In a memorable moment in graduate school, my professor said, “A good social worker needs to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.” I knew instantly that it was true. It is helpful and necessary in my job to say things, make suggestions, offer observations, provide encouragement, and form recommendations. However, it’s not enough. I believe that a really great therapist needs to be willing to do the very things he or she endorses. It’s a worthwhile endeavor that I’m trying for, and maybe sometimes achieving.

While I certainly do not want to dominate therapy with talking about myself, I do want to at least acknowledge that I’m a human too. I have things I work on in life. I’m a fellow traveler in this journey through a complicated human existence. As much as possible, I’m trying to do the same level of reflection, self-compassion, mindfulness, and effective communication that I’m advocating for in my office everyday.

It is hard at times to lead a life that is tuned-in to ourselves and to others. To “walk the walk” in our parenting, our jobs, our relationships means always looking at how well your words and your actions are matching up. It requires a lot of patient reminders to ourselves to be aware, pay attention. You really have to give yourself credit for when you can rise to this challenge, and compassion for when you realize that you can’t do it one hundred percent of the time. So, be kind to yourself while walking out there. Tell you what… I’ll do the same.

As a therapist, I find that the cause of many mental health issues is not the emotion one naturally feels about an event or situation, it is the reaction to this initial or primary emotion. Often for people experiencing panic, it is the fear or embarrassment of having the panic symptoms that becomes problematic. For depression, it may be the shame of feeling sad, which prompts even worse sadness and lowers self-esteem. The first step in therapy is most frequently addressing the reaction to our own natural, understandable feelings. In short, ineffective internal responses to feelings we have are the underlying issue in many mental health diagnoses.

As a result, I think a lot about why we are so ineffective at accepting, managing, or feeling our emotions. Why do we feel shame, anger, fear, or guilt about having feelings? For me, this is an issue that is much bigger than any one individual. It is a societal issue about how we think about emotions. Frankly, I think we as a culture have a messed up view of emotions and how they function in our lives. Instead of seeing our emotions as generally informative and natural, we have framed them as being unhelpful and shameful. People often believe having feelings is weak, irresponsible, or dramatic. We can see emotions as being extraneous to our goals and lives. You can see why they become something that people try to avoid.

It is this avoidance that creates a whole other level of problems. In avoiding feelings, which are a normal and healthy part of being human, we do things that truly wreak havoc. Suppressing feelings has become something of a national past-time, from what I can tell. Substance use, gambling, over-working, staying excessively busy, trying to achieve the impossible goal of “perfection” can all lead very quickly to numbing and disconnection. This disconnection occurs not only from our own emotional selves, but also leads to disconnecting from others.

This is a fundamental problem leading to a lot of human suffering. But I still have a lot of hope. I think that this issue is not widely understood and in helping people gain an understanding, things can change. In fact, that’s why I started this blog. For me, its a small way of trying to show other ways of thinking about ourselves and our emotions. I guess I’m a PR manager for emotions. They need a new, more realistic image. I’ll try to do my part.

What to you think? Why do emotions get such a bad reputation?