‘Can we stay with that feeling?’ How therapy ruined my meetings
There are phrases one encounters in therapy which ought, for reasons of public safety, to remain inside the consulting room. “Stay with the feeling” is one of them.
My therapist says this occasionally when I have done what I consider the perfectly sensible thing, which is to experience an unpleasant emotion, identify its likely cause, construct a plausible explanation for it, make a small joke, and move briskly to the next item on the agenda. This is apparently not the same as experiencing the emotion. It is, I gather, closer to submitting its minutes.
“Can we stay with that feeling for a while?” We can, obviously. We have the next 30 minutes on the clock (and this is a rather comfortable couch). What troubles me is what has begun to happen afterwards.
Therapy, like Excel and management consulting, comes with a vocabulary which, once acquired, begins colonising areas of life for which it was never intended. A few months ago, I would have emerged from a difficult meeting thinking somebody was being an idiot. I now find myself wondering whether I am reacting to the person or to what the person represents for me, which is an enormous amount of intellectual labour to undertake when the simpler explanation remains that somebody was being an idiot.
Worse, I have started saying these things aloud. Someone in a meeting says, “I don’t think we should do this.” The old me would have asked why. The therapeutically contaminated me is now capable of saying, “Can we stay with that discomfort for a moment?” There is no defence against this.
Twenty-five years of corporate life have prepared people for almost every form of meeting aggression. They can survive “let’s take this offline”, “what is the ask?”, “who owns this?”, “let’s double-click on that”, and even the particularly sinister “I just want to understand”, which has preceded more workplace executions than the guillotine.
Nobody has prepared them for a colleague who would like them to stay with a feeling.
The other recent addition to my vocabulary is ambivalence. My therapist would like me to embrace mine.
This is magnificent advice because I have spent an entire career being paid to eliminate everybody else’s.
Organisations dislike ambivalence. They want alignment, clarity, ownership, timelines and, wherever possible, a few slides on which three arrows proceed confidently towards the upper-right corner. You cannot present to senior management a slide saying:
STRATEGIC PRIORITY FY27: We have complicated feelings about this.
Yet complicated feelings are frequently the most accurate response to a corporate decision. You can believe a strategy is necessary and dislike what it will do. You can think someone is excellent and impossible. You can want a larger role and not want what comes with it. You can be loyal to an institution while occasionally wanting to throw the institution out of a window.
This, apparently, is ambivalence. In the office, we call it lack of alignment.
I should say that Bengalis did not need to import any of this. We have been staying with feelings for generations. We have a word, abhiman, for the specific wounded sulk you direct at someone precisely because you love them and they should have known better, a feeling so architecturally complex that English has never produced a translation.
Psychoanalysis needed a century and several Viennese to arrive at what the average Bengali household achieves before breakfast, unprompted, over the question of who was served the smaller piece of fish or some such triviality.
Psychology, meanwhile, has been studying ambivalence rather longer than management consultants have been putting four boxes around it. There is an entire counselling discipline, motivational interviewing, built by two clinicians named Miller and Rollnick, on the premise that feeling two ways about change is not a defect but the normal condition of anyone contemplating it, and that the counsellor’s job is to sit inside the contradiction with the client rather than bulldoze a path through it. An entire clinical field, in other words, founded on poor stakeholder alignment.
This is an extraordinarily civilised idea and therefore almost completely incompatible with a Monday review meeting.
I tried it mentally the other day.
“Do you support the proposal?”
“I’m embracing my ambivalence.”
There are sentences which make a CEO reconsider the proposal. This one makes him reconsider you.
The larger problem is that therapy has begun exposing a fundamental incompatibility between the two principal institutions currently governing some of my days. The office would like me to arrive at conclusions. Therapy would like me to notice how I arrived there. The office rewards decisiveness. Therapy is suspicious of the speed with which I manufacture it. The office wants action points. Therapy occasionally appears quite satisfied if, after fifty minutes, I have discovered that something made me sad.
No action point or owner or closure date. Just sadness.
For someone trained by decades of journalism and management to convert confusion into language and language into action, this is deeply unsettling. I am accustomed to the proposition that if you can name a problem, you are already halfway to solving it. Therapy introduces the alarming possibility that naming it may merely be another ingenious method of avoiding feeling it.
My therapist has, on occasion, been unable to get through to me because I can apparently build an argument faster than she can dismantle one. I regard this as a professional skill. She appears to regard it as material.
Even my lateness has acquired psychological possibilities. I am often late to therapy because the last two kilometres of Delhi NCR traffic possess the temporal properties of a black hole. I leave with what seems like adequate time, advance confidently for most of the journey, and then spend the final stretch staring at the same auto-rickshaw while Google Maps revises my arrival time with the quiet sadism of a bookmaker adjusting odds.
“The last two kilometres are proving difficult,” I once messaged her.
In any other relationship, this is traffic information. In therapy, nothing is allowed to remain traffic information. One begins to worry that arriving seven minutes late is not a consequence of congestion but resistance; that resistance may indicate ambivalence; that ambivalence must be embraced; and that before long the Delhi Traffic Police will be part of my ‘staying with the feeling’.
There is, inconveniently, some basis for the suspicion. Psychodynamic writing has treated lateness, missed appointments and abrupt changes of subject as potentially meaningful ever since Freud noticed that patients obstruct the very process they are paying for because resistance does not announce itself carrying a placard saying I AM RESISTANCE. One published paper on chronic lateness in psychotherapy manages to find in it resistance to dependency and unresolved Oedipal difficulties, which strikes me as a very large quantity of meaning to assign to the Ring Road. I preferred it when the problem was the bad civic planning that went into the Barapullah flyover.
Still, something is changing (though not dramatically). I have not become one of those people who says “I hear you” while visibly not hearing you. I remain suspicious of emotional vocabulary deployed as corporate air freshener, particularly by people who discovered vulnerability at a leadership offsite. But I have noticed myself waiting a little longer before resolving things. Someone says something in a meeting that irritates me, and occasionally I do not immediately construct the prosecution. A colleague disagrees, and I can sometimes resist converting disagreement into motive. There are moments when two contradictory things appear to be true at once and, instead of forcing one of them out of the room, I allow both to sit there looking awkward.
This is either emotional growth or a catastrophic decline in managerial efficiency. I am embracing the ambivalence.
The difficulty is that once therapy teaches you to notice what you are doing, it becomes remarkably hard to stop noticing. The joke you make to escape a difficult conversation becomes interesting. The certainty with which you dismiss something becomes interesting. The meeting in which you suddenly become impatient becomes interesting. Even the seven minutes lost somewhere between a traffic signal and the therapist’s door become interesting.
For years, I thought self-awareness meant knowing why you did things. I am beginning to suspect it means becoming considerably less certain that you do, which is progress, apparently.
I have complicated feelings about it.
