Why is it that sometimes we can feel so bad for feeling bad?
It’s like there’s two layers of misery…the first layer is the bad feeling, and the second layer is the self-judgement that we lay on top of it. Why do we do this to ourselves?
So often, I hear things like:
I don’t know why I feel like this, I’ve been really lucky; I’ve had a lovely childhood!
Nothing bad has ever happened to me….
Other people have had it far worse than me.
What people are really saying here is…it’s my fault that I feel like this. It’s me that’s not good enough, there’s something wrong with me.
And guess what? That makes us feel worse. We feel ashamed of our pain, and we try to push it away.
The thing is, if we are blaming ourselves for feeling bad, then we can get into this self-punishing spiral, where we try to get rid of the bad feeling by telling ourselves to get a bloody grip. Or we might drink more, or work harder, or do any of the other hundred and one things that we do to get away from emotional pain. And that makes us feel worse too.
So sometimes, part of helping people in therapy means helping them to understand why they feel the way they do.
So how do we make sense of feeling bad, or not good enough, or that horrible toe-curling shame, when nothing bad has happened?
One way I have come to think about this is about the importance of feeling got.
You know that feeling when you’re talking to someone, and you know they get you? When that happens to me, I feel a kind of peacefulness inside, I feel myself relax and buzz, I feel a bit lighter, and I feel a bit closer to the person I’m talking to. I might even feel a little bit of joy. It’s just such a relief. The problem I’m talking about is still there, we haven’t fixed it, nothing has changed, except I feel deeply understood.
It’s called attunement.
We’re starting to understand that attunement – feeling got, is absolutely crucial to our early development. As babies, our parents have to work quite hard to get us. We can’t use language to communicate, so we use our eye contact, our cry and our bodies. Ideally, our parents are able to understand enough of what we’re trying to tell them, and they can tune into us enough, even when they’re completely exhausted. And when we feel got enough, then our brains grow and develop in the best way, we learn that we’re good enough, we learn how to manage our feelings, and we know who we are. It’s that important.
But inevitably, for some parents, tuning in to their babies is incredibly difficult, for lots of reasons. If a parent feels isolated, or not good enough, or they’re coping with things like drug or alcohol problems, illness, violence, poverty, war, mental health problems or poor housing…then of course, it feels impossible. For some parents, in some environments, providing the basics of practical care is in itself a triumph.
So, what happens if you’ve never felt got?
Well, you survive, but there’s a cost. Never feeling got means not knowing what that feels like. And if you don’t know what it feels like, you don’t know that there’s been anything missing. It also means not knowing that you need to feel got, so when you have a difficult feeling you are less likely to look for a person to talk to. You are much more likely to try to get rid of the feeling, by any means necessary. And so it begins…with the self-judgement of the feeling, then trying to get rid of the feeling (by intoxication, overwork, drama, promiscuity, gambling, crime, alcohol or whatever) and then the problems that inevitably arise from that.
But there’s something else.
When we’re very little, when we need people to get us and they don’t, it feels unbearable. So, we can block out the feeling by blocking out our awareness of our body. It makes total sense to do that: if our bodies are telling us we have a need, and it feels intolerable to have that need not met, then we better learn to block out that intolerable feeling.
How can therapy help?
Feeling got is a bodily experience. We can say ‘I get you’, but at the end of the day a person either feels it or they don’t. It is a bit like feeling loved, or feeling welcomed, it is the receiver who knows if it has happened. The problem is, that if your bodymind’s inner communication system has been closed down, you are not going to feel what is being offered.
So, in therapy, another part of the work might be helping my clients to feel reconnected to their bodies. This means learning to be aware of inner sensations, a sense of ease, or unease.
In my experience, when a person begins to feel got in therapy, it can be an emotional experience.
Because it is only then that the person realises what they have missed: that they’ve never felt got.