So, when you say you won’t go to counseling, you might tell yourself that you can’t go to counseling because you have bowling, or take up bowling (or lawn darts or square dancing or, well—something!!) or that it will cut into your reading time. (With a note to self that you’d better start reading to make that excuse stick!)
When you say you won’t go to counseling, maybe underneath that is the fear that you will cry. And when you are weeping, you will do so in front of a therapist who hardly knows you. And when that therapist sees you crying, you wonder what he or she will be thinking.
If you’re like the rest of us, your automatic assumption will be that the therapist thinks you are a mess. You know that the therapist is seeing you as some whack-a-doodle. You will tell yourself the story that while the therapist is looking compassionate on the outside, internally they are shaking their head at the pathetic picture in front of them.
I know. Because I have been a client, and that’s what I thought what my therapist would think if I started to weep. Most of the people who sit in my office and cry for the first time, without thinking, apologize to me and do their best to suppress their tears.
Please allow me to fill you in on how I see tears in the therapy office.
Tears of significance.
First, I know that when tears are present, it’s only because those tears have been able to overcome the resistance of the person who is frantically resisting them. Those tears have persisted through the urges to push them down and not allow them to appear. Those tears are persistent and I know they are important. These tears have likely been waiting to spill over for eons.
When I see tears I know something important is happening. Tears tell that the client and I are exploring an area that matters. I know that the work we are doing impacts the person at a deep level when I hear a person’s voice choke up and become tight.
While the tendency of the person who is crying is to apologize and change the topic to stop the tears, my tendency is to slow things down and spend time where the tears are. I do not intend to make the person cry or hurt them by spending time in hurting places. My intent is to release the tears and explore what the tears are trying to say.
Tears are a sign that we are on important ground. Tears indicate a sacred space that merits gentle and slow treading.
If the tears haven’t been allowed to fall, then they haven’t been allowed to speak either.
That probably sounds hokey to you, this therapist mumbo-jumbo is one reason you’ve been avoiding the likes of us. Can you give me a chance to explain?
Picture yourself like a house, made up of rooms. Some rooms have big windows and wide entrances letting you into the room. There are no doors at all.
Other rooms have a single small door, and it’s padlocked. To open that room would involve tears falling. To avoid the tears, you avoid the room. You don’t have full access to your house because you dare not unlock that door. It’s brutal to go into a space that is unlocked only by tears. No one likes to do that. That’s why it’s better to open that door together with someone you trust. Someone who unlocks doors often and goes into that room for the first time with you.
Once the door is unlocked and tears are shed, the door to the room gets opened, and maybe even gets taken off. The room is now possible to enter, if you wish. If the room is about the death of a parent, it might be a chance to remember some special moments in the room, when you can look around in there. It creates an opportunity to remember important and helpful conversations, fun memories of vacations and beautiful moments with a loved parent, not just the painful final days of an illness.
The space may not be a place in which you want to hang out if the room was padlocked because of the pain of the trauma held within—like a sexual assault, or the substance abuse of a parent. But it actually feels safer and cozier to live in a house where the doors aren’t locked tight and where you choose to have the door half closed. You may not hang out in that room by choice, but it doesn’t have to be sealed to hold the fear and grief either.
Can you imagine the freedom?
Tears of relief
Did you ever get lost when you were a kid? Maybe for a few moments in an amusement park you started following the wrong pair of legs and when you looked up, it wasn’t your mom? Or you stopped to look in a store window for a minute in a mall, but your dad didn’t realize you weren’t following him, and he disappeared into the sea of people?
Do you remember when you started to cry?
For most kids tears erupt at the moment they are found. When their mother crouches down and scoops them up and holds them in a tight embrace—that’s when the waterworks start.
Before that, there is only terror. There is no room for sadness, only fear. It’s all business until a child finds momma or poppa, and then they collapse into sobs. The safety of a parent’s arms allows for the vulnerable feeling of sadness to emerge.
Safety is the key criteria for tears to fall. Sinking into soft feelings becomes possible, even probable, with safety.
It is not uncommon, in the safe cocoon of the therapy office, for a person to begin telling their story and find their eyes starting to leak profusely. They explain to me they told themselves they would not cry in the session and now reluctantly accept a tissue. It’s as though the tears that have been held in a quiet, silent reservoir unnoticed, sometimes for decades, finally emerge in the safety of therapy. While it is uncomfortable to cry, there is a feeling of unburdening that happens. As the reservoir drains there is a calming release.
