A friend who had recently lost her father was talking to me about her experience with two mental health practitioners; one, a psychiatrist, and the other, a counselor. At her last appointment my friend asked the psychiatrist what she needed to do in respect to the grief she was experiencing in lieu of a father/daughter relationship marked by a history of abuse and neglect. The psychiatrist responded directly and with little to know registration, by saying, “It’s time to grow up, be an adult, and stop being a child.” 

According to my friend this was the best advice she had yet to receive. Upon hearing it she resolved to get off her medication, reassess her life, and begin setting up routines around healthy habits and helpful daily activities, creating a healthy disposition that has lasted up to the present time. 

My friend also went to her counselor and told her what the psychiatrist had told her. The counselor was horrified. My friend explained however that the advice was the best she had yet to receive, and how it was the catalyst for encouraging her to own her ability to respond, be responsible for her life, and take action to improve her well being.

Being a counselor myself, I understand why the therapist was outraged by the psychiatrist’s remark. The counselor, being aware of the trauma that lies beneath my friend’s suffering, was rightly concerned how such trauma had unconsciously shaped my friend’s life over the years. The counselor was being conscientious of how such trauma could be affecting her in ways that might be preventing her from accessing her full potential in the way of relationships, expression, motivation, etc. and how allowing herself to be with those emotions as opposed to repressing them would be essential for overall health and well being. Concerns that are entirely justified. 

But I also know why my friend felt revived by the psychiatrists “tough love” that more or less said, “Suck it up, move on, and grow up.” My friend appreciated the honesty, the directness, and the emphasis that made her realize that she had the ability to make changes in her life in conjunction with a well-rounded course of action, as opposed to her counselors seeming emphasis on continuing to grieve indefinitely.

In this article I will use this story, along with the perspectives of the counselor and psychiatrist, to highlight the difficulties associated with having to say difficult things, not just as a counselor but as friends and family members as well. In particular, conversations in regard to how one should best approach processing difficult experiences while also cultivating the ability to move forward in one’s life.

In regard to the latter, I will emphasize an orientation that allows for moments of pause, grief, and reflection, as well as one that emphasizes the ability to move forward in one’s life. This approach is a synthesis between providing the space, time, and understanding that allows and encourages the reality of difficult experiences to be acknowledged and processed while simultaneously being grounded in an emphasis that highlights the ability of human beings to take action and move forward through the integration of one’s experiences. 

Most everyone loves having that person they can go to for real advice, where the person will be direct, cut through the proverbial b***s***, and “tell it like it is.” This is one way by which we understand the concept of “tough love,” loving a person enough to tell them directly, something that they may not want to admit or hear but is nonetheless apparent. 

We have such friends or people in our lives because we trust they will get to the point; they have a strong sense for who we are and what works for us, and thus there is confidence in hearing what they have to say, even if there is a degree of irreverence or hard honesty to it; we are less likely to be offended because we trust them, and that trust was built on the mutual foundations of trust, respect, and acceptance. 

Often it is hard to duplicate such a situation in counseling or therapy. Many people build up such a relationship over time through a sustained and regular engagement with a particular counselor over a number of years, but in truth, the counselor/client relationship is largley an artificial one. Some counselors of course will be more direct and to the point than others, regardless of the situation, the person, or how long they have been seeing the client for. 

Either way, most people are looking for a therapeutic relationship where the counselor will speak directly, honestly, and even intensely. I know a number of people who have dropped counselors particularly because the counselor simply sat back, listened, and validated everything they were saying, never confronting or asking hard questions. “I want to be challenged,” a number of friends and colleagues involved in therapy have said to me. And yet to my understanding, many counselors lack the ability to challenge their clients.

The reason for this is mainly twofold: one the one hand, many counselors lack the ability to challenge their clients because of their own fears and insecurities. On another, much of the therapeutic climate is one that emphasizes validating the client’s interpretation of themselves and their experiences, almost to an excessive degree. On important aspects this is indeed essential and necessary, but it becomes absurd when such an attitude is taken to the extreme and discounts the reality that many, if not most people, lack reasonable insight into who they are. 

Culturally, we have also resorted to an ideology of “normalcy” which says that most everything a client believes is valid, especially when a remark is met with a rebuttal by a client who feels uncomfortable and offended in regard to what the therapist said to them concerning their behavior or character. There is an obvious degree to which such an attitude is valid, especially since it has been taken up in response to past trends within standard psychoanalytic practices of the last century which placed all say concerning the truth about the client’s behavior in the hands of the analyst. 

Thankfully, the field has gotten around to a place where more of what a client says is taken at its word, albeit sometimes to a new extreme. In reality, any therapy that is truly honest will eventually involve some kind of confrontation. Surviving the confrontation, it has been said, is ultimately what determines success in the counseling/client relationship.

