If there’s one thing I didn’t learn growing up, and I’m making up for it now, is being OK with my feelings. That is, the negative ones. I have waged a nearly fifty-year battle against acknowledging my feelings and more importantly, accepting them. Anxious? Someone, probably me, is to blame. Self-doubt? It must be true, else I wouldn’t think it. Insecure? Must be a personality disorder or a statement of my value to the tribe.
None of those are true, and more importantly, not helpful. This doesn’t mean that you have to feel this way forever, or even long; in fact, just sitting with your feelings is therapeutic.
What is the healthy response to feeling emotions?
“If you’re feeling sad, allow yourself to cry instead of holding back tears,” Viñas says. “If you’re feeling happy, smile and let others know. The sooner you acknowledge the feeling, the sooner you can move through it.”
Feeling negative emotions helps you move through them.
Interestingly, and this shouldn’t be surprising to students of psychology, is that emotions aren’t really designed for the sake of feeling them: they are designed to motivate us. And negative emotions are quickly reinforced by those two most rewarding of behaviors: (escape and avoidance. But outside of some truly awful situations, neither condition is preferable to patiently dealing with yourself.
So why feel them? (Why not escape or avoid?
It is also a cruel irony that while striving to avoid emotions may bring some brief relief in the short-term, it doesn’t really work over the long-term. This is because we really don’t have direct control over our feelings (if we did, we’d all be hanging out in bliss). So when we try to reduce or avoid emotions, we get stuck on the hamster wheel of trying to control something we really can’t. The resistance takes up much of our attention and energy, while the core issues remain. As we say in the trade: what you resist persists.
The first step? Name the feeling. Another step: talk to yourself in the way that you would someone for whom you care. This is because you may criticize yourself for feeling something negative.
An important hack with feelings emotions is to engage in "(reapprisal)." This is because you can’t control your feelings; you are going to have feelings whether you want to or not. (I think this has been my hangup.) Reapprisal involves recasting your feelings in a more positive light. This helps you avoid attempting to express feeling.
What about "bad" feelings?
This is a meta-cognitive take on the topic, but appreciating that your feelings aren’t good or bad is important: they are all able to help you, but experiencing your negative feelings fully [can help you feel less negative emotions](What You Think About Your Emotions Matters (berkeley.edu))… down the road, at least:
Her study supports other research showing the benefits of believing that all emotions are useful and equally valuable. For example, one study found that participants who thought emotions were helpful also reported being happier and having more social supports than those who found emotions a hindrance. Additionally, the more participants viewed emotions as helpful in their lives, the better they performed on a timed reasoning task—which is somewhat surprising, given how often people pit reason against emotion.
This isn’t a screed against reason and logic; those two are still your friends. But you have to sit with your feelings if you want them to teach you something.
