Therapy and Building Capacity

Therapy has oftentimes been positioned as a comfort item in today’s culture. A place people go for emotional support and validation. And, while these elements are absolutely of importance in the therapeutic relationship: what if there’s more? The implicit promise that if you do enough healing, processing, and regulating you’ll eventually “arrive” to a plane of existence where hard emotions or difficult events no longer disrupt or challenge your life. 

But, what if this misses much of the human experience and directs you away from important emotional experiences that enrich and deepen your life? What if the goal is not elimination but rather the deepening of your ability to be with discomfort in a way that doesn’t disrupt your life? 

To be alive is to experience grief, undergo anxious moments, feel disappointment and hurt, recognize periods of loneliness, navigate shame, longing, anger, vulnerability and so much more. While oftentimes difficult, these are integral parts of the human experience that both point toward our values and deepen our connection to and understanding of our selves. 

Level Setting

Let’s be intentional and refocus therapy away from sterilizing you from your emotional pain and toward therapy being a gradual process of increasing your capacity to encounter life honestly and authentically, in a way that doesn’t destroy your own experience of your life. 

Here, we aren’t asking “how do we eliminate discomfort? How do we get rid of this feeling I am having?” and instead ask, “how do we elevate your ability to accept and tolerate all of your emotions, even the hard ones? How do we grow your capacity to persist?”

Viewing Therapy as Emotional Erasure

When therapy becomes synonymous with symptom elimination alone, you often begin relating to yourself as a problem to solve rather than as a person to understand. This can show up in small but insidious ways. Sadness becomes evidence of personal or moral failure, anxiety becomes intolerable, ambivalence is pathologized, grief turns into a stigma. Subliminally, this teaches emotional struggles as proof that therapy is not working or progress is not being made. 

This creates an impossible standard of living where emotional pain or discomfort itself becomes the enemy. Ironically, the more aggressively you attempt to avoid certain internal experiences, the more organized your life becomes around fear of those experiences. Avoidance begins quietly restructuring and narrowing a person’s world. It narrows relationships, prevents risk-taking, decreases vulnerability, diminishes authentic engagement: life becomes smaller. 

Existential therapy often recognizes that the problem is not always the emotion itself, but the increasingly constricted life built around trying not to feel it.

Therapy as Capacity Building

Therapy can absolutely help reduce symptoms. Relief matters. Stability matters. Safety matters. But, meaningful therapy frequently involves something deeper than simply “feeling better.”

It involves developing your human capacity to remain present during emotional discomfort. It includes tolerance, endurance, and acceptance of the inevitable uncertainties in life. It means navigating the complexities of grief without collapsing into hopelessness or despair. 

To engage with your own life is to be thrown back onto yourself and to confront your own limitations and responsibilities with honesty and clarity. It means staying connected to yourself during distress, and acting out of your values instead of your emotional impulses. It is hard work and is neither emotional suppression nor the glorification of suffering. 

A person who has developed this capacity is not someone who never feels anxious, hurt, or overwhelmed. Rather, they become someone increasingly able to experience those realities without abandoning themselves in the process.

Meaning Over Comfort

Existentially-oriented therapy ultimately concerns itself with the question of how you wish to relate to your experience of existence. This then recognizes the distinction between comfort and meaning. A meaningful life may involve loving in spite of the risk, choosing despite inherent uncertainty and conflicting values, and navigating what it means to be a human with the ability to choose. choosing responsibility despite uncertainty

Therapy cannot, and should not aim to, remove the fundamental vulnerability of being human. Instead, what it can do is help you become more capable of carrying that vulnerability safely and with intentionality. In this sense, therapy is not about becoming emotionally untouchable and is instead about becoming increasingly able to participate in your own life more fully, even when it hurts. p

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