Why Good Therapy Hurts as it Heals

Recently I wrote about our culture’s backwards ideas of mental health treatment.

Now let’s talk about what real healing looks like; what it means to dig into that open sore, clean out all the yuck and infection, and give the soul everything it needs to become whole again.

Rather than slapping band aids on our gaping wounds, good therapy pushes into the pain. (This is a process that is highly counter-intuitive to some people.) It strives to understand the heartache rather than masking it.

Understanding the Heartache

A lot of us learned to survive by acting strong. For some Christians, this means we can quote all the cliches, “I don’t know what to do but I trust the Lord!” “Life is hard but God is good!”

In reality, our act of strength is just an act - not really strength at all, but a mask put out to the world to protect ourselves from the dangers of being truly known for all of our weak and vulnerable feelings.

We have faked strong for so long that we’ve shut down parts of our emotional selves. And what alternative do we have? Otherwise the pain would swallow us, we’d drown in tears, we couldn’t function. And we would disappoint people who depend on us to be strong.

Therapy disrupts the cycle of masking pain and faking strength. In therapy we learn that feelings aren’t the problem, but they can point to the problem. Feelings are signposts that mark the twists and turns of our complex hearts: “jaded by loss”, “feels like a failure”, etc. Therapy invites us to lean into the hurt, to somehow believe that if we travel directly through the swamp of feelings, not around it or over it but directly through it, there will be healing on the other side.

This messy process involves us engaging in the feeling rather than plugging it up or pushing it down. Only then can we follow it to 1) its root belief and 2) the life experiences that really drove that belief home.

Why the Past Matters

Many people want to leave the past behind, seeing no point in dredging up painful memories. And indeed, “forgetting the past” would make sense if the past were truly in the past.

But sometimes the past creeps into the present, even if we don’t want to admit it. And if we turn a blind eye to the past, it will continue to control us.

Part of my work with clients is to understand the encroachment of the past into the present. The beliefs we hold are usually based on specific life experiences that we interpreted a certain way. Pinpointing the event in our personal history that led us to a certain belief helps us to see the subjectivity of that belief. We may have held these beliefs for years and never even questioned them. Many of us believe we are of very little value to the human race, and this belief comes from painful childhood experiences we were too young and naive to interpret rightly.

Uncovering the Beliefs that Shaped Us

As human beings, we’re constantly trying to find meaning, to make sense of what occurs in our world.

When we interact with other people, we feel things. Then, in an automatic and usually unconscious mental process, we draw conclusions from the feelings we feel.

First, we draw specific conclusions about that particular encounter. But then, we slowly begin to draw overarching conclusions about life, ourselves, and others.

“Dad is only proud of me if I’m good at basketball. It seems like people only like you if you are good at things.”

“I’m losing another friend. Every time I start to love someone, I lose them.”

Understanding how the past shaped our beliefs enables us to start the process of laying down new “organizing principles” or beliefs that transform our lives.

Why We Have to Feel the Feelings in Therapy

When we experience something in life and interpret it a certain way, it forms a belief or “organizing principle”. The term “organizing principle” is helpful because belief sounds like something intellectual, but this type of belief is much more than intellectual. What I’m talking about is more like an emotional heart conviction that organizes how we see the world.

In therapy, we have to follow the emotions to get to the meanings. Rather than avoiding distressing feelings and recollections, we create space for them. Having a purely intellectual conversation that keeps emotions at a safe distance is rarely impactful. If therapy doesn’t engage emotions, nobody leaves changed.

The Therapeutic Relationship

Therapy creates a relational context in which to feel things. Therapists are just as human as everyone else. When we build a relationship with a client, it is a human relationship. Human relationships are filled with vulnerabilities. As humans, we have unspeakable ability to hurt each other and to heal each other. Engaging our unquestioned beliefs in a relational context is both horribly risky - and profoundly beautiful.

Good therapy hurts as it heals because addresses the roots of our painful emotions rather than simply masking the symptoms.