How Therapy Can Help You Rediscover Joy in Daily Life

I know this might seem easier than it sounds, Joy in life is achieved by accepting your feelings. 

This doesn’t mean you will LIKE all of your feelings. I once almost stopped going to therapy because I was tired of crying so much. But, there were a lot of tears left to cry after being so “resilient” through childhood and most of my young adulthood. The truth was, I was just stuffing down my feelings all of those years calling it “resilience.” Reality is that you can only stuff down the feelings for so long. 

I have spent several years of my career working with older adults. We are talking 65 years and much older.  I learned so much from the wisdom that more years of life brings you. At first I thought as you got older, you just got more grouchy. That’s partially true for some people. After a while I realized that the grouchiness usually came from trying to make yourself feel a way you didn’t really feel.

The happiest were the older folks who didn’t give a shit. They were angry, and they told you they were. I didn’t meet them where they were at and they let me know it. I was working for a hospital system that deeply believed in using evidence-based therapies. You know, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Problem Solving Therapy, trauma focused CBT, and motivational interviewing, just to name a few. Some of the clients I was working with did not like the evidence-based therapy approaches.

Part of Problem Solving Therapy is to identify immediate actions one can take to reach a goal. So, if they had a goal of losing weight, they would say they wanted to exercise. We would make small goals to achieve the bigger ones. So they would, for example, wear their workout clothes to bed or put their sneakers by the door. As time went on, we would make bigger goals to actually do exercise. I sometimes thought to myself…”this is bullshit, if working out was so easy, everyone would be doing it.” In fact, I myself was struggling with getting myself to the gym. After being up with a kid all night, the last thing I wanted to do was drag myself to the gym an hour earlier in the morning. So, when the client expressed resistance to doing any of the goals or didn’t come up with any, I would sit with them in their discomfort. I would say, “Tell me about how frustrated you are with your weight.” They would tell me how they would try so hard to do all the right things and get discouraged when it didn’t seem to make a dent on the scale. They would tell me that they were worried about dying earlier and leaving their grandchildren without a grandparent. I asked more questions and got curious. 

I realized that sometimes they were looking to get rid of the feelings or we would get so caught up in the goals we were supposed to identify that we skipped the way they felt about the main issue. I learned a lot from them and I learned a lot about myself. I started trying to help them live with the feelings and move forward. If they would feel guilty about something, I would help them identify the guilt and say, ok… how are you going to live with the guilt because it’s not going anywhere. That was a novelty to them. What?!  My therapist is telling me to LIVE WITH the feeling and not try to make goals around it or get rid of it? 

So I would say to them, “Ok, you feel guilty. Where do you hold the guilt?  Your shoulders?  Ok. What does it look like?  If it was saying something to the shoulders it’s weighing on, what would it say?  They felt silly about it at first, but eventually they would say, “It’s that guilt again, on my shoulders, saying ‘I can’t let you go.” We would then go into what the guilt and her body was saying to each other. Once the dialogue finished, usually the pressure went away.  

For clients with anxiety, I help them learn how to live with the anxiety. Usually anxiety makes a person incredibly effective at their jobs, in their families of origin, or keeping themselves or family safe. As much as anxiety can be horrible, it’s also something that is a superpower in other areas. So, for my super anxious over-achievers, I help them learn to live wih it and say, “Yup, there it is, it’s my anxiety trying to make sure I’m the BEST at everything.” They acknowledge, appreciate, and move forward with it. 

That is how you rediscover joy in life. You learn to live with, appreciate, be mad at, and move forward with all the feels. Anyone who says they can help you get rid of a feeling is lying. They can help you live with it. 

Sometimes in doing this I work myself out of a job. But I’m ok with that.