{"id":35026,"date":"2017-06-20T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/?p=35026"},"modified":"2017-06-15T14:04:12","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T21:04:12","slug":"bored-with-therapy-unmasking-the-real-feelings-behind-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/bored-with-therapy-unmasking-real-feelings-behind-boredom-0620174","title":{"rendered":"Bored with Therapy: Unmasking the Real Feelings Behind \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBoredom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bored-lookingHas it happened to you? A few months into therapy<\/a> and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re scratching your head wondering what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still doing here. Things started off so strong. You were exploring your relationships<\/a> or talking about work issues<\/a>, maybe even venturing into a little family history. Maybe things have been a little better since you started. Maybe things haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t changed much. Perhaps they even seem a bit worse since you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been talking about all these difficult things you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather not think about.<\/p>\n

But you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve gone over all that material and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still coming in each week. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still paying hard-earned money. And you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still not being told what you should do differently.<\/p>\n

You spend the whole time traveling to your appointment trying to come up with something<\/em> to talk about, some problem in your life, some point of conversation that will take you through 45 minutes before you return to work or head home.<\/p>\n

[fat_widget_right]<\/p>\n

And you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come up with nothing.<\/p>\n

And now you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in a staring contest with your therapist, who doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to be coming up with anything, either.<\/p>\n

And you think to yourself, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m bored<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So you skip an appointment and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153take the week off.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

You may consider this boring feeling a signal you should move on.<\/p>\n

You might text or email your therapist and say you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re done. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll call in a few weeks if you need anything.<\/p>\n

When reflecting on this, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll say to someone, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You know, therapy just didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work for me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no hard feelings, just \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not for you.<\/p>\n

As both a therapist and a person who has been in therapy, I can empathize. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve felt all of these things at one time or another. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come to understand something about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boredom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not convinced it really exists.<\/p>\n

I like to talk about anger<\/a> as often being a secondary emotion. It can be used, often unconsciously, to protect us from feeling (or showing) some of our more vulnerable emotions, such as fear<\/a>, insecurity<\/a>, and sadness<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But anger can be just pure anger<\/em>. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not convinced boredom is, in and of itself, its own thing.<\/p>\n

When I notice I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling bored, I tend to get curious. What else is in there? What am I avoiding? What is the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boredom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d protecting me from?<\/span><\/p>\n

When I notice I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling bored, I tend to get curious. What else is in there? What am I avoiding? What is the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boredom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d protecting me from?<\/p>\n

Back in my performing years, when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d spend evenings in rehearsals for off-off-Broadway productions that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pay and days in corporate offices as a temp, I remember spending hours doing mindless data entry. I became \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bored\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pretty quickly. But as I later came to realize, what I really felt was anger that I had to be there at all as opposed to making a living doing what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve even been to parties where I felt bored, but, upon further digging, I was feeling kind of insecure. Likewise, I have days when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m at home and think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m bored, but what I really want in those moments is to hang out with others. That is, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m actually feeling lonely<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Boredom covers for all of these feelings. Because who wants to be angry at work, self-conscious at a party, or lonely at home?<\/p>\n

When a person in therapy starts to talk about feeling \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bored\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in therapy, especially around the three-month mark, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m psyched. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m psyched because they said it and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just fade away, as many do. They are creating an opportunity with their therapist to process the feelings beneath their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boredom.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Some are upset because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been coming week after week, spending a lot of money, and they want results<\/em>! They want me to tell them what to do or what not to do. They want to know if there is going to be relief.<\/p>\n

I may not have the answers to these questions. I may not be able to put their mind at ease with a timeline or guarantee, but I will provide the space for them to express what they usually squelch and speak about some new ways to handle it all. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll provide a space to let out the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the hopelessness, the whatever<\/em>, and see that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to push me away. That it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to destroy them.<\/p>\n

Once the real feeling is expressed, therapy gets real. And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anything but boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When therapy gets \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boring,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth considering whether the sense of boredom is covering for deeper, more complex feelings. Now therapy can get real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[542,628],"tags":[779,49],"class_list":["post-35026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-articles","category-general","tag-boredom","tag-considering-psychotherapy"],"acf":{"author_show":false,"author_name":"","author_role":"","author_avatar":null,"author_profile_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}