Do we really need to process everything? An argument for more containment and less talking.

Hi! If you're here maybe you follow me on Instagram or are a friend, family or just curious about mental health musings . While I had enjoyed sharing my thoughts on Instagram I eventually stopped liking it . It required games , to be clever with my captions and words to get attention. I hate games . It required me to be social, almost like a high school popularity contest , I hate being social in that superficial way ha. But most of all it limited what I really wanted to communicate and share which is my longer, unfiltered and real and deeper thoughts on the world of mental health , social media mental health , on being a human right now , on being a mother . Stuff that won’t just fit in a caption. So I thought if you are like me and are over the one minute how to’s and empty promises of being sold on “how to be a better human if you just do this one thing.” If you are over being convinced that you always need to look outward to the “experts” for the answers but really want to learn how to trust yourself. Like if you find those narratives overwhelming maybe you will appreciate some of my thoughts here ?!

So I am kicking it off with discussing the topic of containment. What is containment ? In brief , psychologically, containment is the idea of being held and made to feel safe . Like a warm hug, like a box to put all your emotional stuff in and to feel like that stuff is not going to leak out. Therapists act as a container . We learn early on that the fancy techniques help but ultimately the healing is in the relationship and environment of safety we create. We hold all the emotions, anxieties and worries so ultimately , at least within that hour, you don't feel like you are free falling . And if we trace it back , the idea is that it replicates the relationship between mother and child . A mother acts as a container for all of a child's worries, fears and emotions assuring the child that they are held, safe and all will be ok. Most of the time.

I started thinking about the current climate . Are we all just leaking out all the time ? Is there any containment ? Or are we all just free falling and grasping , looking to others to hold us ? At least from my observation there is such a push to purge, process, fix . To “script things” to death. But this narrative isn't necessarily pushing us towards internal safety, it is really robbing us of our ability to trust ourselves to contain our own emotional storms. To clumsily and imperfectly navigate our own lives .

I think about this alot especially when it comes to parenting . I do not always get it right , know the right thing to say or do . But that doesn’t mean the “experts” know any better. I’ve created a space for my kids to express themselves, a containing safe hold, but only recently did it dawn on me that I also need to encourage them to build that container within, to learn that they need to get quiet every once in a while and begin to learn the emotional regulation skills that they will use for the rest of their life to navigate their own storms. Obviously they are little ! Their pre frontal cortexes which help with emotional regulation aren't fully developed until they are 25! But that doesn't mean I can't start to plant the seeds of these ideas , to get quiet and trust yourself every once in awhile . To teach that maybe we don't need to process every thought and feeling . Sometimes they are just thoughts. Part of the human psyche . And maybe we need to not give power to every fear and thought . To contain it . And I need to model that, imperfectly . Not in a perfect script way. But like a hey we are not going to process that feeling right now , it is ok to ignore it and push through . You will be ok. And that kind of talk sounds a bit alarming in the world of parenting speak . But I think it’s also a necessary block to teaching sound emotional regulation skills .

Recently I did an intensive training on a therapeutic modality called Brainspotting . It’s a mostly non verbal way to process trauma involving locating a “brain spot” that coordinates with a memory, trauma or issue on a subcortical level. What struck me the most was the idea that as a therapist you get quiet , you let the client's brain do the healing . You are a witness , attuned to their presence and a containing environment but you are not doing the heavy lifting. It kind of forces you to unlearn in many ways the responsibility for healing that you might inadvertently put on yourself as a therapist . You are a witness and a guide to the magnificent power of the human brain to heal itself . And that the therapist talking and interpreting actually slows that healing down, real studies support that! .

So what would happen , if we get quiet , in an environment with another or ourselves where we feel contained and safe and what kind of healing can happen ?

I wonder what it would be like if we did that in our lives? If we simplified and we kept some of these things inside to be solved on a deeper level, if we sat with stuff before we said it . If we didnt feel the need to constantly express and process . I know this goes against what you think a therapist might say or think. But I do think we can process too much, talk to much . And analyze ourselves in circles . What if we just trusted that our inner world could be soothed by our subconscious or if you don’t like that idea maybe our inner world is soothed by ourselves. Rather than sharing every thought and feeling what if we just on occasion, got quiet, if we paused . If we accepted the internal chaos and gave ourselves a big hug. Reminding ourselves we are human, we are messy but we are OK. What would that look like ?