Saying Goodbye to Just Right Feeling

by: Michael Upston, LCSW

When I began my internship during my last year of graduate school I was nervous.  For a long time I had wanted to do clinical work (to practice individual and family therapy), and now I finally had the opportunity to actually do it. There was just one glitch, I felt completely unprepared.  I was scheduled to start seeing clients that evening, and to add to my anxiety, my assigned supervisor was on vacation.  I went to lunch with a colleague that day and he must have sensed that I was nervous because, without my saying anything about being anxious, he turned to me and said, “If you feel like you don’t know what you are doing, don’t worry, none of us do.”  When he said this I breathed a sigh of relief and my anxiety immediately reduced.  I realized that I didn’t need to have all the answers on the front end.  I just needed to trust my gut and try to be as effective as I could in the context of whatever happened.  In other words, I didn’t need to have it all figured out beforehand in order to be confident about my abilities.  This allowed me to let go and let the process unfold in its own way.  Things turned out just fine, even though I was anxious and didn’t entirely feel “just right”.

The search for the “just right feeling” can become addictive, and it is easy to see why.  I have heard people who struggle with substance use disorder talk about spending years using substances trying to recapture the euphoria they experienced when they first got high, a moment when all felt right with the world but a moment which soon passed and now was unobtainable.  I have heard some meditators talk about a similar phenomena, a period of being “blissed out”, a moment of complete calm and peace, which, when once experienced, they repeatedly tried to recapture.    

The problem is we, and the circumstances we exist in, are not and never will be “just right,” and if we spend our lives trying to somehow capture that feeling, we will continue to hit dead ends.  The only real hope we have of being just right with the world is to learn to accept and live within a world which is far from perfect, a world which is, in some ways, just wrong.  One of my favorite novels is Henry of Atlantic City by Frederick Reuss. It is the story of an abandoned child who, through various trials, is kept company by an angel.  At the end of the novel, his angel leaves him because he is ready to start believing in himself and move to the next stage in his life.

In a similar vein, I once talked with a client about writing a letter saying goodbye to the just right feeling.  We talked about her not letting “him”, the just right feeling that is, down easy, but being frank about the fact that their relationship was no longer working for her.  We talked about her taking the next step in her life which, among other things, involved learning to accept and live in a world where at some level we all wake up each morning not really knowing what we are doing, but nonetheless needing to find the strength and faith (in ourselves, in others, in life) to get out of bed anyway.