What to do when your feeling feel bigger than you.

When your feelings feel bigger than you, what do you do? There’s not enough room in you for all of your anger, there’s too many tears for you to ever cry them all, the heaviness pins you to the floor, life is overwhelming and confusing, the bigness of what you’re experiencing is too much and it’d be so nice to have somewhere else to put it.

That’s one of the things that art therapy can help with.

Usually, when we’re experiencing things, our body is the container for our experience. It’s where we live - where we feel what we feel, how we experience the world. It’s all happening inside of us.

One of the magic things about art therapy is that it gives us another container to put things in so we don’t have to carry them all inside ourselves. A container that’s outside of us.

A piece of paper becomes that container. We can draw on it, scribble all over it, scrunch it up, set it on fire if we really want to - we can do whatever we like to the page as we put some of what we’re feeling inside onto the paper.

And there they are - our feelings, our experience, outside of us, in front of us, on the page. We can look at our emotions as well as feeling them, and importantly, we can DO things to the page to change what’s on it. We can fold it, turn it over so we can’t see it, zoom right in and look at a tiny bit at a time, zoom right out and put the paper really far away, tear holes in it to see what’s underneath…

It’s really interesting what starts to happen when we explore some of what we’re holding inside in this way. The added perspective of an external container and experiencing it changing as we do things to it is a powerful way to start to change our internal experience of what we’re feeling.

We find new insights - new ways of looking at our experience. We might start to notice how we feel about things changing. We might relate to ourselves differently - feel more empowered to make changes, or think of new options we didn’t realise we had.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it - next time you’re feeling something that feels bigger than you (or any time you’re feeling anything, really) - try using a piece of paper as an external container to hold some of it for you. There’s no ‘right’ way to do this - follow what feels good to you.

And if you’d like some help, perhaps you’d like to book in an art therapy session with me :) I can give you some guidance and together we can create some external containers for some of those big internal feelings (an art therapy session is another kind of container, which maybe I’ll write more about another time).

If you’d like to have a chat about how art therapy could support you, click here to send me a message.