Let me tell you about one of the things that irritates me. In case you were short of a little irritation in your life.
It irritates me that although I was one of the people who went to psychotherapy very early in life, in my early twenties, it took me several more years of doing it before I found out for the first time that I can regulate my own emotional states myself.
Of course going to therapy helped. I calmed down after talking about how I felt. It was a good coping mechanism. And slowly I came to understand where some of those emotions I did not like were coming from.
But understanding did not necessarily give me more confidence in my own ability to manage what I was feeling. Sometimes quite the opposite, I would say. It over-underlined that I had had a harder life than others, that it was normal to feel all of those things.
From insight to action: why understanding is not emotional regulation
Which, yes, helped me have patience with myself, and often made me want to put my arms around myself, pat myself on the head and say, poor Andrei, look at everything he has been through. Compassion, self love.
A good exercise when you want to learn to connect with yourself and accept yourself with all your imperfections. A very poor exercise when it comes to taking control of your own life and growing your confidence in your ability to get through it.
If therapy or coaching helps you tolerate what should not be tolerated, it is doing you harm
As I understand psychotherapy after more than 600 hours of it, in the client’s chair, over the course of my life, one of its main objectives is strengthening the client’s autonomy and responsibility.
In other words, psychotherapy, like coaching, like the change strategy I practise, should help you reach the point where you no longer need it.
Where you manage on your own, in spite of the limitations you started out with. And a lot of practitioners fail at this. It would be unfair not to mention that we, the people and the clients, seem to have a slightly too strong tendency to lean on someone else and forget to stand on our own feet. We seem to do it too quickly. We seem to look outside ourselves too much and inside too little. But the practitioners should know better and should not encourage it. Should they not? I think so.
Living in emotional overdrive is not normal: anxiety as a learned habit, not a destiny
You may be wondering what has got into me today. Let me tell you.
I was in a change strategy session with a client who had difficulty controlling her negative thoughts, thoughts that made her feel strong anxiety, which paralysed her, affected her relationships and affected her professionally. Sounds familiar? It does to me.
And while I was trying to understand better how these things work for her, she said:
“I feel all these emotions that paralyse me. My mind never stops. I mean, it is normal, I know it is normal for thoughts to keep coming, one on top of another, without being able to stop them, but I wish I could.”
I interrupted her.
“No. It is not normal.”
She stopped mid sentence, disoriented.
“What?”
“You said you know it is normal for thoughts to come non stop and for you not to be able to stop them. It is not normal. Just as it is not normal for emotions to paralyse you and for you to feel powerless in front of them. Anxiety is not something you are obliged to accept. It is not a compulsory part of daily life. And I do not think it is okay to simply accept these things. You are not a victim without control. Or at least, you do not have to be a victim, if you do not want to be.”
She looked at me with the eyes of someone contemplating, for the first time, the option of not tolerating a painful “reality”.
As if it had simply never occurred to her that she could want a life without anxiety. I went on to tell her that yes, depending on our history, what we feel may well be justified.
Our past can explain why we are one way or another, why we have a predisposition towards a certain emotion, why we go more readily towards anger, anxiety, sadness, guilt or shame, why it seems we do this more than the people we compare ourselves with.
But let us not normalise a life in which anxiety is with us every day. Anxiety is largely a learned behaviour. We learned to think in a certain way, to try to calm ourselves in certain ways, to structure our days and our evenings in certain ways. And all of those things keep our relationship with anxiety and fear far too close.
These things can change. There are techniques and methods with immediate effects. Which we were not taught at school. And it seems there are a great many psychotherapists who were not taught them either.
For me, as someone who fought anxiety for years, it is frustrating to see that ten years on from when I had this problem, the mental health industry is still feeling its way between “let us talk about it a bit more, maybe it will pass” and “let us give you some pills”. Pills which, to be clear, genuinely are necessary and useful in certain cases.
But the reality is that most people who feel anxiety are not clinical cases needing psychiatry. They are people like I was years ago, who, once they had access to a few advanced techniques of emotional self regulation, could pick one or two that work perfectly for them and take back control of their own life. They could reduce their anxiety symptoms by 90% on their own.
Do you know how that would feel for them? I will tell you, because I have spoken with enough clients who got there. It feels like being reborn, as if until now they had not really been living. It feels like having been fooled into believing they had a problem they must live with, when in fact, for most of them, it was perfectly and completely solvable.
And guess what? That would not only make their life better and quieter, it would also grow their confidence in themselves. Because although they may have learned the techniques from someone like me, or from someone else, the change was made by them.
They wanted it enough, they invested the time and the money, they tested the techniques, they succeeded.
And that is what irritated me today: the realisation that psychotherapy, something I have recommended so warmly for fifteen years, is STILL sometimes so lacking in pragmatism and applicability that for many people it limps. It does not work as well as it could. At least on subjects like anxiety and emotional self regulation.
And yes, if you know someone who needs help with this, point them my way. I know I can help them, as far as time and my calendar allow. I know because I have a collection of more than twenty techniques of this kind, gathered from tens of thousands of euros of training over the last thirteen years. I know because they have worked for me for over ten years. Every time. And because I have taught these techniques to several hundred clients, personalising the process for each of them, and they worked just as well for them.
But above all of that, I trust it will work because I understand that sometimes we do not have time to talk about a problem for six years, until we understand everything there was to understand about it, before we start living our lives.
We cannot postpone living until we have understood the whole of our childhood.
Sometimes we need to live and enjoy our life starting this week.
Important: as I said above, I encourage psychotherapy, I always have, and I think all of us would benefit from some sessions. But when you feel your therapist is not helping, or you have tried working with several and your problem is still there, maybe psychotherapy is not the only thing you need.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.