The Full Spectrum

All too often we imagine the way to contentment is entirely a process of aligning the external world in just such a way that it evokes nothing but pleasant feelings. Much of this comes from the cultural messaging that suggests we’re failing as a human being if we aren’t ceaselessly happy. The implicit message underlying market capitalism is that we should be happy, and if we’re not, there’s a problem to be fixed, and something being sold can fix it. Psychotherapy, firmly rooted in the market economy, is not infrequently marketed in just such a way.

As a clinical psychologist, of course I do - given the right fit between therapist and client at the right time in the client’s life - deeply believe in the value of psychotherapy. And yet the psychotherapeutic process should not be confused with an effort to live entirely on one end of the spectrum of the human emotional experience. As human beings, we by definition experience an endless dance of pleasant and unpleasant moments, emotions that feel great and emotions that are unpleasant, and ultimately there’s very little we can do about this. Yes, through psychotherapy and other healing processes, we can become unstuck from chronic feeling states, we can counter shame, we can cultivate kindness, we can heal trauma, we can live more authentically, etc. But we will forever come back to the limits of the human mind and body, which contain all manner of unpleasant and challenging moments until and perhaps including our final breath.

Of course, we can get stuck in the darker end of the spectrum, and find ourselves impossibly far from joy, love, engagement and meaning. And here good psychotherapy can be enormously helpful, as we might move through that which keeps us stuck in our pain. And yet even once unstuck, we remain human, and challenged by all that that means.

Such a simple notion, that we will forever experience both pleasant and unpleasant emotions; that we can not escape the realities of impermanence and loss; that much of the world evokes sadness, anger, fear; that to be fully alive is to fully experience the entire range of human emotion. In fact, I assert that the lived, allowed experience of the full range of human emotion in response to all that is true in life is the very definition of emotional wellness. And yet it amazes me how frequently people enter my practice feeling such shame about their sadness, their confusion, their fear. When did experiences that are so inextricably human become seen as such a problem?

If the full spectrum of experience is inevitable, my fervent hope for those I treat is that they might cultivate the most useful qualities with which to meet it: courage, integrity, honesty, awareness, wisdom, dignity, acceptance, compassion for others and for the self.

Reactivity

Growth and maturation often lead to a decrease in reactivity. By reactivity, I’m referring to the experience and acting out of feeling states that are more intense or otherwise different than the triggering events would by themselves warrant. Such reactivity is typically sourced in some underlying vulnerability, but might manifest in a number of ways, such as aggression, withdrawal, or emotional numbness. Many of my clients are seeking help for a pattern of reactivity and its destructive consequences within important relationships.

An essential step in working with reactivity is understanding that the intensity of our feeling is often not rooted in the immediate events, as we typically assume. It certainly feels as though it is: a young man’s co-worker made a flip half-joke about his performance in a meeting, and he then felt shamed and deeply angered. The chain is clear: flip comment, then intense feeling. It’s reasonable to conclude that the comment caused the feeling, and the fault is entirely within the co-worker, who then becomes demonized, perhaps for only a moment, perhaps for much longer.

And yet when we look closely at what took place with the co-worker, we see clearly that the moment didn’t contain nearly enough fuel to power the full intensity of feeling the young man had. Perhaps the flip comment was unkind and thoughtless, but ultimately the sting of the comment was merely a match that sparked a reservoir of feeling that was already there. The reservoir of emotion was a dormant powder keg, and had nothing at all to do with the co-worker.

In fact, so much of what we feel is powered far less by the spark of the immediate moment than by our temperament and the years and years of moments and feelings and traumas (big and small) that we carry with us throughout every single day. This is an apparently simple but actually enormously powerful notion to have a good grasp on. Our histories are alive in all of our moments, and in many ways our immediate experiences are passed through the lens of this history. We interpret and react to our worlds in ways that are not dictated solely – or even primarily - by the present situation.

The implication is clear: if we are to meet each moment effectively, if we are to engage other people fairly, we would do well to understand the lens through which we tend to see the world. We would benefit enormously from the ability to discern what is happening “out there” from what we habitually tend to feel as a result of our own deeply held positions. If we believe that what we are experiencing is entirely a reaction to what is happening in the present moment, we are doomed to an eternal repetition, as the underlying patterns and habits simply manifest again and again.