

Of course, this article does NOT cover the violent anger that damages by intention, that revels in destruction and in the inciting of fear.

The person for whom anguish is large will tend to channel it into anger when the anguish boils up and over the pot.

The healing opportunity is to view the anger as an invitation to face the pain of anguish.  That requires the overcoming of guilt and shame—to tell it as it is, which takes quite remarkable humility.

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The ‘narrow way’ of relationships

Jesus talks in Matthew 7:13-14, the Sermon on the Mount, about the need to go through the narrow gate into the narrow way of life, which is Road Less Travelled.  This applies to many aspects of our lives, and it is certainly not the path chosen by many.

It’s the least chosen path because it’s hard and countercultural, and it promises no reward, except that by faith we know it to be right.

It’s hard to let other people win, to give other people the benefit of the doubt, to be the butt of innuendo, to seem to lose.  I say “seem” because when we get this right from a relational context, our very real vulnerability cares nothing for ridicule, for pride, for castigation, because our focus is on a bigger, more eternally significant prize.

It’s a prize this world cannot give us.  It’s a prize won by faith to do what people don’t like doing.

Somehow, by the narrow way in our relationships, getting on with people, and winning them over the longer haul matters more significantly.

But I don’t expect many will understand.  Or if they do, to bother.

We make much of many things in this life that are truly unimportant, even though they seem important, and certainly those temptations we give into seem to make sense at the time—to have something over someone, to manipulate and have our way even if they don’t get theirs.

There’s something so much more important, when all things are considered, when we give up what we cannot keep—the little wins where others lose—to gain what we cannot lose.  When we prefer to build comradery instead of getting our own way, even as we suffer indignities of people offending us, we surprise people enough for them to say, “Wow, there really is something different about this one—they seemed like a ‘doormat’ I could walk over, but just look at how little it matters to them.  And they seem to be ever concerned about me, and look at how I’ve taken advantage of them!”

We certainly won’t win over the narcissist, but we will win over the normal Joe and Joanne.

It takes a while of consistently going the narrow way relationally before people see the integrity that underpins it.  And if they think we’re fools for this allegiance to what’s right, let them laugh—we’re the ones, the aggressed who don’t hit back, who show most power working in our lives.

This is the life of Christ in the believer who knows the strength they bear in not getting offended, but in turning that offence to the Kingdom’s advantage by showing that the offence doesn’t conquer us.

If we’re never offended, we prove safe to know.  Ultimately what happens is we prove trustworthy, and when (not if) their moment of need comes, we then prove useful.

Time and again, people reach out to people they know who are unpanicked by their vulnerability.  We don’t show true strength UNTIL we’re vulnerable.

See how important it is that we maintain our poise especially when we’re most tempted to take umbrage with those who seem to despise us?

Understand though that at the very point of being tempted to react, we must respond differently.  The response required is one that most people are disarmed by.  Such a response can even seem weird, like, “Why aren’t you sticking up for yourself?”

And yet it takes real strength of character to stay poised in that moment, to keep believing in what God might be doing in the longer term by not becoming offended.

This wisdom is about losing battles but winning wars to the furtherance of peace.

Isn’t it just the power of God that converts a person who would violate us time in again?  

Again, it’s not the narcissist, but the person with potential who’ll eventually see that our character is trustworthy.  And we won’t know the one from the other unless we give them a chance.

I guess when it’s all said and done, going the narrow way of relationships is about believing in the potential of people, of giving them a chance of being better for themselves and others.

If we aggress people who aggress us, when will it end.  No, it must end with us.  We must put down our weapons and believe that our influence might work in them.

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The trauma that underpins much mental illness

It’s not until you endure something that a human being was never meant to endure that you sustain a hit to the body, mind and soul that’s commonly called trauma.  It can happen for many reasons, it can happen innocently, or it can be a build up over the years.

It can happen through a grief that leaves you backwashed in such shock you reel for months, and sometimes it takes years to recover—and indeed some don’t.  Or it’s abuse from so early on, a life can seem to have never had a chance.  Talk with enough homeless people and there are plenty of stories like this.

