Why do we avoid feeling, and how can we recover the wish to heal

🧠 Understanding Emotional Triggers to Help Patients Feel What They Avoid

🎯 Why Is It So Challenging to Help Patients Feel?

Helping patients confront what they’ve been avoiding is one of the most profound challenges in therapy. Emotions arise around what deeply matters to the patient, yet therapists often struggle to identify the emotional trigger, as it can seem “irrational.”

Moreover, therapists and patients alike can get confused around the invitation to feel.

👥 Example: A Pleasing Pattern in Search of Connection

Take a patient who craves closeness but has learned to please others. Their attachment pattern is rooted in avoiding emotions to protect relationships.

❓How can we help someone feel if their very instinct is to hide what they feel?

The answer: The patient deeply believes they must avoid or suppress their emotions to maintain relationships.

🔍 Understanding the Pattern – and Who It Was Meant For

To begin working with this, the therapist must:

1. See that the patient’s core drive is always to maintain connection.

2. Ask: With whom in their past did this pattern make sense? Then connect it to how it plays out today, even with the therapist.

⚡ Trigger = What Matters Most

Example: A patient who values privacy. Whenever their privacy is even slightly violated, intense emotions surface – anger, anxiety, confusion, desire for closeness.

That emotional reaction is not random – it’s rooted in what the patient most values.

🪞 Seeing the Trigger = Seeing One’s Life

When the therapist helps the patient see what triggers their emotions around what they deeply care about, the patient can suddenly realize:

🔎 “I’ve been living my life in contradiction to what matters most to me.”

For example, a patient who values privacy may live as if someone is always about to invade it – always avoiding, hiding, suppressing. That is the exact opposite of the life they long for.

📌 When this contradiction becomes visible, the patient develops a deep motivation to change, to feel, and to live differently.

💡 Not Persuasion – But Discovery

Instead of persuading the patient to feel or move forward, the therapist should:

• Help them see the logic behind their emotional system.

  

• Reveal how the trigger touches their most precious values

This allows the patient to say:

“I wasn’t avoiding emotion randomly – I was trying to protect what matters most to me.”

And at that moment, emotion no longer feels threatening.

📘 Another Example: The Need to Choose

A patient values independence, yet struggles to make decisions in relationships. When someone offers help, they freeze.

Convincing won’t help. But helping them see:

💬 “You feel mixed emotions – a desire to decide with them, but also fear that your autonomy is threatened.”

Then they realize:

"I'm not indecisive – I'm anxious when I feel I might lose my freedom."

That awareness makes the emotional response logical and empowering.

🌱 Summary: The Trigger as the Key to Healing

• Emotional triggers are the doorway to what matters most.

• Seeing them allows the patient to recognize the emotional contradiction in their life.

• That insight creates a strong motivation to feel and to change.

🧭 This is the heart of our practice groups –Helping patients reconnect with their profound wish for health through clarity, emotional logic, and understanding the unconscious.