What Does It Mean to Feel Well?

Balance, change, and the possibility of staying in motion

Originally written in 2018 · Revised in September 2026

​

There are times in life when, at least on the surface, everything seems to be in its place. Work is going well, the relationships that matter to us are holding together, and everyday life has found a certain balance. If someone asked us how we were doing, we would probably say: well.

And yet, well-being does not necessarily mean the absence of conflict or dissatisfaction. Sometimes what we call balance is also the result of a long process of adaptation: we have learned that some things can be said while others are better left alone, that some desires can find a place within our relationships while others risk putting them under strain.

Living with others constantly requires adjustments, compromises and giving things up. No relationship could survive if every need had to be satisfied immediately or every state of mind expressed without mediation.

But there is a difference between being able to give something up and having to stop feeling it.

Over time, we can build very effective forms of balance with the people we love. Each person learns something about the other, comes to understand what they can ask of them, what is better left untouched, what might put the relationship into question. Much of this happens without ever having been explicitly agreed upon.

These are forms of mutual adaptation that often protect the relationship. And precisely because they work, they can become difficult to recognize.

It can happen, then, that some parts of our experience gradually recede into the background. A dissatisfaction, a desire, anger, the feeling of not being sufficiently recognized or of having given up something important. These are not necessarily repressed thoughts in the classical sense of the term. Sometimes we know perfectly well that they are there. We have simply learned not to give them too much space.

Until something changes.

It may be an encounter, a separation, a loss, a professional crisis. Or something far less obvious. Sometimes all it takes is a new relationship that makes us feel in a way we had almost forgotten.

Not necessarily because that relationship has finally revealed who we “really” are. The idea that somewhere there is an authentic Self, hidden beneath the adaptations we have built over time, risks oversimplifying what is happening.

The psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg described our experience of ourselves as being made up of different self-states. Different ways of feeling, thinking, desiring and relating can become more or less accessible depending on the contexts in which we find ourselves. Not everything we are is available to consciousness at the same time, and not every relationship makes the same ways of being possible.

From this perspective, a new relationship, a change or a crisis can bring us into contact with something in ourselves that had found less room within a different configuration of our lives. What emerges does not necessarily invalidate the balance that came before; rather, it may reveal its boundaries, making accessible ways of feeling and being that until then had remained more distant from our experience.

Bromberg uses a particularly evocative expression: “standing in the spaces.” That is, the possibility of moving between different self-states without being forced to establish which one of them represents, once and for all, who we are.

When this possibility becomes restricted, some aspects of experience can become difficult to access. They do not necessarily disappear. They may remain in the background, separated from what, at that particular moment, we are able to recognize as belonging to us.

It is also in this sense that a new experience can be unsettling. It does not necessarily deliver a hidden truth to us: it may alter the boundaries of what we are able to feel as our own.

And at that point, the question of well-being changes.

Feeling well would no longer mean finally reaching a state without conflict, nor would it mean always being able to express everything we feel. It might also have to do with the possibility of maintaining a certain mobility between different ways of being, without needing to exclude some of them in order to preserve the continuity of the others.

From this perspective, distress also takes on a less unequivocal meaning. There are, of course, forms of suffering that call above all for relief. It would be rather naive to romanticize suffering by assuming that every form of pain contains a hidden truth or necessarily represents an opportunity for growth.

But sometimes distress is also information. It may tell us that a balance which has protected us, and which may have been necessary for a long time, can no longer contain everything we have become.

Perhaps this is precisely where it becomes difficult to think of well-being as a state to be reached. Feeling well may have more to do with the possibility of movement: being able to lose, at least for a while, the balance we had found without immediately feeling the need to restore it.

After all, what disrupts a balance is not always harming us. Sometimes it is making possible something that, within that balance, had not yet been able to find a place.