When You Feel Like a Dot: Feeling Small and Alone

When I feel like a dot

There's a feeling that people bring to therapy that doesn't always have words yet. It's the feeling of being small, unempowered, alone, like a dot in an empty space.

If you've felt this, you're not alone. Here's what I notice, our world isn't always awake to letting people be truly honest about their emotional space. We're meant to keep moving, producing and keeping it together. But what happens to the part of you that feels tiny?

What Happens When We Sit With Feeling Small and Alone

When someone brings this feeling to me, the first thing I want them to know is simple: you're not alone and we can explore this together. Safely. At your own pace.

I don't rush to make meaning or make things better. We sit with the feeling. We find its shape, the texture, the weight, the size of it. I sit side by side with you and bear witness to that existential smallness that maybe you've never been able to share with anyone.

Something happens when a feeling is exposed and met. Not fixed. Not solved. Just met.

I've seen it over and over: there's power in being allowed to feel like a dot without someone trying to immediately inflate you back into something bigger. Because the dot matters. 

Giving Shape to What Feels Formless

Sometimes we use sand. Sometimes clay, movement, sound, or colour. The modality isn't what matters most, what matters is that the feeling gets to take form outside your body.

When you check in with your body and notice where it's located, maybe your chest feels tight, or your stomach feels hollow, there is an ache in your left leg. You can reach for any art materials and ask: What colour is this? What texture? What shape does it want to take?

You don't need to be "good at art." You just need to let the feeling be seen. Sometimes it has a voice. Sometimes it needs something. Sometimes it just wants to exist on the page or in the sand, witnessed.

Something You Can Try Today

If you're feeling like that dot right now, here's something small you can do:

Gather any materials, paper, pencils, clay, even objects from around your home. Check in with your body. Where do you feel that "dot" sensation? In your chest? Your throat? Your gut?

Use the materials to give it shape. Find the colour, the texture or the form of it. Don't think too hard. Let your hands move. And when you're done, just look at it. Let it be seen by you.

Maybe it wants to say something. Maybe it just needs to exist for a moment outside of you.

What Therapy With Me Looks Like

This feeling, this dot, it could be about shame, loneliness, identity, not knowing where to go next or feeling disempowered or something else. Whatever it is, the more the shape is met, the more you're given permission to be seen and felt, there is room.

Room to breathe in the contentment that this is who you are.

I work with people of all ages and backgrounds. You don't need any previous experience with the arts. You just need to be willing to be you and to let me sit with you. Not to shift you or change you but to help you find you.

If You're Ready

Some people carry this feeling their whole lives and never get the chance to say it out loud. They never find someone who will sit with them in it, who will let the dot be exactly what it is without trying to fix it or minimize it.

I think about this often, about the people who waited too long or never found the space, or didn't know this kind of witnessing was even possible.

If you're reading this and recognising yourself, please don't wait. The dot deserves to be seen. You deserve to be met.

Therapy is a slow journey of finding what's true. If you'd like to begin exploring what your "dot" has to say, you can learn more about working with me. Just drop me an email and we can make an appointment for us to meet in Berkhamsted.

You don't have to stay small and alone with it.