Angry? Disappointed? Heartbroken? Think twice before you

Faced with ‘bad’ emotions, it’s natural to want to lock them up. As a therapist and a patient, I’ve learned to let them run

Not so long ago, one of my best friends was sitting at my kitchen table, crying. He and his partner had just broken up, and I could feel his desperate sadness and the crushing weight of grief at losing someone he loved so much. I stood by the counter feeling so helpless. Confronted with his suffering, I was desperate to lift him out of his misery, to tell him that they would get back together, that things would be OK. It felt like an emotional emergency, and I wanted to call in the feelings police to lock his bad feelings up.

One of the hardest things for me to do, when I was training to be a psychotherapist, was to stop trying to make my patients feel better. It is of course a very natural response, if someone we are with is feeling bad, to want to make them feel good. We feel it in our bones – feeling bad is bad, feeling good is good, and we want only good things for those we care for. Emergency! Shut this thing down!