“Positive transformational change always comes from how we feel right now.”
Dear Readers:
“How did that make you feel?”
That’s a question that many therapists ask clients who are talking about past events, hoping to help the clients process their own emotional reactions.
If you are one of those therapists, or if you know someone who is…might I gently offer an alternative?
Even if your client can successfully recall and describe what he or she felt back then, that’s not the most direct route to change. In my experience, it’s an unlikely, haphazard route indeed.
Why! Because positive transformational change always comes from how we feel right now.
So how do we process events in the past? By inviting the present feeling about those events. Any event in the past that still needs attention is sure to give a present feeling, if you pause and let one come.
Rather than saying “How did that make you feel?” you might say to your client, “As you remember that, perhaps you could invite a sense of how it feels to you right now.”
When a person is in touch with how something feels right now, there will be a sense of intricacy, of “more than I could put into words.” Staying with that can bring steps of real change, a fresh perspective, a sense of strength and possibility… which just remembering how it felt back then cannot do.
