While working through a particularly thoughtful client’s anxiety around phone calls, she reported feeling uncomfortable with not knowing for sure how the conversation will go. Given that she calls me every week with the explicit purpose of being asked challenging questions, I thought this warranted further explorations and at one point found myself saying that part of the purpose of therapy is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before in mindfulness stuff.”

Nothing against the cult of mindfulness, ok, maybe a little against the cult part, but this reaction did not inspire confidence. I can do better, we can do better. Being uncomfortable is inherently, well, not comfortable and I worry that this phrase is more pathologizing and rubbing salt on the wound then helpful.

Then I thought some more about this young woman, and the palpable tension that I felt, even over the phone in our earlier session that lately has turned into the sort of collaborative curiosity that is one of the greatest rewards of the work I do.

Discomfort is where we grow, into ourselves and our world, it’s where we are stretched and challenged and come out stronger and better, but that lump in our throat is not be ignored, or dismissed, we actually can’t just make it go away.

The best we can do is lean in, get curious and treat the discomfort with respect instead of judgement. We can get to know it, ask it what it needs and work to move past it with the knowledge it’s there for a reason.

So no, you can’t be comfortable with being uncomfortable anymore than a fish can walk , and there is nothing wrong with that. But accepting this and letting go of any pressure to be otherwise actually seems to be the first step towards the next best thing, possibly even a better thing; acceptance of discomfort and the ability to manage it.