How do you finally let your walls down?

Need some ideas.

I have a good relationship with my T. In theory, I trust her with my life. However, despite three years of chipping away, I’m yet to be as vulnerable as I would like to be.
I’d just like to be able to shed a tear. I don’t expect myself to be able to really cry, but I want to start sharing the emotions that get stomped down day after day.

Yeah. Ideas, advice?

I'm just gonna say random things that came in to my head when I read your post, not sure if it's good advice though.

Can you be vulnerable with yourself? Like cry on your own, write devastating journal entries, watch yourself in a mirror until it's hard to make eye contact. Feel your own body. Be totally honest with yourself.

Then after practising that for a bit you take it to therapy, the therapist becomes sort of like a witness to your vulnerability... but you aren't doing it *for* them to see, you are just doing it for you.

Personally I build walls up and break them down, only to have new ones pop up because of something that happens or is said and then I have to do it all over again. So tired.

Yeah so that’s probably half the problem. Getting me to cry is not an easy task. I’ll sometimes try to get it started with a sad movie, but more often than not, it doesn’t work.
So I guess that could indicate that I don’t need a cry. But, I do. All the stomped on sadness just resurfaces as anger. Not ideal

Does anything move you, in a good or bad way? Maybe not like a movie or something, but something beautiful like a person, art, poetry, music, sunrises? It doesn’t sound like you are very in touch with your emotions (except anger as you said) so maybe work on that first and then crying will just come naturally. Can you write down things that make you feel happy, sad, excited etc? Not sure if someone else has mentioned it to you before, but there is a book called ‘the body keeps the score’ which has a lot of stuff in in about our bodies holding memories and feelings in. It’s in us even if we don’t realise it.

Ps. I never cried as far as I can remember, until I had been in therapy for a while. I genuinely couldn’t feel anything before I started doing what I have mentioned to you here.

In my experience, it's not really a 'finally' thing...it's a process.

Once you've built a level of safety with the person you're working with, you might be able to let your walls down slightly, but they won't stay down. My counsellor and I talk about it in terms of a filter that I am learning to control. When I am in session (virtually at the moment, but hopefully physically again at some point) she reminds me to turn the filter down or off as necessary.

Rightly or wrongly, I have internalised the idea that 'therapy is the space where feelings happen', and struggle if they pop up anywhere else.


All I can offer is be open to it maybe taking longer than you would like to express emotion in front of your therapist, and ask them for help. They'll have seen this before, I am certain.

By making a conscious decision to take a risk and share something vulnerable. Then assess T's reaction and handling of it. This informs whether T is trustworthy or not.

Trust has to be earned, imo.

You don't have to force yourself to cry if you can't or don't want to. It will happen organically IF it has to happen, rather than forcing it to happen.