The Cure for Bad Feelings
On Morita Therapy
This week’s topic, about accepting the reality of our emotional state, is inadvertently timed to coincide with a story I told at a Moth Mainstage event last March and is airing this week on PRX radio. It's about the night an epiphany saved me from suicide and taught me how to live.
You can listen to it HERE. (It's the very first story).
Since I launched this newsletter, I’ve been trying to get a handle on time management. I haven’t captured the rhythm of dividing my week into reading, researching, writing, revising, and coming up with the flow of topics that build and add to the larger conversation I want to engage in with you.
So, I’ve become quite interested in the concept of time and started to read the work of Oliver Burkeman (the British journalist whose most recent book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which is more about how to live a meaningful life than anything else.
Burkeman also writes a bi-monthly newsletter called “The Imperfectionist.”
Often, while I’m preparing for the topic of the week, other things pique my interest. I detour momentarily to take notes and save things to my Pocket app (If you are unfamiliar with Pocket, and this is the only thing you learn from me or this newsletter, then I feel I’ve done my job) to remind myself about things I want to explore later.
Recently, one of these diversions was about personal growth, which I will write about soon. But this led me to the website of clinical psychologist Nick Wignall (here's his newsletter). I read some of his articles and then wandered over to his podcast “Minds and Mics” only to discover an episode with none other than my beloved Oliver Burkeman!
After listening to that episode (it was fantastic), I randomly selected another episode: a conversation with Gregg Krech, discussing a type of Japanese psychotherapy called “Morita Therapy.” I had never heard of it.
As I listened to the episode, I admit, I went from “This is utter bullshit” to “Holy Cow, this is really smart. I think I understand.” (The episode). So I began digging and learned enough to provide you with a basic introduction to the principles and concepts of Morita Therapy.
So, here we go...
In the early part of the 20th century, when Freud was consciously coupling with the unconscious mind and Jung was creating his archetypes, Dr. Masatake (also known as Shoma) Morita, the head of psychiatry at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, was developing his psychotherapeutic methods with roots in Zen.
Dr. Morita worked with people suffering from anxiety and mind-body disorders. The name in Japanese for those who suffer from anxiety disorders was shinkeishitsu (which, like the word “neurotic,” is now outdated). Dr. Morita, a dedicated practitioner, developed his therapy to address these issues with those patients.
Image Source: moritatherapy.org
Dr. Morita understood that we live in a paradoxical existence. We want to feel emotionally comfortable and at ease while also wanting to enjoy successful careers, deep and meaningful love, and have families and nurturing friendships.
Achieving any of the latter requires sacrificing the former. One cannot go after their dreams without pressing up against feelings of discomfort and vulnerable emotions.
And because these sensations are so wildly unpleasant, many of us suppress or avoid the things that give rise to uncomfortable truths. It’s this dysfunctional reaction to psychological suffering that keeps us stuck in place.
To truly know ourselves and others requires the emotional discomfort of facing our insecurities, inadequacies, fears, desires, doubts, and traumas.
Dr. Morita believed that our feelings occur inside of us, but we don’t create them, and because we don’t create them, we can’t control them, and because we can’t control them, we must learn to accept them, to co-exist alongside them. In essence, we need to learn how to live in tandem with our discomfort—to live, as Rilke said so succinctly, with the questions.
When we try to change our feelings, we thwart the natural flow of emotions. Each time we try to avert an uncomfortable truth, we are stunting our growth. To exist means to experience the ups and downs of daily life. When we find creative ways to avoid feeling overwhelming sensations, we create tension where it shouldn’t be; and this makes existing harder.
The Western view of psychotherapy is feelings-focused. We treat our feelings like symptoms that must be immediately soothed, fixed, or managed. This in turn creates a sense that feelings and emotions are dangerous.
The more we experience feelings as something from which we need protection, the more afraid we are of our feelings. The more we focus on the self, the more attention we give to despair and anxiety. When we focus on action, we allow our emotions to take their natural course.
When we ground our attention in reality instead of our internal turmoil, we take the necessary action we need in order to move forward.
There are many people (e.g., ME) who can get leveled by their emotions, who are literally sideswiped by the gallop in their chest at the realization that they feel or know something they don’t want to feel or know. They can become incapacitated by the strength of their emotions and take to their bed (ME), losing entire days, missing important deadlines, and canceling plans based entirely on their overwhelm. (UGH, FINE, OKAY, YES, ME!)
