Sitting with your Difficult Emotions
This is probably one of the most important… and most difficult!! things we can do. It may also be a reason for seeking help from a therapist/counsellor, though you may not know it yet because it can be at the core of a lot of other issues.
We have often not learned to deal with difficult, or intense, emotions that come up in our bodies and heads and may have learned that expressing and processing our emotions is wrong.
Shutting down intense emotions may have also been born out of trauma, adverse childhood experience or a way of surviving your family dynamic at some point in your life, shutting down your emotions may have been the safest and most important thing to do.
Putting up a wall most likely got you through some really difficult times in your life.
However, this wall you put up can keep you from making meaningful connections to others and to your self and can stop you from moving through this world as your authentic self.
And these emotions cannot be shut out forever and doing so can cause major issues in your life. These emotions are guides to how we move through this life and are full of vital information. Trying to shut them down will only make them stronger.
Imagine your emotion as a kid who wants your attention. Shutting down your emotions, is like taking that kid and locking them away in a small dark closet. That kid is going to go nuts or completely shut down. When you finally let the kid out of the closet, he will either be completely numb or is going to go ape-shit!
What we need to do is to attune to the kid with curiosity and compassion. And this is what we need to do with our emotions. We need to attune to them with curiosity and compassion rather than shutting them down or stopping them from occurring. We are built to do this. We can build up our ability to feel these feelings rather than avoiding them.
Work With Not & Struggle Against Emotions
There is no such a thing as negative emotions.
I know they can be difficult to sit with, process and… feel.
We have been taught that there are positive and negative emotions, but this isn’t true. ALL Emotions can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ meaning that they cannot be labeled as all good or all bad.
Whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is dependent on context. Let’s look at joy. Joy can be a great feeling but also a terrible one. If you are sitting in a funeral and feelings of joy arise in us… that can feel awful.
So, if feelings aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ what are they?
ALL feelings are a really important guide in our lives and full of really important information. It says a lot of beautiful things about you! We need to work with our emotions, acknowledge them, appreciate them with curiosity and compassion.
The issues often arrive not because of the ‘negative’ emotion but because of our struggle against the ‘negative’ emotion. A lot of times, the problem is not the emotion coming in to our systems, but the reaction to that emotion.
This fight against the emotion is often born of a traumatic experience, or adverse childhood experiences or how you survived your family dynamic. At a point in your life, you learned that it is ‘dangerous’ to feel your feelings.
At some point in your life, the goal became and becomes to stop that emotion from ever occurring!
This is often where the struggle begins. The struggle is to stop the emotion. However, this goal can put a wall up to connecting to others and your authentic self… ignoring a guide that has been with us since the beginning of time.
You are not that version of yourself that cannot handle these feelings… and it’s time to let down that wall.
