So much of what falls under the banner of 'mental health' is actually a matter of feelings. Thoughts and feelings require completely different approaches to change them – so different, that they are in effect different species. You cannot reason with feelings. They are more or less irrational. Whenever you believe you have reasoned with a feeling, you have merely suppressed it. What feelings want is to be felt ¹. They are messengers. They need to understand that they have been received and understood.

Consider the archetypal dread tyrant, prone to throwing messengers into the deepest, darkest dungeon if they dare to deliver him an unwelcome message… Ignoble and unenlightened behaviour, you will no doubt agree. And yet this is what people do all the time when their internal messenger tries to deliver a feeling-message which they do not want to hear.

Everyone has a whole range of defence mechanisms and strategies to avoid their own upsets. These include hiding the upset (suppressing and repressing it; walling it off as a separate personality), distracting yourself from your upset (layering it with other feelings, or rationalising), projecting your upset onto others (through blame and resentment), or running away from your upset (such that when you encounter it, you unconsciously shy away from it and slip into a different train of thought).

Once a messenger has delivered its message, its work here is done. Until then, it is relentless. A feeling will dissipate only when its message has been received – until then, it will chunter its message at you over and over. Even if you cast the messenger into an oubliette in your subconscious, trying to forget it, it never forgets – and it nags at you so you never truly forget it either.

The person your feeling wants to deliver its message to, is you. It might seem like you are angry with someone – and that therefore this feeling is all about the other; that if they change, your upset will be gone. However, regardless of whether there really is a monster out there, your feeling is a message to you, not to them. The message is always telling you something about your own internal model. An upset is an indication that in some way you have stepped into unreality; a snake has entered your Eden.

When a feeling of upset arises, this is usually the point in the journey where you need to do something differently. Sometimes one small change is all it takes to start the ball rolling. Up to that point you have been in some way suppressing or avoiding the upset; now you need to engage with it. By giving the upset (and its associated feeling) space and presence, and accepting it as it is, it will find the way to say what it needs to say – and disappear.

Every part of us communicates with our centre (our true Self); and communication with this centre is what connects every part of us. Like everything from on high, this communication is essentially undefinable – so let us not waste many words trying to define it, except to observe that this ineffability reflects the essential struggle of all language; that reality is infinite and inexpressible, yet with our bodies and our words (which are just another kind of body), we seek to give it form and expression.

An abstract idea only has 'reality' in the world of form if it has a form (on that level or dimension). This is why we have bodies and minds.

Every part of ourselves – every organ, every cell, every atom, every feeling, every idea – has its own form of form-forming; every part of us has its own language. Every part of us is a part precisely because of this language barrier. The crossing of these barriers, the refining of communication across these barriers, is growth for our organism. When we form meaningful associations between realities or ideas that were once disparate for us, we transcend our (mortal) duality and take another step towards the infinite unity. We have added another spell to our book.

Who determines what is meaningful in this regard? In a way, all the experiences of life are there to coach us in what is meaningful. We envisage what we imagine to be a meaningful association between ideas, and the universe shows us the error of our ways. We refine our model, our understanding, and it is tested again – until the end of time.

The quest for communication between two beings (or two parts), is a quest for common ground.

The individual internal language of two beings or parts only has a higher meaning if they can find a way to translate something between themselves². In other words, communication is a quest for commonality, for community – all of which are expressions of the common, the unity, that which unites.

Whenever two personalities interact, they subtly change one another, seeking to extend their common ground (even if that 'common ground' is defined as something which you and I stand at opposite ends of – in which case, the tendency is for the two ends to become more polarised on contact, which still serves to extend the common ground). This is true when one of your personalities meets another within your psyche; and when one of your personalities interacts with another from 'outside' in the world.

Riding a bus is a kind of communication, with its own language. The quantum (or 'message') being communicated is you. Of course in all of your communications, what is being communicated, is you.

The language of a bus journey shares some 'vocabulary' with a train journey, or a car journey, or a foot journey – and also has differences. The way we say something changes the experience of the message. The experience of the message is imparted not only to the receiver, but to the giver.

One bus journey has something in common with another bus journey, but will also be different. If you deliver the same message to two people, the experience will be similar but different. In fact, you cannot ever deliver the same message twice, just as you cannot cross the same stream twice. The stream has changed and so have you and your world and your message.

We can also think of a bus journey as a translation – you are being translated from A to B. It is not a coincidence that the language associated with movement (communication, translation, change) is closely related to the language of language. Our communications move people, and ourselves.

For therapists, it should go without saying, communication is the quintessence of their trade; and therapy, like every journey, is an act of becoming.

Ultimately, all communication is an expression of our creativity.

In life, we are exploring the numberless ways of representing infinity in finite form, and crossing numerous bridges to do so (between parts of ourselves, from inside to out, and from outside to in). This creative journeying, this playing with communication is not a hobby, but is our essential nature.

As Shakespeare wrote, "No man is lord of any thing, though in and of him there be much consisting, till he communicates his parts to others". Or as his 'contemporary' Edward De Vere wrote, "What do [your studies] avail you if you do not participate them to others?... What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit unto another? What doth avail the vine unless another delighteth in the grape? What doth avail the rose unless another took pleasure in the smell?... and so it is in all other things, as well as in man."