Unlikely Story

by Ali Rosen

The one upside of being a therapist is that everyone around you always assumes you have it all figured out. Except, of course, your own therapist.

For most adults, when you don’t talk about your feelings a lot, the vocabulary for it atrophies. When we’re kids, we’re taught to identify our emotions. We use color charts or characters or affirmations to help us go from useless blobs to fully formed people. We learn how to say “I feel blank when you blank. I want blank.” We work on expressing ourselves without throwing tantrums. But then as adults we get better at camouflage. We learn how to redirect so we don’t have to always feel so deeply. We comport ourselves so we can live in a world of adult feelings and expectations.

It’s one thing to decide you’re in a rut and need to do something about it. It’s another thing to know what actually to do.

The permission to chip away at “woulds” and “shoulds” has made space for “could.”