By Theodore Seeds, LMFT
In the central plaza of a small town in Colorado sits the sculpture pictured right. You might say that before I knew I’d be a therapist, I knew I wanted a rendering of this amusing yet instructive scene between man and beast in my waiting room. What better primer, I thought, to induce emotional honesty in the client than to have him – if absent-mindedly, with his day’s troubles still flooding his thoughts – gaze upon its miniature. Somehow the moral of the bear and the boy would seep into his subconscious and set the stage for a productive session.
What is that moral? It is quite obvious that the bear seems upset with the Arapaho boy opposing him. But why? A close look at the photo will reveal that Big Bear has an arrow protruding from his backside, misfired – we presume – by Little Foot, who now begs his forgiveness. Frequently, I’ll hear in the room with clients “I know I shouldn’t feel...” sad, angry, jealous, you name it. There seems to be an impulse to distinguish some feelings as legitimate and others, not.
Let me scream it from the mountaintops with the same gusto that it appears Big Bear would like to growl in this moment: There’s no such thing as “legitimate and illegitimate” feelings! Your feelings – however irrational you think they are – have the same legitimacy as Big Bear after he’s been picked off from 100 yards while simply trying to enjoy some berries. It’s what we do with these feelings that defines us. And actually, the sooner we can learn to identify and acknowledge these emotions within ourselves, the sooner we can begin to function more elegantly within our world.