Thinking and feeling together

Many of us tend towards feeling and reacting quickly or impulsively to that feeling or to spending a lot of time thinking (and perhaps feeling we are going nowhere with that thinking). We may tend towards one or the other of these – or we might swing from one to the other. This tends to result in feeling stuck in life. We may feel we keep repeating destructive patterns and/or that we simply ruminate about things and don’t go anywhere. When we can bring thinking and feeling together -where we allow ourselves to feel and to think about things before responding – things can shift. As therapists we call this mentalising. The capacity to mentalise develops through the process of therapy.