School life. Why don’t they teach us how to feel?

We might just about remember how to draw a circle with a compass and how to make a battery with a potato, thought by many as not massively useful in adult life. What we didn’t seem to learn much about at school was how to navigate some of life’s most difficult bits, such as coping with anxiety, understanding ourselves, learning how to deal with grief, or how to think about what we might want in a relationship. All very useful stuff that doesn’t seem to get any airtime in the many years we spend in education.

Often people come to therapy with problems in their relationships, unable to fathom how they feel or what they need…just something doesn’t feel good or right or like it was in the early days. Psychotherapy can help to explore some of the difficult things we sometimes don’t even have the language for; how to feel and how to express our emotions, to find ways to work out who we truly are and what makes us feel fulfilled and happy. And, as noted by Headspace, learning that by ceasing the search for always being happy, we can shift our perspective and live in comfort with all the emotions we experience in life. And the more we can make these shifts, the happier we will ultimately feel in our lives