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For many years I taught basic counseling skills to students at university. Every year the students would bring up the same concern: “What happens if I make a patient cry?” When they ask this question, it has an implied tone of horror about it. I think the students wondered if it was mean—or perhaps were already convinced it was cruelty. Every year, we would explore this question: “What happens if a patient/client cries while a therapist is with them?”
No doubt, there are terrible therapists who might make their clients cry with criticism and shaming. That’s not cool—it’s wrong. If that happens to you, on behalf of my profession, I’m sorry. I think this is actually rare.
So, I would process with the students by asking them, “If your client is telling a story, and you encourage further exploration, and a client’s tears arise, what is happening?” The students always get to the realization that, most often, when a client cries, it is a sign that they feel safe enough to let the sadness or turmoil or depression or whatever voice to express itself. The tears, along with the grief or hurt were there, all along, just suppressed. Now those tears have the courage to emerge. Crying expresses something meaningful at the moment. They acknowledge feelings that have been held but unexpressed, all along.
At my office, we have facial tissues everywhere. Three boxes of tissues in each counseling room—one within easy reach of where the client sits. One is near the therapist to allow us to hand the box over to the client as needed. Sometimes, I need one myself in session since I’m human too. A third is on standby on the bottom shelf, waiting its turn. We have tissues in the waiting area and by the reception, too.
Around our office, tears are:
signs of vulnerability which we see as courage
valued forms of expression
signs of trust in the therapist and in the therapy—and therefore are valued
evidence that a person’s soul is daring to express itself. It is a sign of poignancy.
little symbols of something important—and so each tear holds an exquisite dignity
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Clients tell me they fear that if they start to cry, they might never stop. The tears have been withheld for so long that they worry that the sorrowing will not end. That fear is real and quite common.
Sometimes, when I hear this, I tell them that I will help them end their crying at some point. I won’t let them drown in their tears. That’s part of the job of a therapist is t
o help you hold your tears safely.
You can let your counselor know how you feel about tears. Sometimes, it’s an entire conversation about what to do when/if tears happen. Those conversations are OK to have.
Other times, when I know the client could use a giggle, I’ll ask them about the last time they were in the mall and how many folks they saw weeping as they went about their business because they started to cry and never stopped. People always stop crying. Sometimes it just takes a while.
Some client’s eyes well up—just a trace. It’s like they leak, just a little. Or there can be quiet weeping. Sometimes, people come in and sob. Occasionally there is wailing. It doesn’t alarm me. I just pass the tissue. Often, people are surprised by how great they feel after a good cry.
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It’s a brave thing to enter an internal room full of pain that may have been locked shut for years. When tears happen, it’s a sign a person has walked into it and is looking around.
Tears are the brave sign that you have gone to an important and intimidating and powerful place. Yes, you might cry when you see a counselor. Entering a room that is opened by the experience of tears means entering a room that hasn’t yet been fully explored.
But if you cry will be courageous like when a Navy SEAL goes into a compound on a reconnaissance mission to explore and discover important information.
And you won’t find the SEAL apologizing.
14
The floodgates will open
Picture your soul as a large home with a variety of rooms. Some are sunny and full of life with lots of action, frequent cleaning, holding laughter and good times.
Some rooms are a little dusty with less use, more like rooms that are visited as necessary. The door is shut on these rooms, but the handles can be turned and the rooms entered.
Some rooms are locked and bolted shut, not having been inhabited or even visited for years. They get no light and often are in the basement. If a visitor might ask for on a tour, you wouldn’t even acknowledge these rooms exist.
Some of these rooms have dark closets in the back corner with secrets tucked inside that remain firmly locked up.
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Maybe you have had some very painful experiences in your life. Experiences that you have put away in a dark closet in your mind because the thought of bringing them out again creates shivers down your spine or nauseous feelings in your belly. Perhaps the death of a parent, the violating touch of a coach/club leader/sibling when you were a child or the shame of a parent’s reaction to a school grade or not making the team. The experiences vary but the gut-wrenching sensations associated with those experiences are more similar than alike.
Many spend their lives trying to cloister the painful memories as far away from conscious thought as possible. A belly twitches if a song or a smell has them go there. When they read something online or watch a show where someone experiences something similar to the avoided feelings, they know sleep will go poorly that night.
The body teaches a person to avoid the painful memories that are then kept locked away.
Many shut those parts away because it feels awful to just even feel the slightest initial bit of those memories.
There can be the sense of, “If I feel this bad when I just begin to think of it, how bad would it be if I started talking about it with someone else?” Often people live out of this idea without ever knowing that they have made this choice. The fear of the potential power of exploring these intentionally neglected pieces of ourselves is significant.