It’s like the mother I saw at a train station today chastising her three-year-old violently for behaving like all three-year-olds do.  Talk about a child raising a child, but dig deeply enough, there’s trauma in the mother’s story.

There are some things you don’t believe until they happen to you.

Post-traumatic stress.  I knew about PTSD before I suffered my own post-traumatic stress, but never do you figure upon the gravity and breadth of post-traumatic stress until you’re called to bear the ignominy of it.

Post-traumatic stress took me to a place where my mind ceased to function, and it lingers even today in those moments where there is no answer; seconds of momentary overwhelm where I simply say to myself, “Hang in there, buddy; this too shall pass.”

To feel out of control is to know trauma, and yet there’s nothing to be ashamed about in suffering it.

I’m so glad God’s equipped me with personal experiences of trauma, because it’s honestly the best way to be trauma-informed.  You quickly realise there are limits and you begin to accept the limits of others. Gentler on yourself is gentler on others.  Compassion for yourself is compassion for others.

When it’s a trauma response, it’s fight or flight or freeze or fawn—and when you look at it, so many of our responses come straight out of that place, for rare is it that we don’t bear some trauma.

I know all too well all the trauma responses and even a blend of them as responses seem to compete with one another in a disorganised way of coping.  This is defined as triggering, and the grand challenge is to experience the triggers (without them tearing you or others apart) enough to learn about them; how can I learn what prompts them, how to prepare, how to stay safe, how to modulate the response in a better, safer way of coping.

Healing is the ‘beyond’ of trauma.

In discussing grief, how many people have been affected by it?  Everyone.  Some respond to its truth because it overpowers their sensibility, and they capitulate.  Others seem unfazed but watch how it leaks out in some other way.

At every level trauma is the outworking of so much of life that overwhelmed us.

Depression and anxiety we face because we’re overwhelmed by emotions that sweep us away—just like trauma.  The panic attack, just the same.  The shattering of confidence in the attack of dread.

So much of our mental illness is enfolded in trauma or manifested so much like trauma the concepts are inseparable.

When we understand the concepts of trauma in the everyday life, we become instantly compassionate, knowing that harms done causes or creates harm, and what stands before each of us is the quest to learn; how to wrestle, when not to sweat the small stuff, nurturing gratitude, safe vulnerability, apology and redemption, gentleness toward self and others.

If this has triggered anything for you, I pray you go gently on yourself, understanding you’re not alone, that there’s hope, and that vision of peace you have is possible.

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19 acceptable, prayerful laments

I lament there’s not enough time, to live, to love, to do everything I want to do—it truly overwhelms me with sorrow—but I accept the time I’ve got to live, to love, to do what I can in my allotted time here.  I must accept it, for the other options are not attractive.

I lament that there are so many aspects of life that are unpredictable—and that life circumstances frequently feel hard—yet I accept that’s the way life is, and I’m comforted to know I’m not the only one who feels desperately uncertain at times.

I lament that there is suffering the world over—anguish consumes me for the myriad injustices faced—but I accept the part I can play, and Lord, help me leave the rest to You.  Despair would tear me apart otherwise.

I lament that I can’t control everything in this life, but I accept with both hands the control I have. Lord, give me discernment for what I can control over what I can’t.

I lament the mistakes I continue to make and for the periodic failures I contribute to, but I accept I’m flawed, and I’m ever thankful for those—especially my family, friends and colleagues—who extend grace to me and forgive me.  Help me forgive myself, God, when I get it wrong.

I lament that that there is so much misunderstanding in this world, and so much hurt, but I accept that people can only see what they see, and so many aren’t interested in seeing from others’ perspectives.  Help me, Lord, to be curious and open to what I find difficult to see.

I lament that there are lives I would like to step into and change, but I know that I can’t, and I accept that I can’t, even if that’s hard, and that I must look on and watch carnage.  Help me, Father, be satisfied that prayer is enough.

I lament the concept of fear in the normal life that often leads to anxiety, and the fact that it’s so prevalent in so many of us, but I do accept that while fear is there, it reminds us of confidence in faith that is also there.

I lament that in terms of time I’m so time poor, yet I accept that now is the time appointed to do things that must be done now.

I lament the fact of regret for the fact of time spent poorly, even as I accept that hindsight is a wonderful thing that is unavailable to me at present.

