The Courage to Feel

I’ve been sharing a lot lately about using psychedelics in therapy. It’s new, it’s sexy, it’s cutting edge, and it’s even joyful (gasp).

But it’s not for everyone.

What if you feel the same sort of stuckness that I’ve described in other blog posts but you would rather not mess around with consciousness altering medicines?

There’s about a billion different ways to go through whatever you’re going through. Let’s say you have an emotional issue (like, maybe, you feel completely unenthusiastic about everything and fear that life is just an endless chain of days and nights that will drag you to the end and then there’s nothing…NOTHING!! Just as an example, of course…).

You might decide to face this issue head on. You can look at your suffering and you can say to yourself, “Self, this is no way to think. Let’s go to therapy!” And then, in therapy, you dig deep and you make sense of your suffering and through that process, you find your way to the other side of it. Once there, you will notice that you now have new skills and habits that can help you the next time you find yourself feeling eternally broken. Not too shabby!

Or, perhaps less helpfully, you could notice a hint of an icky feeling lurking somewhere in the depths and immediately run the other way. Look straight at the sun before you look in the mirror. You might use alcohol, food, mental acrobatics, any number of tried and true defenses like blaming others, denial, or self flagellation. There’s usually some kind of other cost to these methods, but you get to do that math yourself. Maybe, sometimes, it’s worth the cost. Seriously.

You get to make the choice, each and every time. Any moment in which you find yourself reaching for a glass of wine after you said you would take a break from drinking, or when you have your hand in a bag of chips but you’re not at all hungry, or you’re desperately engaging in a gratitude practice that’s laced with contempt for yourself instead of real gratitude, you have the choice to stop and evaluate.

Ask yourself:

What am I feeling and why? What was the incident that got me here? Is my feeling a proportionate response to this event? And if not, what is the situation reminding me of?

You might not choose to dig in, and that’s ok too. Sometimes the feelings are just too much, or it’s just not the right time for this level of introspection.

Make it a choice, though. Recognize what you’re doing. Reaching for a life raft to get through a storm is an appropriate action once in a while, but when you start to depend on a life raft for all of your maritime adventures, you’re going to find yourself near-drowning quite often.

Therapy, whether with psychedelics or not, is your path towards building a better boat. It takes longer, it’s harder to do, but with each plank of wood you hammer in, you’re getting closer to smoother sailing.