In the Japanese language, arugamama means “as it is.” Suffering arises in the chasm between accepting reality as it is, and wishing for it to be different. As the stoic Seneca believed, having expectations is grounds for unhappiness.
After all, everything is constantly in flux, and expectation is a fixed desire for things to match your specific hope. Wishing that things turn out a certain way is just another way we avoid accepting reality as it is. When what happens doesn’t conform to our secret hope, we are crushed.
We believe that things should be a certain way, and we work hard to make reality conform to those beliefs. When they don’t match, we work hard to fix it so it does match, believing that when our expectations are met, we will be happy.
We spend
SO
MUCH
TIME
trying to bend things to our will when we would save so much time—and be happier and better off—simply accepting reality.
It’s a very Western notion to believe that the emotions that hurt are destructive for us, and that any discomfort must be eliminated if we are to function and thrive. Morita Therapy believes we have it backward.
When we avoid the truth because it feels terrible, when we live in the fantastical realm of expectation because we can’t face reality, we grow estranged from ourselves and the world. We create a model of existence that keeps us stuck that prevents us from growing.
Morita Therapy posits that our feelings and emotions are our soul’s ecosystem, our natural state and that we need to live in congruence with our nature and not try and outrun it. We don’t try to alter the sky, so it won’t rain; we don’t try to empty the ocean so there are no vicious waves.
Therefore, we shouldn’t try to fix the thoughts and feelings that alert us to some internal discomfort. Our emotions are not the problem; the problem is how we behave and relate to our emotions.
There are three rules of Morita Therapy:
Accept your feelings. Let them live inside you without trying to change or fix or avoid them.
Know your purpose. Instead of trying to control your emotions, ask yourself, "What needs doing now?"
Do what needs doing. Co-exist with the emotion as you take the action, trusting that you’ll learn from doing.
The focus of much of Western therapy is on feeling better.
We place emphasis on the outcome, and when we do feel better, we consider that an achievement—we call this growth.
In Morita Therapy, success is not measured by outcome, but by the ability to co-exist with our suffering while doing what needs to be done in our lives. In Somatic Therapy, people are taught to “observe but don’t become” their emotions, which I find incredibly helpful. In Morita Therapy, the idea is similar.
Feel the emotion, but do not take actions dictated by the emotion; rather take actions dictated by what needs to be done in your life. Instead of crawling into bed and forsaking your evening plans because you are deeply sad–be deeply sad, and keep your evening plans.
Don’t allow your emotions to deprive you of doing the things that fill your life with meaning.
We can’t cope with our feelings when they overtake us, and we can’t cope with our feelings when we avoid them.
We don’t need to eliminate or conquer our fear or anxiety to do what is necessary.
We don’t want to do our laundry, but we have no clean clothes, and so we do our laundry.
We co-exist with the feeling of not wanting while taking the action that needs doing. Actions are controllable; emotions are not.
When we focus on taking the right actions, we can notice that the actions will often shift how we feel.
Original image of Dr. Morita drawn by Edwina White
Dr. Morita insisted that we accept the temporary comings and goings of emotional sensation and weight AND not avoid reality by trying to alleviate our suffering so that we can then go and face reality.
Reality is the experience of uncomfortable emotion; it is not the absence of it. After all, we can never live in a state where there is a constant absence of feeling, so there is no point in trying to change what or how you feel. Instead, we should learn how to live with and alongside the pain while doing what needs to be done for our life to move forward and have meaning.
A person should not be ruled by their emotional state.
Life should be purpose-driven, not emotion-driven, and the way to do that is by building character.
Dr. Morita defined character as one who is purpose-centered and not feeling-centered. A feeling-centered person often makes decisions driven by their self-interested desire to feel better.
Human beings are forever feeling things, and knowing what you feel without changing it or pushing it away gives you the information you need to take the necessary action.
Feelings should never be discounted, of course, but they should not always influence the action a person takes.
When one is busy coping with the symptoms of feeling bad, they are putting the constructive parts of their life on hold.
You don’t have to like something in order to accept it, but you cannot practice Morita Therapy without coming to peace with things as they are.
And you?
What do you think of all this? I’m so curious to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments!
Until next week I am…
Amanda
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