Mind Moves: One of the most common fears people mention on consulting a psychologist is that there must be something "strange", "abnormal" or "inadequate" about them given the distress they are in.
Because they assume most people live "normal" untroubled lives, they live in terror that their apparently confident public persona will be exposed as a sham.
Their decision to confide in another is a significant step and is arrived at only when it becomes demoralising to keep revisiting the same pain over and over.
As they explore their distress with another, they begin to realise that there are very valid reasons for feeling the way they do.
My hope is that people reading this column will make more sense of the experience of psychological distress, whatever form it takes, so that they might be better equipped to confront with courage and self-understanding those elements in their personal and interpersonal lives that invite their attention.
Why is it that we find painful feelings so frightening to accept? Why is it that when support is most needed, a sense of shame can take hold causing our connections with others to be severed? Partly it may be our fear that to confront whatever is going on would be unbearable and overwhelming.
Partly it is our belief that to allow ourselves be upset would serve no purpose other than to confirm to us that we are weak; we subscribe to a myth that our society is peopled by individuals who manage their lives unburdened by doubts and insecurities, or those darker feelings of jealousy, rage, and despair.
We want to believe that life can be a happy business if we live it well. We want children who thrive, relationships that are steadfast, success at work, bodies that look beautiful, always.
Our aspirations to be like we imagine others expect us to be can become a rigid standard that makes for a very uneasy relationship with pain.
Any state of mind that falls short of this ideal becomes a reason for self-attack and paranoid defensiveness.
Where there is a degree of honesty and trust between people, we live easier with the notion that suffering is no stranger to any of us.
Acceptance of the inevitability of emotional distress and recognition of our need of support when it hits are key elements of good mental health.
People have a way of righting themselves when these factors are present and accessible. Whether it is among friends or on a hospital ward, acceptance and solidarity are critical to resolving a life in crisis. We have much more in common than divides us at the level of pain, loss and fear.
Very often it is not the fact of being emotionally upset that causes problems in our lives but our own and other's reactions to our predicament.
In rejecting our unwanted feelings we find it hard to be compassionate towards ourselves and we tend to feel contempt towards others who fall prey to mental torment. A more accepting attitude creates the conditions of safety necessary to grow through a crisis.
A psychological perspective views both the individual and their particular "symptoms" with respect and curiosity.
The shadows of our inner lives can reveal important truths about who we are and what moves us to act as we do.
A young man beset by panic attacks related how he had always been prone to feeling down in himself until he had finally realised that his anxiety symptoms were a wake up call to stop hiding from himself.
His panic reactions reflected an acute mistrust in his capacity to deal with specific painful feelings that re-surfaced whenever he got close to someone.
Gradually, the connections between his troubled past and his present predicament, his thoughts and his emotions, became clearer.
He discovered that certain over-used coping strategies only served to invite and perpetuate his suffering, while others helped him to feel grounded and stable. Moving towards rather than away from his distress produced a much larger and creative sense of himself, someone not bound inexorably to repeating the past, or doomed to keep repeating it.
Times of crisis in a person's life offer both the impetus and the opportunity to change. We want to get over our difficulties, to move beyond them.
To give ourselves the time to articulate and feel our upset is generally the best way to begin to right ourselves.
Psychology can illuminate the architecture of our inner lives in a way that permits us to understand our reactions and to reconnect us with our own vitality.
• Dr Tony Bates is principal clinical psychologist at St James's Hospital and course director of the MSc in Cognitive Psychotherapy at Trinity College Dublin.