Why am I thinking or feeling this way?

Have you ever found yourself asking yourself the question: “Why am I thinking this?” or “Why do I feel this way?”

I hear clients asking this question all the time, sometimes to themselves, and sometimes directly or indirectly to me. I hear in these questions the desire to find some understanding of themselves and be able to tell themselves a story that makes sense about the one thing that seems like should make sense to them - their self.

It’s one thing to experience the Absurd outside of ourselves, to face something in the world that seems to defy our attempts and desire to make sense of it. It’s another thing entirely to experience the Absurd inside of ourselves, to not be able to make sense of our own thoughts and feelings.

There are several things that come to mind for me when clients are asking these “why” questions.

First, is the fact that there is no real answer to the “why” question. Why do we think the thoughts that we think, or feel the feelings we feel? To be completely honest: who knows? We’re not really doing either of them, as much as it may feel otherwise at times. Our thoughts just bubble up and babble along like a noisy stream of words, images, sensations inside our minds. Our feelings flow along like waves of shifting color, tone, intensity, in our whole being, body, mind. 

Trying to build a story to explain the origins of these appearing and shifting thoughts and feelings is an endlessly complex task, like trying to explain the origins of a thunderstorm. There are so many interacting variables and interlinking cause-and-effect relationships, that you could never trace the whole thing back far enough to land anywhere final. We can describe interacting dynamics all day to no end, but we can’t land on a final “why”.

The second thing that comes to mind for me is that it’s ok we can’t answer the why question, because it’s not what really matters anyway. Explanations and the certainty of explanations can seem like a path to security and comfort, but such a notion is misleading. Seeking an explanation is a path that never ends, as the “why” question never lands on an answer that feels satisfying enough to provide lasting comfort or security.

What is really needed for security, comfort, and peace with ourselves, is something different entirely. It’s not explanation we need, but compassionate relationship.

Try putting the “why do I feel this way” or “why am I thinking this” question aside for a moment, and start instead with a statement of fact.

“I am feeling….”, “I am thinking…”

Asking why is sometimes a subtle resistance to our feelings and thoughts, an implied message that we shouldn’t be having those feelings or thoughts. But, the fact is it’s too late, we are already having them, and we didn’t decide to have them in the first place. They’re here.

Next, is where creating a story around our thoughts and feelings can be helpful, as part of validating our own thoughts and feelings. The largest validation we can give ourselves is to know that any feeling or thought we have is perfectly normal, valid, and part of being a human.

Believe me, whatever you may be thinking or feeling, any therapist has heard or seen it in dozens of other clients as well, maybe even several times that same day. There is no thought or feeling you can have that is outside the realm of “normal”. Period.

This can be a hard sell sometimes, so some of what therapy can provide is a more specific story around your individual thoughts and feelings that can help you see how valid and normal they are. This can be incredibly helpful when you’ve received repeated messages from friends, family, strangers, media, and the culture as a whole about what normal “should” look like, and how what you are experiencing isn’t normal. (Pretty sure our economy would implode if we all suddenly realized we were normal, and didn’t need to buy anything to fix ourselves.)

It is one of my greatest joys as a therapist to help clients free themselves of the false stories about how not normal they are, false stories which tend to motivate the “why” questions and the drive for explanation. 

It is another one of my greatest joys as a therapist to help clients learn to be there for themselves, to acknowledge and validate their own thoughts and feelings even when they can’t explain those thoughts and feelings.

In this practice with ourselves is a version of what life asks of us on a larger scale: How do we practice relationship with that which we don’t understand?

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