Angry? Disappointed? Heartbroken? Think twice before you call the feelings police

Not so long ago, one of my best friends was sitting at my kitchen table, crying. He and his partner had just broken up, and I could feel his desperate sadness and the crushing weight of grief at losing someone he loved so much. I stood by the counter feeling so helpless. Confronted with his suffering, I was desperate to lift him out of his misery, to tell him that they would get back together, that things would be OK. It felt like an emotional emergency, and I wanted to call in the feelings police to lock his bad feelings up.

One of the hardest things for me to do, when I was training to be a psychotherapist, was to stop trying to make my patients feel better. It is of course a very natural response, if someone we are with is feeling bad, to want to make them feel good. We feel it in our bones – feeling bad is bad, feeling good is good, and we want only good things for those we care for. Emergency! Shut this thing down!

But what I have had to learn as a therapist, and as a patient in therapy, is that feeling bad is not actually bad for you. It is part of living a full life, and an important part at that. Sadness, grief, anger, disappointment: all these feelings and more are what we experience when we do things like grow and develop, let ourselves love freely, take important risks, and have friends and lovers and children and adventures. Many patients come for therapy expecting the therapist to take away their sadness, but meaningful therapy will, in the words of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, “increase the patient’s capacity for suffering”. Yes, it hurts, but feeling bad is a vital part of a good life.

But it is one thing to know this intellectually, and quite another to live it emotionally. It is so ingrained in us in the west that “bad” feelings are harmful that we can end up feeling anxious and stressed about feeling bad – and chronic stress really is bad for us.

This was explored in a fascinating study called Feeling Bad Is Not Always Unhealthy by Shinobu Kitayama, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He surveyed a group of American and Japanese participants and found that in the Americans there was an association between the experience of so-called negative emotions such as sadness and increased inflammation – the body’s first line of defence to fight bacterial infection after an injury and a biological marker of feeling threatened. But this was not the case among the Japanese: there was no evidence they felt under threat when they felt sad. He understood this to be because in the US feeling bad is more stressful because it is a “source of threat to self-image”, whereas in Japanese culture, it is understood to be “natural and integral to life”.

The thing about trying to make someone feel better is that what you may unconsciously be communicating to them is: I don’t want to know about your sadness, your depression, your anxiety, your anger. I cannot bear it: hide it from me, please, and deal with it on your own.

Feeling that your sadness is not acceptable to those around you, that the feelings police have been called and you have to hide your true emotions from those you love – that is very anxiety-provoking and stressful. What is intended as a kindness, trying to lift someone’s mood and cheer them up, can be experienced as a kind of cruelty, as emotional neglect.

So what is the alternative? I think there is an important difference between offering someone comfort and consolation, and trying to cheer them up. It’s the gulf between meeting them where they are and listening to them, and trying to pretend you are all somewhere else.

When my friend was in distress, I recognised my desire to call the feelings police, and I told myself: Moya, just hug him and show him he isn’t alone. Eventually he and his partner did find their way back together, and I think an important first step was when he allowed himself to experience that agony in all its truth. Feeling that bad was a consequence of the depth of their love, and I think it helped him to recognise that there might yet be different ways to repair their relationship rather than let it break irretrievably.

The hardest thing, for me, when I’m in a low place, is to resist calling the police on myself. But I know that that way lies emotional impoverishment and a barren, dried-up life. If we can instead open our minds and our hearts to the full gamut of human feelings, then we can begin to put them into words and listen to what they tell us about our relationships and ourselves.

• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood