Trying to sell you on negative emotions is a hard sell indeed.
No one wants to feel them but we all have them.
We actually have a default setting to want to feel positive emotion and not negative ones. The desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain is something we have in common with all animals. In fact, everything we do or don’t do is because we want to feel something or avoid feeling something.
This creates a dilemma because being human means experiencing negative emotion. So far there’s no sustainable way to opt out or avoid them for long. That said, we humans are resourceful and can be pretty creative in our efforts to escape or numb ourselves to painful or uncomfortable feelings. Here’s a shortlist of the kinds of things we use to check out when we don’t want to feel something:
- alcohol
- busyness
- food
- preoccupation with others (ie our children, our partner, etc.)
- sex
- social media
- shopping
- gaming
- Netflix
These things give us a temporary escape, but not for long. Like hitting a pause button, as soon as we take our finger off the button we’re right back where we started, except more so. Avoidance strategies perpetuate problems and amplify negative emotions. Instead of growing or getting better at taking care of our emotional health, we keep ourselves stuck and spinning.
Trying to block out our negative emotions is like holding a beach ball under water. At first it seems easy, but the longer you hold it under the more effort it takes to do so. The pressure created by the counterforce continues to increase along with the effort required to keep it submerged. Eventually it will break through the surface no matter how hard you try to keep it down. And this happens against our will often withe great force and disturbance, usually at the most inopportune times. Plus, we’ll be blindsided and overwhelmed because we’ve had no practice in how to cope. The only thing we’ve gotten good at is holding them down. When clients tell me they they don’t want to feel their emotions for fear they’ll be consumed by them, I know they’ve been using this strategy and now they’re afraid if they feel any of it, it will take them under.
All feelings are valuable and natural, not just positive ones. Emotions are felt in the body as reverberations of what’s happening in your mind. Your body doesn’t produce emotions on its own; it relies on your brain to tell it what to feel & how & when to mobilize, relax, defend etc. When we try to interrupt this important feedback system, we block access to our thoughts and our body will turn up the volume. No amount of telling ourselves to “suck it up” or “get over it,” will work. If we continue to insist on ignoring these signals, we create unnecessary suffering for ourselves. Not only that, drowning out negative feelings also numbs us to positive feelings. It’s not like a McDonald’s menu; you can’t hold the negative feelings and keep the positive ones. You block out ALL your feelings and essentially disconnect yourself from life, which paradoxically dials up the ratio of negative emotion we experience.
You might be thinking, “But I feel bad all the time, I don’t see how feeling worse is going to help.”
If you believe you’re already feeling more than your fair share of negative emotion, it’s more likely what you’ve really been feeling is RESISTANCE to your negative emotions. When we’ve learned to push our feelings away, often very young, it’s easy to confuse resistance with processing our emotions.
Here’s how you can tell if you’re processing negative emotion:
- You’re able to drop into your body and tune in to the the specific physical pattern of pressure, temperature, tension and breath that accompanies emotional states.
- You can translate your emotional experience by identifying the words that describe the names of your emotions.
- You know what it’s like to have the experience of the natural rise, peak and dissolution of an emotion. There is a beginning, middle and end to all of our emotions. Sometimes the waves come faster than others, but the peak of negative emotions typically last no more than two minutes at a time.
- You are able to allow yourself to feel the full range of emotions without judgement or self-rejection.
If none of this sounds familiar, you are most likely not feeling your emotions. Instead, you’re most likely opting for the beach ball plan and resisting them. The good news is that feeling your emotions is a skill you can learn. Just like any skill, you get better with practice. This practice helps you approach instead of avoid your feelings, which will open the door to more self-awareness. Self-awareness is what leads to change because we can’t change what we refuse to see.
When you are not afraid of your feelings you know what it means to trust yourself to handle life’s ups and downs. You realize there’s you don’t need to hide from the world or from yourself and this opens the portal to more positive emotion.
Here is a free download to help guide you in processing your negative emotions. It might come in handy about now 🙂
