Notes On…Getting Better at Feeling
We live in a culture obsessed with feeling better. I see it all the time. From wellness trends to self-help slogans, from pharmaceutical ads to therapy intakes. The message is always the same: relieve the pain, calm the nerves, make it go away.
But what if healing isn’t about feeling better? What if it’s about getting better at feeling?
To feel better is often a request for escape. That’s completely valid, especially when we’re hurting. We want the pain to stop, the anxiety to dissolve, the grief to pass. But getting better at feeling asks something different. It’s not about escape; it’s about engagement.
Getting better at feeling means developing a new relationship with your emotional life. One rooted in curiosity rather than control. It means no longer judging sadness as weakness, anger as shameful, or fear as something to hide. It means sitting with a feeling long enough to understand what it’s trying to say, to feel it all the way through. It means building emotional capacity to hold, to name, to stay.
This is the work of therapy, though few would describe it that way at first. A client may come in saying, “I just want to feel better,” and of course, we honor that. But over time, if the work deepens, the goal begins to shift. It’s not that the pain disappears; it’s that the person becomes more capable of meeting it. That’s real healing. Not a life without sadness, but a life where sadness no longer defines you. Not a life without fear, but one where fear becomes a companion rather than a captor.
Getting better at feeling lies at the heart of every evidence-based modality. In DBT, it’s distress tolerance. In ACT, it’s emotional acceptance. In psychodynamic therapy, it’s affective attunement and meaning-making. In somatic work, it’s staying with sensation and building safety in the body. These are not strategies for avoidance. They are invitations to presence.
To feel better is to seek relief. To get better at feeling is to seek growth.
We need both. But when relief becomes the only goal, we risk bypassing the wisdom our emotions carry. Anxiety may hold insight. Anger can offer protection. Grief can reveal what mattered most. Even despair, when met with presence, can bring clarity.
In a world that rewards speed and surface, emotional attunement is a radical act. It takes time. It takes practice. And yes, it can be uncomfortable. But something shifts. Emotions begin to move through rather than take over. We stop fearing our feelings. We start listening to them, not just to what hurts, but to what longs to be understood.
Because the goal of healing isn’t to float above our lives in detached calm. The goal is to be alive. Present. Willing to sit at the full table of human experience without turning away. From that place, from the courage to feel fully, we begin to live not just with less pain, but with more meaning.
That’s the kind of better worth aiming for.
