Why Counselors Talk About Feelings
One of the core classes that all counselors take in graduate school is a basic counseling skills, or helping skills class. The class teaches you basically how to sound like a counselor, and is probably one of the more important classes in graduate school, as it serves as the foundation for how you’ll interact with clients for the rest of your career.
One of the techniques that they teach is called a ‘reflection of feeling’, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a client will share something happening in their life, and you simply reflect back to them how they’re feeling in real time.
It can be as simple as saying, “you’re feeling overwhelmed”, “you’re feeling vulnerable”, or “you’re feeling numb”.
Again, this is one of the basic core techniques that all counselors are taught and draw from, and I remember when this technique was introduced asking the professor - with complete and total honestly - “how does knowing what a client is feeling help them in any way?!?”
The professor, with complete grace and understatement simply said, “well, I can tell you a lot of clients find it meaningful…so…you might try it and just notice what happens”.
Flash forward a few years and today I am all about emotions and feelings.
If there’s any part of you that wonders like I did why feelings and emotions have any place in therapy - and maybe in your own life as well - then this blog post is for you.
Emotions and Denial
You don’t have to believe in something for it to impact you.
You don’t have to believe in gravity, but that won’t stop it from holding you firmly to the ground.
You don’t have to believe that the moon is real, but your disbelief will not stop it from creating the tides that impact all life on earth.
So again, you don’t have to believe in something for it to impact you. But what’s probably more accurate with emotions is that people don’t value them, understand them, and sometimes deny them altogether.
And yet emotions are like gravity or the moon, you don’t have to understand or value them to continue to be impacted by them. You can deny gravity, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to start flying like a superhero.
Humans have lived in denial that fossil fuels would negatively impact the world for at least 80 years…and yet, that denial doesn’t stop global temperatures and sea levels from rising.
That denial has certainly made a few people and nations very wealthy, but, in the end, there will be a devastating price to pay for that denial.
Our emotions are the same way.
We can deny our emotions all we want, and yet, they will continue to impact our lives in ways we are unaware of.
As Jung famously said, “what is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate”.
Here are some ways parts within us that contain strong emotions may be expressing themselves, even as we deny them:
Relationship difficulty
A sense of burnout
Physical pains or illness
Panic attacks
Unexplainable fits of rage or anger
Overreactions
Problematic alcohol or drug use
Over or underworking
Trouble or frustrations at work
Depression or generalized anxiety
If any of these resonate with you, don’t worry, there is hope:
Eventually after people became aware of, and understood gravity, they could work with it. Gravity is utilized to provide power in hydroelectric dams, and tracks sea-level rise. Understanding and working with the moon and the tides improves commercial fishing and allows for ships to navigate safely all across the globe.
Becoming aware of, understanding, and working with your different emotional parts can help you to break free of the cycles and patterns that you are stuck in, and discover what those emotions are trying to tell you.
The first step is to begin to bring to consciousness the emotional parts that we are experiencing.
The Feelings Wheel
It’s not uncommon for me to ask a client perhaps the most stereotypical counselor question of all time - “...and how does that make you feel?”
But the answer to this question is often tricky for people.
When it comes to emotions, many of us are able to name only 3-5 of our emotions…if that many. It’s kind of like we’re at a restaurant and got the pack of crayons that gets given out to kids along with the children’s menu. It’s got blue, green, red, yellow…and while those are great basic colors, every kid quickly gets frustrated realizing that those colors don’t capture the full range of the visible light spectrum.
If your awareness of your emotions is limited to happy, angry, and sad, then a great first step is learning to recognize the rest of the emotional colors that are in your internal world.
Again, just like having only 3 colors would greatly limit your ability to accurately color a picture, knowing only 3-5 emotions really limits your own ability to accurately understand and communicate your own internal world.
In the early 1980’s, Gloria Willcox invented the Feelings Wheel. Here’s a version that I found online for free here. At the center are six core emotions. As you move from the center to the outside you’ll notice more nuanced and particular emotions that fall under a particular core emotion.
Being able to name and accurately understand the particular feeling (or group of feelings) you are feeling at a particular moment can be a mental health breakthrough for people.
Take a moment and think back on an event that happened in the past week that was particularly charged in some way. Maybe this event left you feeling intensely, but, you’re not exactly sure what you were feeling at the moment.
Now, connect with what you were feeling in that moment again. First, notice the sensations you were feeling in your body if you’re able to - maybe a knot in your stomach, a tightness in your shoulders or jaw, tingling in your hands…whatever it is, just notice that. Then, start from the center of the feelings wheel and work your way out until you find the exact word that best goes along with that physical sensation you are feeling. There may be several words that are good and close…but usually there’s one word that just really describes what you were feeling in that moment. When you find that one particular feeling word, you’ll notice a slight shift inside of you. Something inside will, for lack of a better word, relax, as you find the best word that really encapsulates what you were feeling in that moment.
Feelings and Parts
As a therapist who draws heavily from an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, I understand that feelings come from Parts of us.
Here’s the difference: instead of being angry and thinking “I am angry”, when I get angry I think “I have a part of me that is angry right now”.
It might seem like this is just semantics, but, it really does make a big difference.
Here’s why that’s important and how it’s related to understanding your own feelings:
Feelings are gateways to different parts within.
When we begin to be able to name our different feelings, we begin to access different Parts of ourselves. Different parts all have different stories, histories, hopes, fears, dreams and motivations.
Once we are able to name our different parts, we can, with the help of the counselor, begin to bring a sense of curiosity and compassion to our different parts and then get clarity around where our feelings come from, and most importantly, who they are protecting.
Once we are able to help the part that our anger or anxiety is protecting, those parts will actually relax and not feel the need to act out in extreme ways.
Healing our extreme feelings actually begins with being able to name them.
And that’s why counselors talk about feelings.
Are you ready for the next step???
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