One of the things I’ve always struggled with is allowing myself to feel my feelings. If my feelings were unpleasant or uncomfortable, I would either try to dismiss them as unacceptable or wrong, or just ignore them. All of you emotionally healthy people out there already know that that course of action is simply ridiculous. Feelings are not good or bad, right or wrong. They just are what they are. How you choose to act on them can be good or bad, right or wrong. But a feeling itself is beyond judgment really. And you can’t escape them. If you try to run from a feeling or push it down, you might succeed for a while – an hour, a day, even a year. But that feeling is going to resurface eventually somehow. So you might as well deal with it in the present.

A very popular image of a feeling is that of a wave. And one way that my therapist taught me to feel my feelings is to picture myself on a beach, standing in the surf, and seeing the wave approach. Knowing that the wave is going to crash over me and I will get wet. The wave might even knock me down, I might get pulled under for a while, but eventually the wave will recede and I will be fine, I can get back to the beach and I can dry myself off and move on.

Right now I feel sucked into the undertow. I guess it’s perfectly natural for the feelings of sadness and loss to linger for a long time. Mine are like an ocean really, to continue the metaphor. Sometimes, the sea is calm, and it’s a long time between waves, and sometimes the waves keep coming one right after the other like in a storm.. And right now it’s a veritable hurricane. I can’t say I know what’s triggered it, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

But here’s the cool thing, the thing that makes me want to sing the praises of therapy from every mountain top. As these waves are crashing over me, even as I feel like I spend days underwater, I know that it won’t always feel like this. I know that I’ll get back to that beach. I can acknowledge to myself that I feel sad or angry or betrayed. I just take a second to notice it’s there and then go about my day. And that’s all it takes most of the time. It’s not so scary after all.

Who would have ever thought I could be an emotionally healthy person? But I’m getting there.