allowing emotions – The Healing Modalities

But what if it hasn’t?

When we’re in the “other half” of our 50/50 emotional life, sometimes we may think something has gone terribly wrong, that maybe we’re wrong, that our life is wrong, that everything is wrong.

I want to offer that life and our human, emotional experience is 50/50 – 50% “good/positive” and 50% “bad/negative.”

It has to be this way because we wouldn’t know what “good” is without “bad.”

I think we’ve been taught incorrectly that our emotional lives should be “good” most, if not all, of the time. So when something happens and we feel the “bad” 50%, we think something has gone terribly wrong.

But if that “bad” 50% is supposed to be there, has anything really gone wrong?

No. We’re just in the 50% that sucks sometimes. And that’s okay. We’re okay. It’s all okay. We’re in the human experience.

It may not feel okay in the moment, but when we can stay with the negative feeling and allow and process our emotions, that’s when we’ll move forward.

Avoiding the negative emotion can hurt us. Instead of experiencing the emotion, we buffer: we seek other things to make us feel better. Other things, like false pleasures, we don’t necessarily want, like over-eating, over-drinking, binging Netflix, over-Instagraming, over-working, over-spending, etc.

We do these actions instead of allowing and processing an uncomfortable emotion like boredom, loneliness, shame, fear, jealousy.

But experiencing the negative emotion can help us. When we’re willing to experience the range of emotions, we open our lives up so much more. That’s when we know we can handle any emotion.

When we open up to the 50/50, we get some authority over it. Then we don’t have to be in a hurry to seek false pleasure or change things impulsively to feel better.

Your turn: How would your life be different if you recognize that your emotional life is 50/50 and that’s okay? Are you open to allowing and processing negative emotions instead of avoiding or resisting them? What would you be more willing to do for yourself if you embraced the 50/50 of your emotional life?

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And what if that’s OK?

All of us experience emotional pain at regular intervals in our lives. We often turn to food, alcohol, shopping, work, or something else to ignore the pain we feel. These actions are called buffering (more on that soon). These temporary distractions only prevent the process that needs to happen to let the painful feelings go.

What happens when feelings hurt:
• Something happens to trigger your emotional pain.
• You can barely make sense of it and it overwhelms you.
• Emotional pain racks your body—the vibrations in your body caused by the thoughts you’re having are excruciating.

You can make a choice to: avoid it, resist it, react to it, or process it.

Avoiding
When you choose to avoid your pain and pretend it isn’t there, you are basically lying to yourself. This doesn’t work long term. The truth is that avoidance causes pain to fester. The more you avoid it, the more you have to avoid it. You might eat, for example, instead of feel. Then you might get upset because you ate when you weren’t hungry. Then you might obsess about your body or your exercise routine. All of these tactics keep you from addressing the cause of the pain and instead, multiply undesirable symptoms such as weight gain.

Resisting and Reacting
When you resist the emotion, you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling this way and then you feel bad in addition to the painful emotion you’re already feeling. When you resist, it’s like trying to hold a large beach ball under the water. The beach ball always wants to pop back up and gets stronger the more you try to push it down.

When you deal with pain this way, you act it out or fight against it. You might yell at the person you believe caused your pain. You might talk behind their back, you might give them the silent treatment, or maybe take even more drastic measures against them. This may seem to help with the pain temporarily because it alleviates the vibration in the moment, but these actions almost always backfire.

When we react from negative emotion, we almost always get a negative result. Our actions are usually uncontrolled and unthoughtful. Fighting against the emotion becomes a losing battle–anxiety speeds up the vibration of the already painful emotion, making it even more intense.

Processing
When you choose to process pain, you are choosing to feel it. We are so reluctant to feel pain on purpose. We tell ourselves that feeling pain is a bad thing because it feels bad, but this isn’t the truth. When we allow ourselves to feel our pain all the way through, we see that it’s manageable and it can do no long term harm (unlike avoiding and fighting, which can have many long term consequences).

Allow the feeling to be in your body even if you can’t make sense of it in your mind yet. Watch and notice. Say in your mind “I am processing pain” over and over as you feel the pain. You don’t need to fix it or make it go away.

Notice any desire to react, resist, and avoid. You can say the desire out loud or in your mind, or write it down. You don’t have to act on it—just acknowledge it. You can tell yourself, “That won’t help” or “That’s not worth it” every time you notice the desire. Remind yourself, “This is pain…This is part of being human.” Allow the painful vibration to be there as you do laundry, take a shower, drive your car, or talk on the phone. Notice its heaviness, its energy, its ability to take your breath away. Just notice.

As you do this, you’ll begin to see that your thoughts about the situation appear. It may take some time–a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. Let it take as long as it takes—there’s no need to force it. Just keep noticing what you notice.

Your turn: What happens to the feeling if you just allow it to be there and feel it all the way through? What happens if you’re allowed to feel this way without reacting, resisting, or avoiding the emotion?

Next week we’ll talk about how our thoughts about our circumstances/situations create our feelings. It’s easy to think our circumstances (other people, our job, our neighborhood, traffic, etc.) create our feelings. It’s all our thoughts. And that’s where our power lies.

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Tag: allowing emotions

“It’s all gone terribly wrong”

Sometimes our feelings hurt…a lot