People most often fall into two camps when it comes to going to therapy. For those who are a bit more reticent, there are reasons upon reasons why they might shy away. For some, therapy is not the right venue to work on their problems. For others, it’s weird, awkward and vulnerable to talk to a stranger and handling things alone can be preferable. And for others, the thought of talking about their anxieties and stressors feels like it might bring their problem to the forefront of their minds, and who would really want to do that?
So here’s a bit of a metaphor from the animal kingdom. Enter the cow and the buffalo and how they face a miserable storm. When a storm approaches, cows tend to run away from it. However, because the storm is faster than the cow, they end up staying in the storm for a longer time as they are essentially running alongside it. In a different strategy, buffaloes instinctively run directly into the storm. By doing so, they encounter the storm sooner but pass through it more quickly. This represents facing challenges head-on, which can minimize the time spent in discomfort and allow for quicker resolution.
Therapy is a strategy that reminds us of the buffalo. By directly facing our emotions and moving through them in therapy, especially the painful ones, it allows us to reach a place of relief and growth more quickly than if we tried to avoid them. Many of us have learned, consciously or unconsciously to be like the cow, to avoid difficult feelings, pushing them away in the hopes they'll fade over time. This approach of trying to outrun the storm often means we end up spending even more time with those difficult emotions.
When we avoid our feelings, they often linger in our minds, creeping back in at unexpected times. Avoiding them might feel safer in the short term, but over time the unexamined mind may lead us to making choices that are not aligned with what we want from life, sticking in relationships that are not satisfying and choosing coping strategies that eventually stop working or have unwanted side effects.
Think of a clearcut example of using alcohol to cope with social anxiety at work functions. While having a drink may take the edge off a racing heart and assist in speaking without becoming tongue-tied, you may find yourself later down the road with health issues or over-doing it and causing more problems with your colleagues. Dealing with the problem may be uncomfortable at first, but long-term self-sufficiency is incredibly rewarding.
Another relevant example is a traumatic life circumstance. There are a wide variety of tragic things that can happen to people, and the effects once the original damage is done can leave a mark in many ways. From avoiding people who remind them of the incident to creating beliefs about themselves or the world, someone who has experienced something traumatic is undoubtedly changed. It may be necessary to protect yourself at first - let’s say you find yourself being made fun of in school. One response might be avoiding any group of people. That may be necessary to protect yourself, but over time, you feel lonely and start missing out on social events that might ordinarily excite you. Talking about the incident in therapy might conjure some of the original feelings of the incident in session, but with a trained therapist, you will only talk about events and emotions in a way that will expose you to the level of emotional discomfort that does not make you feel flooded. That might look like first speaking about how an event affected you without getting into details just yet.
So we return to the cow and the buffalo. Outrunning our emotions is a losing game. When we can turn towards what has affected us, whether it be a quiet anxiety or large traumatic reaction, instead of expending energy towards the fight of pushing things down, we can endure a bristly initial hard turn into the wind and with the right support by our side, get through the storm and regain solid footing.
TL;DR, the process of therapy reminds us that going through our emotions, rather than running from them, leads to a faster, more enduring peace—just as moving directly through a storm is the quickest path to calm on the other side.
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