I've been thinking a lot about sense-making, but in a therapeutic context. So much of the work we do in counselling is about making sense of our experiences, our relationships, and our own inner world (phenomenological sense-making, if you'll excuse the vocab).

A lot of my own work and the work I'm seeing with others is the act of not only explaining patterns in words, but making sense of the feelings underneath, and resulting from, those patterns.

A lot of us tend to intellectualise: if we can explain why our patterns exist, we'll know things about ourselves, and then we can make change happen. I think a lot of us will be familiar wit this feeling, and how change doesn't just come from knowing ourselves.

Similarly, from the opposite direction, as much as I've spoken about feeling your feelings, the landscape underneath those feelings - where they come from, what they're protecting you from, etc - is also important.