My first step was learning to recognize if I was feeling something, because I was so good at stuffing something deep inside, instantaneously, that I didn't know I even had a feeling about it. "Doesn't that make you angry?" No. "That sounds like it hurts." Nope. And so on. So just learning to listen to myself and look within helped me, and not be so fast on the draw to try to protect myself from hard feelings by stuffing so deep inside. That's been my biggest breakthrough.

I have never thought that my feelings were incorrect so I didn't work to correct them. My feelings just are--not right, not wrong. It is true my feelings can be hard to sit with and feel, instead of stuffing, but being a challenge doesn't make a feeling incorrect. Once I went to my T and told him I was so sad about something (my father's impending death, months and months before he died) and it was affecting me at work and school. I would get sad in the middle of the day and start crying, while other people were around! Bleah. It was horrible. I was just so sad and it was escaping into my everyday life. Very dysfunctional. I went to T and asked him for help with this. I wanted him to help me better be able to control my feelings and not be sad in public like that. He would have none of that! He told me nothing useful about how to do that. Instead he told me I should just allow myself to be sad. If I had to cry, then do it. He said it wasn't the end of the world if someone saw me crying and not to worry so much about what other people thought. He also said I could let some of that sadness out in session with him and that might help relieve some of the pressure of trying to keep it all inside when out in public.

I'm not sure there is an "answer" to how to overcome feelings. I think my T believes you shouldn't "overcome" the feelings but let yourself feel them. It's painful, but they don't go away by denying them. They just lurk inside, waiting to get out. I'm not sure what "answer" your T is thinking, but it would be interesting to hear more about what she means.

This is hard work you're doing.