“It’s like I was invisible.”
“I could speak up, but I’m not sure it would matter. What would I say anyway?”
From the time we’re young, we ideally start to learn about our impact on the world. Think of the baby who throws their spoon on the floor from their high chair. Mommy picks it up — and the baby gleefully drops it again.
Or the toddler who puts some pressure on a block and….it falls! Cause/effect. More to the point, “I made a difference. My actions make a difference.”
Then there’s the emotional impact we make. We smile and someone coos at us. We cry and someone consoles us. We form a fist and someone names our feeling: “You’re feeling angry.” And they help us understand why. “You’re angry that Timmy took your toy away.”
Through millions of interactions like this, we learnt that our feelings are comprehensible and our behaviors make a difference.
But what if these interactions are short, or blaming, or confusing?
People who had inattentive caregiving get a feeling that their words and actions don’t matter. When you feel that nothing you do matters, when you know in your bones that your reactions are unlikely to get results, you fade out and stop feeling like you are a mover of your own world. You may flail about in life or in tasks, because the feeling that your actions can’t matter makes whether you complete any one strand or not irrelevant. Your thoughts, your words, your feelings, and your very essence are almost choked out of being. Instead of a sense of moving your world, your vitality gets locked within you.
Since your feelings and impulses are held in instead of being expressed out here, they get expressed inside you through a morass of suffering. Tension. Pain. Restlessness. Inexplicable worries. You live in a haze of feelings divorced from their cause, instincts divorced from a sense of agency to act. But the feelings don’t evaporate so much as they amorphize — you feel “awful” or “tired” without knowing why.
People who had scary caregiving get a sense that they have an impact but that fails to come as a relief. Imagine that a kid drops his spoon from his high chair. His mom, who last time responded with glee, now responds with indignation. “How could you do this to me?” Or an older kid speaks up with an idea and is slapped down: “No one asked you.” If this is our world, we become frightened of our place in it. It’s as if our actions create all kinds of unforeseen consequences, many of them bad. As kids, we just don’t have the perspective to look at these people who take us out of context and to say to ourselves, “Wow, I was really doing something good — and then these people got angry. They must be threatened somehow by my competence.” Or, “Hmm, I was feeling happy and then I got slapped down for something trivial. Perhaps I’m in a shaming environment because of some kinda fear they have of letting me become my true full self.”).
In the neglectful environment, a kid doesn’t think, “These people aren’t responding to my emotions or my behaviors. This is obviously an indicator that they’re limited in some ways.”
Kids can’t assimilate that information. They instead decide some very damaging things: “My happiness is a bad thing.”
“My anger is destructive and will push people away.”
“My words don’t matter.”
“What I do makes no difference.”
It doesn’t help that we’re also not trained to look for the why to how we feel or don’t feel. Our culture is one of surface explanations without any comprehensive look at root causes. We have diagnoses but no clarity. We can come to believe that our sense of shiftiness or pain or restlessness or exhaustion are the whole story — not a symptom of energy that got cut off somewhere. We will give you words for your robbed vitality, but we will not ask who robbed you or look at how you can reclaim your sense of self.
(Of course there are disorders that impact people’s physiology. Of course! This article isn’t about that. This article is about being given a diagnosis of “fatigue” without a look into the cause of the tension giving rise to it in the first place, whether that’s physiological or emotional or some combination. We’re trained to say, “I have chronic fatigue” as if that’s a cause when it may well be an effect: “I’ve had the vitality drained out of me.” It’s like diagnosing a car as “motionless” without checking to see if it’s out of gas or if something else is going on.)
Say that you got these ideas from the time you were young — these ideas that you don’t matter. That your feelings don’t make sense. That your anger itself is destructive, or that your tears garner withdrawal or scorn instead of the comfort you deserve.
Perhaps you find yourself in counseling and you’re that “motionless car.” You know you’re stuck. You know you feel “bad.” But you’ve lost the framework for the feelings. You come in with beliefs that it’s hopeless.
You also come in with beliefs about relationships, and this is a really big deal in counseling.
Because every time your therapist responds to you with the attuned response to what you are truly feeling and doing, you get a sense that you matter. That your feelings have a cause. That your behavior and your thoughts and feelings have an effect on you and on others.
But any time your therapist misses what you say or fails to note a shift in you or a reaction to what they say, they may accidentally play into this very old story you carry inside. This story that you don’t matter or that your feelings, the shifts in your behavior and energy, are not worth looking into.
