People love to make fun of the stereotyped therapy party line: “How does that make you feel?” Yes, it’s one of the biggest cliches in the therapy field, however what this question stands for still remains an important piece of psychotherapy.
When people come in for therapy, it’s generally because they aren’t happy with the way they are feeling, in one way or another. Whether it’s about relationships, depression, anxiety, stress, jobs, career, or any other areas of life, the reasons people start therapy is both to help the concrete, external situations, but overall it’s how these situations makes someone feel that matters most. Basically, if you’re feeling good about something, then you probably wouldn’t seek emotional help with it.
Some may respond to this by saying, “Yes, but the reason I don’t feel good is because my partner doesn’t listen,” or, “I would feel fine if I didn’t have so much work to do and had more vacations,” and other thoughts similar to these. And it may be partially true that if things around us were set up just right that we’d feel balanced and happy. But, it’s rare that the moving components around us are so generous as to constantly accommodate our internal emotional states.
Therefore, it becomes up to us to understand ourselves on a deeper level in order to deal with life as it happens. This starts with understanding how we feel about things. Becoming aware of how smaller and greater things make us feel is a necessary road into understanding how we’re impacted by external scenarios — the partner who doesn’t pay attention to us; the family and others who judge us; the boss who stresses us with work; the bank account that isn’t plentiful enough; the friends who shame us for not doing as they would do; the arguments in our relationships; and so on.
Each scenario in our lives activates some sort of emotional response within us — these often go unacknowledged on a conscious level. Maybe our partner says something to us that makes us want to lash out and yell at them, or storm out of the room, or makes us shut down, or cry. We act out the reaction, but without acknowledgment of where the acting out originated. Did the comment make you feel ashamed? attacked? inferior? vulnerable? annihilated? etc. How did this make you feel?
However, the therapy doesn’t end here (nor is this even the meat of the therapy), this is just the beginning of understanding where the therapy needs to go next and start to focus. It shouldn’t be the only thing your therapist ever says to you. In fact, in my practice I probably ask this question only once in a while (there are other ways to understand emotions and open the therapy without actually asking this question all the time). I find that people quite often come in knowing how they feel in certain ways, but they have trouble with where to go from there. So, while it’s important to learn how we feel, this isn’t the bulk of the therapy.
How therapy works from here would take much more than one article to describe — not all therapy works the same, and it always depends on the specific person in the room. But what is necessary is to have an understanding of what activates us, how it’s triggered, and how the patterns of our dynamics with ourselves and with others impact our lives in ways that causes us to feel unbalanced, and otherwise unhappy (or anxious, angry, unfulfilled, stressed, etc.). Understanding our underlying emotions really just opens the door to this process so the work can be done.
Some therapists tend to rely on this question a bit too much. However, the mere presence of this question doesn’t necessarily indicate you’re receiving some outdated, stereotyped, ineffective therapy. But to create change, the therapy must go beyond this. So if you feel you’re hearing this question too much, and not hearing much of anything else, bring this up with your therapist. If you have a skilled therapist, your inquiry will lead somewhere that will most likely be helpful in your therapy.
