Toronto Psychotherapy

…I generally tell patients: “The best way to get rid of a feeling you don’t want is to let yourself have it”…It’s not that letting yourself have the feeling makes the feeling disappear. Rather, it changes the feeling from one you don’t want, and need to control because you’re afraid of it, into one you can comfortably accept. But how can this be? The process of inner attention through which you let the feeling happen – the psychotherapeutic process – actually changes the way you experience the feeling. In fact what you discover is that it wasn’t really a feeling you were so uncomfortable with in the first place, but rather the unsettling pressure of an emotion. Becoming more conscious of the feeling that goes with this disturbing emotion tends to diffuse the emotion – making it possible to simply have the emotion as an inner experience without being so unsettled by it, or so pressured to act on it impulsively. Quoted in Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain by Elio Frattaroli, M.D.