Why Do I Feel This Way After Therapy (And What Should I Do)?

It’s no secret that therapy sessions can leave you feeling drained of energy and feeling exhausted. Some sessions see us expanding, exposing, examining and processing complex things about ourselves that may have been a lifetime in the making. In other sessions, there is little movement; or you might leave feeling reenergised and ready to take on the world. Through therapy we may relive, re-examine or re-contextualise important and fundamental aspects of our life, or our perceptions of ourselves and the world. The amount of mental and emotional energy that goes into deconstructing and challenging our memories, emotions and automatic responses can be vast. 

Yalom believes that real change isn’t made solely through rational means, it requires an emotional experience to facilitate that movement. Until that emotional experience happens, we might find our rational and emotional selves in tension. Therapy explores this source of tension, encouraging us to examine ourselves from an emotional perspective and develop a real understanding of our emotions (not just a rationalisation of them). When we honestly engage with our emotions in their messy and un-rationalised nature, we begin to fulfil Yalom’s requirements of change through emotional experience. The tension between emotion and rational begins to dissipate. Once released, we can feel exhausted not only from the effort required to engage in therapy, but also through a loss of this tension between our rational and emotional sides. Sometimes for change to become long lasting and deep rooted, we may have to continually revisit this aspects of ourselves as they are brought to light under different scenarios. 

‘Self-care’ is a term that’s easy to grow a deep scepticism of, mostly due to pop psychology and toxic positivity; a post for another day. Self-care isn’t just chocolate ice cream, bubble baths and your favourite movie (although it can be these things). Sometimes I find it useful to conceptualise self-care as a way in which you can address the ‘deficit’ in your current state. 

Advice I got from gym-goers and sports-people alike was ‘listen to your body, it will tell you what it needs’. The mind, psyche, spirit, soul, however you best conceptualise that driving force of consciousness, can do much the same but it can get carried away or not recognise the real thing it needs (see, bad habits, cyclical patterns, obsession, addiction, consumption, and a whole host of other things). In my mind, self-care is an active process of listening to your inner world and addressing it through action that authentically speaks to that world. It’s a moment by moment, session by session, discussion.

So this form of self-care is a bit like a dialogue. You honestly ask yourself what you need, and you negotiate with the answers that come back. When you’re not used to this process you might get answers like ‘I need to lose weight’ or ‘I need to reach the next level of my hobby’, and these are things to aspire to, but they can’t service the thing we’re getting to; namely ‘addressing the deficit in your current state’. 

‘I need to lose weight’ could be ‘I need to feel movement’ or ‘I want to feel energised/tired/satisfied’. Equally, acknowledging that you just need some company. Perhaps some quiet time with a book to refocus your mind, or spending time on a hobby with the purpose of being present with it rather than looking to the future and improving at that specific moment.

Sometimes this self-care builds on some aspects of the things you might be working on in therapy, other times it will be completely unrelated. It can also be useful to keep a mental (or physical, if you can be forgetful) list of the things you have felt and how you’ve tried to engage with them, whether they worked or not. Then your dialogue with your inner-self becomes more understandable over time. ‘I know I feel like I need to move and exhaust myself, but when I went to lift weights, I overtrained and made myself feel sick. This time, I’m going to set aside some time to go walking, so I can reach what I need to without overshooting my physical capacity.’  It is, as in all things, a balancing act, but it’s a balancing act that you can learn through, grow to know yourself better through, and ultimately develop an understanding of yourself through.

Garrick Wareham