Dealing with ‘negative’ emotions
5 September 2024
Many of us have trouble dealing with so-called negative emotions - such as fear, anxiety, anger, sadness.
I often hear clients say they just don’t want those kind of feelings and how can they get rid of them? Of course, you can’t simply ‘get rid’ of a particular feeling and even if you could you’d be giving up something important as feelings play an important role in our life, even difficult feelings.
Feelings are there to communicate important information to us. For example, sadness tells us that we’ve lost something important and need to grieve. Anger may tell us when someone has stepped over an important boundary and that we need to take action. Fear may be telling us there is a risk of something going wrong in our life and that we may need to give it attention.
Of course, even though feelings play a crucial role in communicating information to us about our environment, that does not mean we let our feelings run our life. We may find ourselves particularly susceptible to some feelings, such as anxiety or anger. When these kind of feelings predominate it can cause problems in our relationships or daily functioning.
Suppression and distraction
Our impulse may be to try and suppress or distract ourselves from painful feelings and while there is a role for this if distracting ourselves becomes habitual then we are at risk of the suppressed feelings causing other problems, such as illness, depression, addiction. For more on this, read my blog on accepting and facing pain.
Sometimes the feelings we experience today actually relate, in part, to events from long ago. So, if we experienced a major loss as a child and the feelings around that loss were ignored or glossed over, we may struggle with handling grief as an adult.
So, feelings are complicated. But we need to find a way to acknowledge and feel our feelings but at the same time not let them dominate.
One way of dealing with difficult feelings is to use a mindful approach. By that I mean practising noticing our thoughts and feelings without reacting to them in the moment. This can be challenging for many of us because our minds want to look for a ‘solution’ to our discomfort or to ruminate on all kinds of thoughts relating to the feeling.
It can be common to judge ourselves negatively for the fact that we are feeling sad/depressed/anxious/angry, especially if the feeling is commonly repeating in our life. One of the problems with this kind of self-judgment is that we’re already feeling vulnerable in some way because of the difficult emotion and then we make things worse by judging ourselves for having that feeling!
Soften, soothe, allow
In her book, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff describes a way of working with difficult emotion in a mindful way. For more on self compassion, read this blog post.
If you’re feeling anxious, afraid, sad, angry or whatever difficult emotion, first find a calm place to sit and make sure you have five to 10 minutes free of distractions. The first step is to just become aware of your body and any sensations you have.
- Notice where in your body you feel the emotion. It may be in your stomach, your chest, shoulders, head. Notice the quality of the sensation. Is it a heavy feeling, a tightness, an ache?
- Send some compassion to the feeling - tell yourself how hard it is for you right now and try to give yourself, and the feeling, some warm words. These could include, ‘you’re going through a tough time right now’, or ‘I can see this is really difficult for you.’ You could imagine you’re speaking to the sensation a bit like a loving parent might speak to a scared or vulnerable child.
- You can repeat the phrase ‘soften, soothe, allow’ during this exercise as a way of reminding yourself of the importance of coming into a compassionate, accepting relationship with the feeling (and with yourself).
- If you find yourself going off into thoughts and ruminations, such as asking yourself why you’re feeling like this, how long will it last, what’s wrong with you, see if you can bring your attention back to your body, to the physical experience of having the sensation.
This exercise can help us to detach from the temptation to try and analyse our experience and to spin off into lots of unhelpful thought patterns which often end up with self judgment.
Being present
While it can be important to gain understanding about why we may be prone to feeling certain emotions and if there is anything in our past that may need to be given attention, it is also important to be able to stay in the present moment and allow our feelings to be felt and to pass through us.
Neff makes an important point when she notes that this process is not about ‘positive thinking’, it’s not about replacing ‘negative’ feelings with positive ones. It is, rather, about being able to face and experience difficult feelings with the support of an internal compassion and self-empathy.
I like this exercise because it also includes the body. Often we forget that we carry our emotions in our body and we can go to a place of ‘thinking’ or analysing. But all our feelings are felt in our body. When we’re anxious we may feel butterflies in our stomach, when we’re sad we may feel a heaviness in our chest, when we’re angry or frustrated there may be a tightness in our chest or jaw.
By allowing ourselves to connect with our body’s experience in these moments of strong emotion we can begin to develop a different relationship with our emotional self. This can be a relationship that is more accepting and welcoming of painful feelings, rather than one in which we almost panic when difficult feelings are present and do our best to run away from them or numb them with alcohol, social media or busyness.