But this is too far afield from the current article. Suffice it to say that legitimate therapy involves the difficult task of creating a container where truth can be both spoken and received. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Apart from the difficulty of building a close relationship seemingly from scratch, the truth is that most people do not want to hear the truth. We assume we can handle it, and even want it without first asking ourselves, “Will I be able to accept the truth?” If this wasn’t the case, then therapy as a practice would be irrelevant. The whole field of therapy is in fact predicated on the reality that individuals lack objective insight into themselves.

Everyone speaks with a determination and desire to hear the truth, but we all have been in that situation where severe ruptures occurred, some permanent, after the truth, the truth that the person we were speaking to was so adamant to hear, was spoken; people do not unhear or unknow things, and thus, something said in an instant, despite the intentions, can lead to long standing or permanent ruptures. Not to mention the simple fact that our interpretations can often be wrong. 

The other “shadow side” to speaking directly, involves an underlying “toughness” that is encouraged at the expense of not allowing other important aspects of life to flourish, and to be experienced and expressed. This is why the therapist was horrified by what the psychiatrist had told my friend. The therapist was horrified because advice given by the psychiatrist seemed to encourage a moving forward that was built on the denial of one’s feelings. 

My friend had experienced a traumatic relationship with her father, one that was directly related to the strong grief and anger that she had been experiencing, and to simply move on and “grow up” would mean the continued repression of emotions that would nonetheless find a way to come out and interfere with my friend’s ability to have a more wholesome and meaningful life. 

Current research about trauma, especially trauma originating in childhood, along with the gradual breakdown of past assumptions and cultural expectations regarding affect control and emotional expression, has led to a greater awareness of the dangers of emotional repression and how it negatively affects a person’s ability to maximize their vitality, self control, and cognitive abilities. As a result, much greater emphasis is being placed on past trauma, how it is processed, and the lasting effects of it.  

Now there is a much greater emphasis placed on allowing people to experience their emotions, talk about their pasts, and mourn their losses. And yet this new encouragement has been met with resistance. One can hear it the complaints that today’s culture are whinny babies who want everything given to them for free; where everyone receives a trophy so that no one’s emotions are hurt; and where safe spaces exist to avoid a person’s views on life from being challenged and their sense of identity being potentially broken down. Though I do not know the overall beliefs of the psychiatrist we can nonetheless place his admonishment to “grow up” as being indicative of a person who feels too much coddling is occurring and is getting in the way of a person’s ability to move on and engage with their sense of agency in directing how they want their life to be. 

Here there is a relevant point to be made with regard to such a concern. Indeed there is something to be said about a set of practices that overemphasize the effects of how past experiences shape one’s life in permanent ways just as there is something to be said about a set of practices that undervalues emotional expression and the effects of trauma on a person’s development. In regards to the former, there is a valid concern that an overindulgence in one’s grief and one’s past prevents a person from realizing that, despite the negative experiences of one’s life, there nonetheless exists a sense of agency that involves being able to “let go” of what occurs, learn from it, and move on in ways that successfully integrate the experience.

In many ways the pendulum of society concerning how to function and how adapt to life has swung radically from one direction to another. What used to be an emphasis on emotional repression through rugged individualism, puling one’s self up by the bootstraps, and “grabbing the bull by the horns,” has shifted to where one’s sense of self and agency being dependent on other people and society. For so long there was such a denial of feeling and the expression of emotions that now there is an overindulgence in them, one that occurs at the expense of the having the ability to take action to improve one’s life.

We resonate with “tough love” because it can spur us to take action and resist the urge to wallow in our suffering indefinitely. The problem that arises, as stated earlier, is that a drive to take action will not be successful if done through a forced repression of emotions and a denial of the reality of what happened. Thus, both the therapist and the psychiatrist expressed valid points of view that were built on valid considerations. 

Thus, a comprehensive view conducive to encouraging a person to move forward in life while simultaneously expressing the necessary affect related to difficult experiences, must be one that allows for normal bodily reactions of anger, grief, sadness, and doubt to be acknowledged and expressed. It must further emphasize the power to make decisions that result from having integrated the affect into one’s character so as to go on living, and not to become the victim of a fatalistic sense of determinism and pointless self-indulgence. 

There is undoubtedly a time for stillness, reflection, mourning, and grief, but these must be tempered by a willingness to take actions in the present moment, and to let go and move forward with decisions that are conducive to a healthy disposition. As friends, partners, and therapists, we have to encourage both in our dealings with those we care about and those whom we are trying to help. 

There will never be a formula for knowing when exactly something difficult needs to be said, perhaps even something confrontational, something we know needs to be said but won’t necessarily be received well. That is why there is an art to being a therapist or just a good friend, partner, or overall conversationalist. It requires patience, attentiveness, confidence and the ability to deal in confrontation. But we would be doing a disservice if we allowed those we care about to wallow in behavior and tendencies that are unrealistic and paralyzing, just as much as we would be doing a disservice by encouraging those we care about to move on and press forward without having been given the space and encouragement needed to express their thoughts, sensations, and emotions.