By Lissa Carter, LCMHC
If you think you are alone in this feeling, let me relieve you of that misconception. The vast majority of my clients—clients who represent a pretty wide span of financial, generational, and professional realities—have said these exact words to me at one time or another. Usually through tears. (Sometimes we forget this, but feelings literally hurt. The clue is in the name).
When my clients share their sense of overwhelm with me, what I say next might seem counterintuitive:
Would you like to hear a story?
I promise this is not me trying to sidestep the intensity of my clients’ feelings. Allow me to explain. We have a tendency, when we are in pain, to contract. We attempt to make ourselves smaller, to have less surface area to contact a world so full of trouble.
But imagine if you stirred a tablespoon of salt into a small glass of water. Not only would that water become impossible to drink, but if emptied onto the ground, it would burn any plants that happened to be growing.
If you took that same glass of salty water and emptied it into a freshwater tub, the salinity would be greatly diluted.
And if you emptied that bathtub into a lake, the salt would become barely detectable.
Contracting around painful feelings might seem to make sense, but it traps the intensity inside a rigid, small container. If, instead, we could amplify those feelings somehow; dilute them enough that we could bear them and interact with them rather than being fused and overcome by them…we might be able to find a way forward.
And that, precisely, is what stories are for.
In his fascinating work Traumzeit, Hans Peter Duerr writes: “Snow White’s stepmother could only bear to see her second face when it was not her own, but that of the mirror.”
Does that strike a faint chord in you, somewhere? We all have those second faces, shadowy faces, that we’d prefer to ignore. But if we can look them in the eye—if we can find a “mirror” for those parts of ourselves in a story or in an archetype—we can choose to consciously relate to them rather than allowing them to subconsciously control us.
Imagine that you are feeling unbearable pain around parenting. Perhaps you are suffering because you acted in a way that violates your own values, or perhaps you have come under the laser eye of the collective for a real or imagined transgression (society loves to shame parents). Imagine sitting back and listening to the story of Snow White, allowing the Wicked Stepmother archetype to carry all of that tight, overwhelming, immense feeling.
Imagine that you could talk to her—-to that demonized stepmother. Imagine that you could dialogue with her, and hear her side of the story; imagine that you could allow her to absorb some of the fire of your own feelings. Perhaps you could emerge from that conversation having let go of whatever poisoned apple you’d been holding—-having given it back to her, the archetype, to hold.
Through amplification, counterintuitively, comes relief.
Here’s another way to think about it: imagine that all of us are adrift in tiny boats in a boundless sea.
Every once in a while, our boats strike an immense boulder. Perhaps it is the boulder of grief. Or the boulder of rage. Or the boulder of injustice.
Whatever it is, it belongs to the ocean—not to us. The Grief or The Rage or The Injustice just are—boulders in the ocean of human experience. Everyone’s boat touches them sooner or later; but they are far too vast for one human life to encompass or fathom. All we can do is allow ourselves to set foot on these shores and then, when the time comes, to get back in our boats. We don’t carry the boulders with us. They are not ours.
Allow me to offer an example that is adapted from a client’s story, a client who has given me permission to share. (Some details have been changed to protect privacy).
The Depression is Taking me Over
My client had been suffering from depression for over a decade. He had found some relief, recently, through his meditation routine, time spent in the outdoors, and the ACT interventions we practiced in session. But today, when he walked through the door, I could tell things had stepped up a notch. There was no light in his eyes. Even his speech had slowed down.
“It was really, really bad this week”. He forced the words out through tight lips. “I wasn’t even sure I could get out of bed to drag myself here.”
I put a cup of tea into his hands and dimmed the lights slightly. I asked him if he would be open to hearing a story, and watched as his muscles visibly relaxed. (Later he told me it was because he felt he was off the hook to explain, justify, or fix the way he was feeling).
He nodded, and I started to tell the story of Catskin. There are many versions of this story, and in this one, the heroine is cast out from her kingdom and is sent out into the wilderness wearing a coat sewn of the pelts of every animal who dwelt in the bounds of that kingdom. She finds a hollow tree and crawls inside to sleep for seven days and seven nights.
When I arrived at that moment in the story, I saw that tears were beginning to fall from my client’s closed eyes. I asked him what was happening, and he shared this:
“I would love to sleep in a tree for seven days.”
(Can you relate? …Me too.)
We spent some time with that feeling—-the feeling of being wrapped in the “skin” of every mode of being that could possibly exist. Of being allowed to wear every possible way of being right there on the surface. Of being so integrated into the natural world as to be almost invisible. Of being allowed to sleep for as long as the animal body required. The tears kept flowing. When his eyes opened, I asked my client if he’d be willing to draw what was happening in his heart and mind.
The image that emerged was the image of a hollow tree with a crescent moon rising above it. The whole scene was wrapped in velvety purples and blues. “Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m in there”, he said, pointing at the tree. “I’m resting.”
His face, now, was more relaxed. He had found Catskin to rest his boat on. Now there was a new possibility, the possibility that at some point, his boat would be able to leave these shores.
We looked at his drawing together. His posture was more alert, his eyes brighter. Now that we had a piece of paper to represent the depression, his body didn't have to hold it. I noticed that the crescent moon he’d drawn was lit on the right side: a waxing moon. I asked him if that felt true, that the energy was beginning to return.
“Yes,” he said. “I know I’m through the worst of it.”
“When you hit new moon again,” I said, “—because we always do—what will be different?”
He looked at his drawing for another moment and I saw the first smile I’d seen since he walked in the door.
“I won’t force myself to act like full moon,” he said. “I’ll find some kind of tree to sleep in, for just a little while.”
So how do I work through my own intense feelings?
First, check in with yourself: what are you feeling, exactly? See if you can give it as specific a name as possible. Maybe when you let yourself look directly in the mirror of that overwhelm, you recognize anxiety, dread, and grief. Or maybe it’s rage and sorrow. Or exhaustion and disappointment.
Once you have named your feelings, find a character or archetype that represents those feelings for you. You can draw from mythology and fairy tales, of course, and we each have individual mythologies, too, that consist of characters from favorite books, shows, and our personal histories. It’s important that this character be larger-than-life— Thanos, for example, or Rumpelstiltskin, are better choices than your difficult second cousin.
When you’ve found your character, take some time away from other people—maybe on a walk, or in a room with something to write on. Let that character embody the full power of everything you are feeling. Imagine yourself watching them as this emotion courses through them. What might they say? What might they do? Now find a way to represent this safely (when we are working with amplification and imagination, it’s important that our work stay imaginal and not cross into decisions or actions that could impact your ordinary-reality life). You might curate a playlist that evokes this character and dance it out. You might write a dialogue between yourself and this character. You might draw the most evocative aspects of this character’s story, as my client did.
The important thing is that you let this archetype hold some of your suffering for you. Now that the suffering is outside of you, it’s possible to see it and relate to it without being overwhelmed by it. And that makes it possible to work through it, a little at a time.
Here’s to finding trees to sleep in, and to the bravery of stirring our salt into larger and larger stories.
Thank you to my client for sharing his story.
