We have to talk about difficult things

On New Year’s Day, I was quite cheerily walking my dog at dusk, all wrapped up against the rain and the cold, and I was thinking about my work. While therapy can be joyful and there can certainly be laughter and lightness in the mix, a lot of the time the work is about grappling with what’s difficult, trying to find ways to talk about the pain we have faced or are still facing in our lives, when it has been impossible for one reason or another to feel we can really talk to and be understood by friends or family members.

When we find ways to say what feels unsayable in the therapy room, and when we feel heard and understood, we start to see new options, to make sense of feelings, thoughts and experiences that seemed stuck.  What seemed impossible, can start to feel possible. And if clients can then find new ways to talk with their friends and family members about what was stuck, if they are open and receptive, the situations and relationships that seemed broken can sometimes be repaired. Talking about difficult things can have a ripple effect.

We can start with one person, one set of relationships at a time. I’m personally very invested in that process. But I’m also increasingly interested in how we can talk about difficult things on a wider scale. Hence my writing this here.

As I walked, my thoughts turned to what I see as the challenges and opportunities of the coming year. To my mind, one of the greatest challenges we face is the climate crisis. And in my experience, this is one of the most difficult things for us to talk about. It drives straight into the heart of how we live and the choices we make, as well as how stuck, helpless and hopeless we can feel. Many in our society have learned to avoid confronting these kinds of issues and many just don’t know how.

But no good has ever come from just trying to ignore or avoid problems that aren’t going to go away. Like pressure building in a corked bottle, at some point it always becomes too much to contain. The tragedy is, how much suffering and damage do we have to endure and inflict before the cork blows?

I’m thinking about the protests that were triggered in many countries across the world when a black man George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota, in the United States in 2020. He was far from the first, but his death provided the pressure needed to blow the cork out of that bottle. Likewise, when the #MeToo social movement against sexual abuse, harassment and rape culture took off in 2017, it was the sexual abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein that lit the touch paper, also igniting protests across the world though again the issues were far from new. The anti-immigrant violence that flooded onto the streets of cities across the UK in the summer of 2024 is another case in point. Triggered by the murder of three young girls in Southport by a 17-year-old youth, people whose anger had been simmering for a long time decided to take matters into their own hands.

As I walked, I was thinking about how in these kinds of eruptions of anger and outrage, when the cork has blown, something important is finally being communicated in a way that should no longer be ignored and in that there is an opportunity for healing. And if we can seize it, in the process of healing comes the opportunity to embrace the joy in life.

People are often frightened that if they dare to begin to try to discuss the difficult aspects of their lives, they will be overwhelmed by the darkness and unable to get out. ‘If I allow myself to cry, I may never stop,’ is a common phrase in the therapy room. It’s a powerful fear that can keep our troubles corked up. In my work with clients, we may only really be able to address the difficult stuff once we have also worked on their ability to trust that they can feel the pain and regain their footing. When we know that we can face our difficulties, we are freer from the fear, and this freedom also brings the opportunity to engage with what is also good about our lives.

Climate change and all its implications is a truly terrifying thing to confront because it is so all encompassing. And yet, if we do I think we also have to acknowledge what is really important to us - our relationships, with other people, with animals, with places, with nature, with the world around us. And if we can see the beauty, love and joy in all that, we may find we have the power and the courage to work out what really matters and what actually doesn’t.

This makes me think about Ken Loach’s 2023 film The Old Oak, set in a former mining town in the North East where people whose livelihoods have collapsed take against having to share what little they have with an influx of refugees from Syria who are being housed in the town. Loach manages to convey with gritty empathy the difficulties on both sides, and also demonstrates how, if they can come together, they stand a greater chance of finding lasting resolutions.

If we can talk about difficult things with a genuine openness, a curiosity, an interest in understanding each other and begin to have these discussions in classrooms, in work places, in community groups, in places of worship, in prisons, in hospitals, in sports clubs, in politics – wherever people meet to try to make the world a better place, the cork may or may not already have blown on the climate crisis, but there is still an opportunity for healing and hope.

**If you’d like to talk about how you feel about any aspect of the climate crisis and you’d be interested in discussing options for therapy sessions with me please get in touch.