To be clear, very few folks say, “I will avoid every circumstance related to my most uncomfortable feelings,” to themselves. Your body does it for you, unawares, somewhat like your eyelids blink over your eyes to lubricate them. You are never aware that your eyeballs are becoming dry. Your brain tells your eyelids to blink without conscious awareness that this is a good idea.
And so a person organizes his or her existence to make sure those areas of their lives never get talked about or explored:
He doesn’t watch certain television shows because those shows have a similar theme. Theme avoided—inside pain avoided.
She mocks certain movies that might have her feel certain feelings. When you mock a movie for its emotional themes, you have an obvious reason to not expose yourself to watching it and to remove the threat of touching on tender spots when the characters struggle with that which you are avoiding.
He might avoid funerals—or avoids listening to anything at the funeral if he finds himself feeling the real sadness present. He might look like he’s there, but he has walled himself off. He sits in the pew, stony. Shut off. Feeling nothing. Because it’s safer than feeling the feelings the funeral service would elicit—which are the same feelings he shut down and shut off decades ago when dad died.
She becomes a cordial roommate with her spouse, because the deeper, more intimate conversations that they once had now become dangerous. The deeper conversations might touch too close to the parts of herself she will never, ever go near. How can she tell him how, sometimes, his touch feels eerily like the unwelcome touch of the man who persuaded her to trust him when she was a child?
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When a family physician, boss or a dear friend, encourages counseling, it’s not uncommon for there to be a lot of bluster. Comments like, “There is no time! Where would I find the time?” or, “Much ado about nothing. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about!” These are fantastic, vague comments to blow someone off who has spent the time thinking about it, and risked suggesting it.
In my experience, when those people somehow make it to counseling, the terrible, terrifying truth comes out: “I have spent years/decades avoiding the experience, memories and feelings around ______ and if I start, I fear I will drown in it. I dare not open the box, because I won’t be able to put it back, and it may just finish me.”
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When a person has deliberately spent decades avoiding discussion or even thought of the:
Sexual assault
Sudden death of someone significant
Serious accident
Experience of war
Violent relationship
Abuse by parent or caregiver
Absentee parent
Stillbirth
—the idea to go to counseling and explore that space seems ridiculously counterintuitive. As in, why would you put your phone in a blender and turn it on? Why would you walk on thin ice that is cracking? Counterintuitive like snow in July.
There can be a fear of:
Falling apart and never coming back together
Starting to cry and never stopping
Being so concerned about what might happen, that you wonder if spending time with that needs-to-be-ignored space might just kill you.
Beginning to talk about the one terrible bit of it you remember when you suspect there is more that you can’t remember, and you presume that what you can’t remember is even worse. You assume these unknown memories would flood you and sink you fast if you opened the door, even just a little. This one is especially terrifying. If you don’t know what you don’t remember, then you don’t know how unspeakably horrendous these pieces of memory could be.
Some of you spend your life making sure that the fragile container holding your most painful moments isn’t touched during regular life. Ever.
You avoid the triggers by
Not ever visiting that part of town
Changing the radio whenever a certain song plays
Shutting off the television when it discusses certain types of news events, or maybe not watching the news at all.
Changing the conversation
Never talking to certain kinds of people
Never letting yourself feel a certain feeling—or even feel anything at all.
If you go to all that work to make certain that fragile container is never touched—then, why the hell would you go to counseling if the purpose of that therapy is to tap at that container? W
hat if it shatters into a million pieces that you can never glue back together? And if that container shatters, then whatever-the-heck is in that container is now not contained.
Therapy would seem to be the antithesis of how you organize your life!
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So, first of all, no good therapist will recklessly shatter your guarded and protected container that holds your most precious and tender and frightening moments. We don’t shatter and crush.
That violates everything that a therapist stands for and desires for you.
If a therapist should attempt to push too hard, let them know that this counseling approach will not work.
You can do that. You can say, “Slow down,” or “You’re pushing too hard,” or “I couldn’t sleep for days after last session, can we pull back today?” Let the therapist know what pace is tolerable for you. If the therapist doesn’t respond well to your concerns, find another therapist who will support even as you explore.
Therapists do not smash the container with the avoided memories and feelings.
However, therapists are “professional peekers-into-dark-and-locked-closets”.
Counselors have spent years learning how to peek and we know how to help clients peek. Safely.
Hell No to Hmmm, Maybe Page 11
