Emotional strength

Art by Alex Pardee

While most of us get that we need to train our bodies in order to feel better, becoming more resilient and recover faster, etc. our emotions for some reasons left behind.

In these days, in our culture, I believe most of us could do with some extra support building up a stronger emotional body.

Truth is, most of what my clients are coming for ends up to us doing some sort of emotional training.

You don’t want your therapist to tell you what to believe in or how to think. You want your therapist helping you with :

Emotional Training for Adults

  • anxiety,

  • depression,

  • anger issues,

  • panic,

  • dissociation

  • not trusting others, difficulty delegating

  • trust or how to be heard/have your needs met by your partner,

  • Feeling lost and/or aimless,

  • terrifying inner critique,

  • Shame

  • addiction,

  • PTSD, cPTSD,

  • procrastination,

  • not being good enough,

  • narcissism or grandiosity,

  • apathy.

Art by Alex Pardee

Those issues, while being vastly different, all have their roots in how you have learn to process emotions.

If you are anything like me, no-one told you that. Moreover, no-one offered to support you building a stronger, more capable, resilient emotional body.

Our parents and teachers only did a minimal job at supporting us to become emotionality mature when we were kids. Most of us have either been smothered or left on our own. Our parents, teachers, politics and beloved fictional characters tends to all be very poor example of what an emotionally mature human might look like.

If asked, most of us can bring to our mind a few people who embody physical health, yet most of us have difficulties bringing up someone who embodies emotional health and maturity.

Emotionally speaking, in our culture, it is EXTREMELY rare to see any adults in the room.

My solution is simple: we need to train our emotional body the same way we train our physical body.

Here are some of the tools we will be using when working together:

  1. Mindfulness will help us noticing the emotions we are having and how our mind respond to it.

  2. Acceptance is about learning to be curious about our emotions and the way we respond to them. I say it often to men with anger issues: the problem is not anger, it is that you don’t accept that you are angry and therefore cant learn from it. Emotions are signals from our body to our brain about our environment and how we respond to it. If we accept them as they come, we learn to reclaim our capacity to respond. If we deny them or feel ashamed about them or get angry at our emotions, we make ourselves incapable to learn and doom ourselves to re-experience the same situations. That is how we emotionally create our own hell. Acceptance of our emotions and acceptance of us experiencing it is the most difficult part for most people.

  3. Emotional capacity is our capacity to tolerate (emotional) discomfort. By definition, grief, pain, shame and anger aren’t comfortable emotions to have. However they aren’t the issue. As mentioned above, they are the messenger that something is wrong, they aren’t wrong themselves. Learning to grow our capacity to sit with those difficult emotions as well as what we tend to do in order to avoid doing so (using drugs, social media, porn, blaming the world around us for us feeling that way, becoming aloof or cutting, etc). We will work this muscle together with acceptance.

  4. Learning how our emotional landscape as been formed. This is what most of the ‘old’ paradigm of therapy was about, learning about how our past informed our present. It is the meaning part of emotional workout and is still relevant of course. However, it is only supportive of change if we are able to develop acceptance of who we are and where we come from and capacity to be with discomfort, despair, pain, grief, shame and anger.