What’s the point of shitty feelings?
Guilt, sadness, shame, anger – why do we feel them? Can they help?
No matter what issues or concerns a client brings in to therapy, all clients have one common thread – they are having nagging, unhelpful feelings that just won’t go away. Sure, they may say they are frustrated by their procrastination, but what it means is that they’re angry at themselves for not getting things done, ashamed that they need to come to professional for “something so small” or sadness of being trapped by this and not realising their full potential, or guilt for wasting their time and not being productive.
These feelings are shitty. They feel bad, they often make you think of yourself in a poor light and they project a hopeless future. I conducted a poll on twitter and Instagram to find out what people struggled with the most. These are the results –
So why do we have these feelings?
Emotions are to the mind, what pain is to a body. They call your attention to something important.
Yes, we may take a pain-killer every now and then, but it is not a good idea to take pain killers every day. We need to figure why the pain is there, get scans and blood tests and treat the issue. Yet, when it comes to the mind, the bad feelings themselves are seen as a problem, and very few people, including therapists and psychiatrists, look at what these emotions could mean.
For example, feeling angry at your boss daily doesn’t mean you have a problem with your temper necessarily, it could also mean that something is off about your job. Maybe the way you’re treated is killing your self esteem and stopping your growth. Yes, it could also mean that you have unrealistic expectations from yourself/others. Regardless of what the emotion means, brushing it away is not going to help, because avoidance increases the pain in the long run.
Avoidance builds up your anticipation for when the negative feeling will occur, and it makes it harder to have anticipation anxiety all the time. Avoidance doesn’t let you go through the tough but important journey of recognising what’s wrong and doing what you need to do, to fix it. But worse of all, avoidance makes your own emotions, your own self, your enemy. You keep fighting yourself and your inner knowledge and lose a lot of energy in that.
Based on my work with clients, I feel these are usually the messages associated with the four feelings I’ve discussed above:
Guilt – it wants you to take responsibility, maybe it means fixing something or maybe it means letting go and taking responsibility of your own mental health.
Anger – anger is a moving emotion. Usually, it wants you to make a change. It feels blocked and belittled in the current circumstance.
Sadness – sadness wants to be acknowledged. It wants you to accept and grieve the loss instead of avoiding it. It wants you to accept that life has changed after the loss and you need to adjust to this new life.
Shame – shame is the toughest of all, because the moment you feel shame, you just want to built. Shame is always internal, “why am I like this, what did I do wrong”. Shame may say different things based on what your trauma/experience was but fundamentally, shame wants to be released. Shame is you, stuck in time, and it wants to be let go and wants you to proceed in the future. Yes, to truly integrate and be okay with the shameful experience is hard, there’s a lot of corrections involved with “who’s fault was it” and “it could have been avoided”, but fundamentally, working through shame leads to a lot of new insights about the self.
Of course, once you listen to these feelings, the actions you take may vary. It may not always be possible to act in the most optimal manner due to situational factors. But, even if you are compelled to act in a not so great way, doing it in light of what your emotions tried to convey, will still feel more congruent than to deny emotional understanding.
Shitty feelings can literally change the world. Ask Greta Thunberg, if she was not pissed off, would she do any of the things that she’s done. What if she just tried to reduce or ignore her feelings?
