Navigating Mental Health Crisis in Therapy: Let the Snow Settle

When I meet with a client for the first time in my therapy practice, they are often in a state of crisis. They might be so depressed they can’t function in what they consider a normal way, or so anxious they are feeling physical symptoms that scare them, or their relationship has reached a moment of crisis that seems to be a breaking point. The issues they’re dealing with might have been worth discussing in therapy for much of the time previous to their crisis, but things weren’t bad enough to go to the trouble of finding a therapist, making an appointment, filling out all those forms. Now, however, the shit has hit the fan in a way that makes talking to someone about it worth all the trouble of getting there.

In that first session (or sometimes two or three or more) we spend time downloading everything the client is experiencing. It’s a “get it off your chest” kind of situation. There are things the client needs to tell someone, and they almost always feel better after telling someone trained to listen to and support them. There’s a sense of relief after verbalizing all the thoughts the client has had bouncing around in their head. The thing is, that good feeling usually disappears as soon as they start to think about what they can do to change their situation. Now what do I do? This is where I encourage them to consider not what they can do to change things in the future, but how they can better process what’s happening right now.

When Life Feels Like a Shaken-Up Snow Globe

At this moment there is so much going on in the client’s life that it’s like a snow globe that has just been shaken up. If we picture our lives as a snow globe’s typically bucolic scene of holiday cheer and pastoral landscape, then in our current situation those scenes are now completely obscured by snow. We’re stuck in a snowstorm with no idea where we are or how to get to where we want to be.

To the client, the snow is the problem, and they want to get rid of it. But how do you get rid of snow? One person can’t make the snow go away. It’s an impossible task. But the funny thing about humans is we often get stuck trying to accomplish impossible tasks. A therapist’s job is to point this out, and help switch our focus to the tasks that are possible to accomplish. When navigating mental health crisis in therapy, learning to separate what we can control from what we must accept is the crucial turning point.

Why Stopping the Fix-It Cycle Restores Focus

So what can we do when our lives have become a shaken-up snow globe? I encourage my clients to stop trying to make the snow go away but to instead wait for it to settle. This means accepting the feelings and events that are causing their crisis without the pressure of having to fix them right away. It seems counterintuitive to come to therapy for guidance about one’s problems and then be told not to focus on them so much, but it helps. It’s part of the process.

Think about it as if the mental energy spent on trying to fix things is actually shaking the globe a little more each time. The more we try to get things to settle down the more we kick the snow up and send it swirling around us again. Sometimes the ways in which we try to fix things actually reinforce them—just as we see in interpersonal struggles when reactive patterns get stuck in relationship button pushing dynamics.

Allowing Emotional Snow to Settle Before Taking Action

The source of our unhappiness is not the snow drifting around obscuring our vision, but in the foundation of our bucolic scene that the snowstorm obscures. Something has changed in that scene that has caused this emotional snowstorm. In this situation, we attempt to let go of the burden of trying to fix things and let ourselves be free to just feel things.

Clinical research regarding crisis management and emotional regulation strategies emphasizes that slowing down automatic impulses allows the brain to transition out of fight-or-flight reactivity. This is the mental health equivalent of setting the globe down and waiting for the snow to float back down to the ground. Only then can you get a good look at your surroundings and see what exactly caused the snowstorm.

In the same way, only once you’ve accepted the strong emotions and reactions to events that brought you to therapy without feeling you have to fix them can you start to see the sources of these emotions and reactions to them. When navigating mental health crisis in therapy, we wait for the snow to settle, and then it becomes easier to assess the situation, and then we can begin the process of change.