I lament the fact that there are people I disappoint that I may even be unaware of, but I accept that I will hear anyone’s complaint regarding what I can set right.

I lament that I so frequently feel out of control in my own life, even as I accept that I’m doing the best I can to live life of integrity, and that control over my life isn’t the point.

I lament the conflicts that were, are and will be, even as I accept that conflicts are a divine appointment for opportunities that cannot be foreseen.

I lament the losses that I’ve had to bear and those I’ll be called to bear, but I accept that on the opposite side of love is loss, and I’d prefer to love than not.

I lament that I’m often forced into a paradigm of resignation, but I accept that there’s wisdom in arriving at such surrender, and my prayer is I don’t resent it.

I lament that there have been injustices propagated against me and my loved ones, yet I accept that in forgiving each person, they then answer to God.

I lament the amount I complain, either inwardly or to my wife, about matters related to time and rest, yet I accept that there are so many things in my life I can be thankful for, so Lord, cause me to be grateful.

I lament the fact that even in speaking the same language, it’s as if we all speak different languages, and yet I accept the power of perceptions, and the power of my own perception reminds me to be curious about others’.  God, open my mind and heart more and more to what others are seeing, thinking and feeling.

I lament the idea that I don’t know when I’ll die, but I do accept that each day brings opportunity to not just survive but thrive.  Lord, help me convert surviving into thriving.

I lament that I can’t live forever, but I accept I’m in God’s hands.

What are your laments that you can find acceptable or prayerful?

Finding time to breathe in the break-neck pace of life

For a little over two years, I’ve worked at least a six-day week.  Much of it has been a mash of part-time roles, and the pace of life has felt a fair bit like constant catch-up.  From 2013-2017 I was always working full-time and studying almost full-time load.

But I look around and I see so many people in the same place.

Like the local coffee barista I chat with, studying full-time, working part-time, constantly tired, laughing it off, but despairing at her core.  Yet, this is how she’ll achieve, and she knows it.  Some short-term pain for some long-term gain.

One of my busiest and least enjoyable days has become Saturdays.  It’s because it’s the only chance I usually get to do things that must be done.  Like most people, I’m not time poor because I’m greedily (or wisely) earning lots of money.  Sometimes I’m time poor because I over-commit myself, because I’m trying to make a difference in people’s lives.

You don’t need to be a ‘people pleaser’ to want to extend yourself to serve them.  No, that’s not a heart that’s about appeasing people at all.  It’s a heart to get in and help; to give the sort of help you know you’d appreciate receiving.

Finding time to breathe in the break-neck pace of life isn’t easy, when there are children who need to be supported and transported and there all kinds of other family, job and life pressures.

I have found, however, that there are ways to get away or squirrel away time, but it takes planning and commitment, and especially a will that says, “I need this rest and self-care, because if I don’t get it, I’ll be no good to anyone.”

I’ve got a Franklin-Covey bound planner, which is a complete planning system that requires 30-minutes a day to work, but it pays off handsomely to know you’ve got life managed.

To approach a month, perhaps in the last week of the present month, you can look ahead and see what’s on.  Right there, with that month before you, land some ‘big rocks’ of time to get away and do what you enjoy and recover.  Put them in knowing some just won’t happen.

Make at least one of those slots for the month work for you and you only.

Self-care isn’t a selfish act, it’s a wise act.  If you still feel selfish when you’re away doing your thing to rest and recover, you’re still too wedded to your world.  We get a good dose of perspective when we realise the world spins without us when we’re gone.

Imagine you’re dead for a moment; it’s going to happen at some point.  Life will move on without you, and yes there’ll be grief, but life must learn to work without you from time to time.

Take a book, or go for a swim, hike or ride, get out into nature, or go somewhere with a view to the horizon—most of us are so busy looking into a screen less than half a metre away that we miss all the life that’s going on beyond it.

Finding time to breathe in the break-neck pace of life isn’t easy, but it’s doable.  Make a commitment to yourself now that you’ve read this.  Plan your time to recharge now while the opportunity presents.  It might not be for a week or two, but now’s the time to plan for it to make it happen.

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