Make Peace With Your Difficult Emotions
“The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.” — Nicholas Sparks.
What emotions do you repeatedly struggle with? It is anger, shame, anxiety, fear, or others? If we don’t deal with them, we are likely to re-experience them later. It’s easy to escape difficult emotions because who wants to face them again and again? But they can hold essential messages, and when they keep re-emerging, it is a sign we need to heal or transform something in our lives. The pain and suffering we experience are dangerous only when they are distant from us. What do I mean by this? Our painful emotions are risky because, from a distance, they cause us to suffer. But what if we become intimate with these feelings, instead of pushing them away?
That is, we get to know them on a deeper level, so we stop fighting and resisting them. For example, have you ever judged someone from afar, perhaps someone you didn’t like? Then, you got to know them and discovered they weren’t what you imagined? In fact, they were pleasant and likable. The same thing happens when we befriend our difficult emotions. We invite painful feelings to come closer and, in doing so, drop our resistance to them. Suddenly, they are no longer as frightening or overwhelming as we once thought.
When you make peace with your difficult emotions, they no longer have a grip on you, and you discover joy and freedom in your life. This freedom was always there, but the difficult emotions obscured it. After all, painful emotions can’t control you when you are intimate with them because the role of an emotion is to move through you, not get stuck in your mind and body. Yet, many people unknowingly hold on to negative emotions for years, even decades. In earlier articles, I mentioned the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who says an emotion takes two-and-a-half minutes to move through our nervous system.
Knowing this, it makes sense that we get to know our emotions more deeply, rather than ignoring them. So, to stop resisting complicated feelings, inhabit your body when they arise. For example, if you had a heated exchange with a friend or loved one and experienced fear and anger, move to the area of your body where those emotions are present and sit with them. Be with them until the emotion dissolves, and you will discover an expansive energy of love, joy, and freedom. People often ask me: How long does it take to be free of negative emotions? Will it come back once I’ve done this exercise?
Heal And Transform The Pain Of Your Past
“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, and simpler.” — Friedrich Nietzsche.
As mentioned earlier, it takes two-and-a-half minutes for an emotion to be processed through our nervous system. However, if we’ve ignored our difficult emotions for years, it may take longer to process them. There have been times I’ve experienced anxiety that lasted 30 seconds, and other times, I’ve experienced anger that lasted 30 minutes. It will depend on how long the emotion has been alive in our nervous system and whether we are willing to face it. Remember: difficult emotions teach us important lessons that we have ignored. They shine a light on something that requires our attention; otherwise, they will reappear, perhaps as a disease or illness, if we are not mindful.
Are you satisfied that complicated feelings don’t have to dominate your life? That you can make peace with them and learn the lessons they’re trying to impart? It’s worth repeating this idea, so you are not destined to repeat the same mistakes. To paint another analogy, what if someone continually showed up at your front door, and you didn’t answer? They might show up again until you open the door to see who it is. This is what happens with our difficult emotions. They keep returning, and we turn them away because we don’t want to deal with them. But we must learn to embrace our negative emotions because they can help us understand our past, so we don’t recreate it in the future.
So, if you’ve had a history of bad relationships with previous partners, pushing away your negative emotions may cause them to re-emerge in your next relationship. After all, you want to be in a healthy and loving relationship with a similar-minded person, don’t you? Then, it requires healing and transforming the pain of your past, so you don’t recycle it in your next relationship. Otherwise, we will carry our emotional baggage from the past and unload it on our future partner, claiming it is their fault for triggering our painful wounds. But it is not their fault because the wound was already present, and your partner is merely shining the light on the wound so you can heal and transform it. Therefore, to stop resisting your difficulties’ feelings, be open to the messages they carry, and you will come to realize that everything has been working out perfectly for your highest good.
The First Step Toward a Breakthrough
If you’re ready to move past what’s been holding you back and create real momentum, a 30-minute Breakthrough Coaching Session is the perfect place to begin. In just one focused conversation, we’ll uncover what’s keeping you stuck, shift your perspective, and help you design a clear next step toward meaningful progress.
Tony Fahkry
Expert Life Coach