It doesn’t matter how amazing the modality is that your therapist works with at this point. They can help you to expand within yourself, to breathe more deeply, to learn coping skills. But your sense of having an impact, of mattering, doesn’t shift. So you remain in hiding.
On the other hand, say your therapist just lights up when you walk into the room. Say that they look at you with curiosity, and when your eyes shift, their eyes take that shift in. They look at you with regard. And they treat your feelings as if they matter and as if they are being caused somehow in the here-and-now with them. They say, “You just pulled back there, and changed the subject pretty fast. Can we take a look at what happened just now to cause you to pull back here with me?”
Say your therapist responds with some level of real emotion to your interaction with them. They are moved by your words. They shift in response to how you are with them. They help you map out the cause and effect in a non-shaming way. They are helping you to restore a sense that you matter. And that another person can hold their own with them. You learn that it turns out that your vitality, your feelings, are not too much. They’re not invisible nor are they dangerous. You come to embody yourself in a new way because you know you matter.
Diana Fosha refers to this as “feeling felt”. Your therapist feels on your behalf and they feel your movement toward and away from them.
This helps restore your sense of cause/effect in a really hopeful energizing way.
Unfortunately, so many times, therapy unintentionally becomes a confirmation of some old story of our feelings and our actions not mattering.
Say that you’re talking with a therapist and they echo back everything you say. “I feel scared.”
“Yeah, you’re frightened.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t know what to say here. Uh….”
“Yeah. You don’t know.”
You have learned nothing here! Your words aren’t being mapped to a real interaction happening right now in this moment.
They’re giving you nothing to work with.
Or say that you come in to your therapist and they have some cool modality and they’re positive their method works. They fit you into some kinda category, give you some kinda treatment, and you sit there letting them do this thing “to” you. They don’t note the waves of anger or withdrawal or feeling you show unless it fits into their idea. You learn to fit yourself to their modality. You do not learn that you matter and that a person’s actions are contingent on yours.
This even happens by accident. You get this sense that your words don’t matter, and you have a hard time forming goals for counseling. So your counselor quits asking you what you’d like to work with. They fail to address it that somehow, for some reason, you seem to wait for others around you to tell you what to do. This position in life robs you of a lot of opportunities. You don’t take initiative. But worry now with this therapist — for they have a flipchart! A protocol! A way of understanding you without you having to talk.
No matter how good their flipchart or their understanding is, your passivity isn’t looked at. You don’t learn how going helpless and small impairs relationshps. You don’t learn to understand that compliant behavior as a response to a world where you learned that to move was dangerous or ineffectual. You repeat the same pattern. People stuck in this mode will go to multiple life coaches, therapists, healers, nutritionists, self-help seminars — because they’re still the victim of the notion that their movement is ineffectual, that others must be hired to move “on” them rather than with them.
Good counseling will help you to get a sense of cause and effect. You’ll feel your actions mattering to your therapist. You’ll begin to notice the links within you between your emotions and your nervousness. The links between your impulses and your fatigue when you suddenly deflate or the link between your repressed feelings and your sudden outbursts when the feeling suddenly whoosh out.
They’ll help you know that your movements, your actions, your interactions, matter to them.
If you feel like you’re going around in circles in your life or you have feelings or do things that seem sourceless, you’re living in a less than fully realized life. Out of touch with yourself, your feelings don’t get to become words that can make an impact. Your passions don’t turn into projects that support a bigger vision. Your life is drifting by. You’re sitting on the sidelines, afraid to be disregarded or pushed down.
Good counseling can help you get a sense of you again. Good counseling can help you to see and feel that your feelings have causes and meaning. That what you say makes a difference. That what you do matters. That what others do and say matters to you. You begin to care how people treat you. You begin to treat yourself differently. Inexplicably “misery” becomes much clearer: I’m feeling angry because that person didn’t keep their word” or “I’m having an idea and I’m going to express it.”
You don’t have to keep going through different healers. You can if you want to. But if you find a sense of your impact in the world and a sense of the world’s impact of you and how to move within that, you won’t feel that constant need for “one more fix.” You’ll be living from who you are. You’ll be experiencing emotions that make sense and lead to actions — actions you take on your own behalf and on behalf of the world. Good therapy teaches us not that feelings lead to therapy — but helps us find how to transalte our feelings into actions.