One of the reasons people enter therapy, is to learn to control their emotions. Some people even state that at the outset: “I want to learn to control my anger”, or “I need to control my anxiety”, or “My husband says I need to control my insecurity”, or some variation on the above. Or else, in the therapy process, it becomes clear that the patient believes that he or she needs to control their emotions: one sees that quite early sometimes when people struggle to retain their composure, or swallow away inevitable tears and even apologise for crying.

Of course, all such behaviour is an invaluable source of information to the therapist about someone’s way of being in the world. And hopefully the therapy client will learn that the therapeutic space is safe enough to express all kinds of emotions. But even when someone has relaxed into being able to express whatever emotion is present, it remains a challenge to help them realise that the key to healing is not learning to control emotions, but to allow the emotion to simply be deeply and viscerally felt, and to learn to use the information from the mind and the body which an emotion is trying to convey.

The greatest obstacle to allowing an emotion simply to be felt, is that we judge some emotions to be bad. In fact, any emotion which causes physiological discomfort seems to be labelled “bad”. This may be a moralistic issue: harmful behaviour fuelled by certain emotions may be judged harshly by families and societies and religious dogma, and so the emotion itself becomes labelled as bad or good. Anger is a good example of this: despite it being a very important and strength giving emotion, it gets confused with aggressive behaviour, and is often unwanted and feared.

It is true that emotions like fear, sadness and anger are uncomfortable and cause central nervous arousal which is felt in our bodies as unpleasant, and protracted experiencing of these states can be stressful. The impulse to want to control and therefore minimise these are understandable, but the simple reality that no emotion is “bad” can already be a powerful intervention.

Learning to simply become aware of the emotion, to become curious about why it is there, to let it find its natural expression in the visceral experience as it arises in our body and awareness, is the beginning of healing.

This is at the center of a more mindful approach to working with emotions: in fact, distress tolerance is a key skill which is taught in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, developed for treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Controlling emotions does not work as a long term strategy. Knowing that an emotion is a temporary state which can be tolerated, understood and expressed effectively, and learning to simply sit with an emotion with curiosity, openness, and mindful awareness is in itself a worthy therapeutic goal.

I have been rereading an old favourite of mine: A wonderfully wise book by James Hollis, a Jungian analyst and teacher living in the US: “The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife”. This is a truly remarkable book, and I have referred patients to this and other of his books. Rereading it again, I was reminded about how true it is that we tend to burden the other in our relationships and particularly marriages with the task of making our (often unconscious) dreams come true.  One of the biggest issues in failed marriages is the simmering resentment we eventually experience towards the other because they don’t fulfill that ideal.  This happens when two people  give up on their own individuation in service to the unconscious demand on each other to stay as they are to preserve a particular relationship dynamic.

Individuation is the process of becoming fully our individual, separate selves, with increasing awareness of what is true and real for us, and taking self responsibility for our development as we continue living our lives within the inevitable limits which fate brings. But when we surrender our inner truth to another’s agenda, as is so often required by socially accepted roles and rites in relationships, we do not live our own lives in an examined and aware way, and it often takes a failing relationship, to wake us up.

A relationship crisis can therefore be a first sign of the need to inquire into what is really going on for us. As Mr Hollis reminds us in this book: our intimate relationships can never be better than the relationship we have with ourselves. “All relationships, therefore, are symptomatic of the state of our inner life, and no relationship can be better than our relationship to our own unconscious”(p 47)

I think that these are incredibly true and powerful words: for all our relationships: with intimate others, with family and our own children, with friends and colleagues.

So the ultimate challenge then is to be able to look at ourselves, and ask the hard questions about what is going on inside of us and how it informs our thoughts and feelings, and behaviours , in stead of blaming or shaming the other party, or even(prematurely) severing ties.

Not easy, but possible. Sometimes it takes repeated failures or heartache to force us into doing this work:  when we lose lovers and friends, when we clash with work colleagues, and our relationships with family members and even our own children become fraught with tension, it can be the beginning of our own journey into becoming more self aware, self responsible, more grown-up, more fully ourselves. Ironically it is only when this happens, that we can have good relationships. This is why it is worthwhile to invest time and effort and in the case of therapy, money, into becoming familiar with ourselves, and learning to have a good relationship with ourselves. That is the ultimate gift to ourselves and others.