You Can’t Dam Up Half a River: Why Feeling Is a Sign of Mental Health

Carl Jung once said
“Neurosis (Mental illness) is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

To be human is to suffer. Not because something has gone wrong, but because loss, uncertainty, fear, longing, love, and change are woven into the fabric of being alive. When we try to bypass that reality—when we avoid pain—we don’t actually escape it. We just force it to show up sideways.

Often as anxiety.
Or numbness.
Or chronic tension.
Or depression.
Or a sense of being disconnected from ourselves and others.

Mental health isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the capacity to feel pain without becoming overwhelmed or shut down by it. I guarantee you what you want from therapy isn’t to not feel anxiety or grief anymore. It’s to not feel STUCK in anxiety anymore, or to be AFRAID of anxiety or grief anymore.

A Culture That Avoids Pain Also Avoids Growth

Existential psychologist Rollo May put it plainly:
“When we avoid our pain, we avoid our growth.”

This runs counter to much of what we’re taught—explicitly and implicitly—about emotional life. Many of us learned that “being okay” means staying positive, staying productive, staying regulated at all costs. Grief is rushed. Anger is pathologized. Fear is something to get rid of as quickly as possible.

But emotions don’t work that way.

Unfelt feelings don’t disappear. They go underground.

There’s a commonly referenced idea (attributed to James Hillman, though expressed by many thinkers) that every war can be traced back to unfelt grief. When pain has nowhere to go, it finds an outlet—often destructive, often disconnected from its original source.

The same is true internally.

A person who avoids grief doesn’t become “fine.” They often become numb. A person who avoids fear doesn’t become brave. They become rigid. A person who avoids anger doesn’t become peaceful. They become resentful, collapsed, or chronically anxious.

Feeling Is Not the Problem—Getting Stuck Is

One of the most painful myths about therapy is the idea that the goal is to not feel anxiety, sadness, or fear.

If my job were to help you stop feeling anxiety altogether, that would actually be cruel.

Anxiety is a natural response to uncertainty, threat, and change. Sadness is a natural response to loss. Anger is a natural response to boundary violation. These are not defects in the human system—they are signals of aliveness.

The real suffering comes not from feeling, but from getting stuck.

Stuck in anxiety that never resolves.
Stuck in grief that never moves.
Stuck in activation with no sense of completion.
Stuck in shutdown that feels like emptiness or numbness.

This is where trauma—big “T” or small “t”—often lives: not in what happened, but in what couldn’t be processed at the time.

Why You Can’t Numb Selectively

There’s a metaphor I often return to in my work:

You can’t dam up half a river.

If you numb the uncomfortable feelings, you also numb the pleasant ones. If you suppress grief, you also dull joy. If you shut down fear, you often lose spontaneity, curiosity, and connection.

Many people come to therapy saying some version of:
“I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
“I feel flat.”
“I know I should be happy, but I don’t feel much of anything.”

This isn’t a failure of gratitude or mindset. It’s often a nervous system that learned—wisely, at some point—to turn the volume down on feeling as a form of protection.

Therapy isn’t about ripping that protection away. It’s about helping the system learn that it no longer has to live behind a wall.

Somatic Experiencing: Becoming More Alive to Your Experience

At the heart of Somatic Experiencing is a simple but profound goal: helping people become more alive to their own experience.

Not flooded.
Not overwhelmed.
Not dissociated.

~Alive~

This means learning how to feel sensations, emotions, and impulses in the body in doses that can be metabolized. It means developing the capacity to move through activation and return to regulation, rather than getting stuck in either extreme.

We don’t force feelings. We don’t analyze them to death. We track them. We allow them. We let the nervous system complete what it once couldn’t.

Over time, something shifts.

Anxiety becomes information instead of an emergency.
Sadness moves instead of stagnates.
Pleasure becomes accessible again.
Presence returns.

Health Is Not “Feeling Better”—It’s Feeling More

True mental health isn’t about being calm all the time or positive all the time. It’s about having access to the full range of human experience—and trusting your capacity to move through it.

Feeling deeply is not a weakness.
Sensitivity is not pathology.
Pain is not proof that something is wrong with you.

In many cases, pain is proof that something real is being touched.

Therapy, at its best, doesn’t make you less human. It helps you reclaim your humanity—messy, vibrant, tender, and alive.

And that, paradoxically, is where relief actually begins.