Why we do it and why it’s so bad for us.
Feelings. They are freakin’ everywhere if you’re a living breathing human, but boy do we try to avoid them.
Say for instance, fear. When’s the last time you felt it’s presence and didn’t find yourself reaching for your phone or some ice cream to soften the ugliness of that emotion?
It’s what our society does and it’s what most of us witnessed our parents doing as we grew up.
We saw emotions get processed in one of two ways:
- Reacting or
- Resisting/Avoiding.
Reacting looks like that 45-minute cry session you had after 3 weeks of keeping it all together.
Or the outbursts of yelling and losing your shit with your kids cause you just can’t seem to keep it inside anymore.
Resisting/Avoiding goes hand in hand with reacting as it’s like the sneaky build up before the storm.
This looks like numbing your brain with Netflix, food, productivity, alcohol, shopping, cleaning, etc. to distract yourself from feeling.
But here’s the thing, humans are not built for emotion storage.
We’re meant to be processors of emotion, letting it come up, be felt, and pass through us.
But somewhere along the way, we got the message that negative emotions are bad and we need to avoid them. That the whole goal of life is to be happy.
“Isn’t it called ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ for goodness sake?! Then why do I keep feeling all this other crap?!”
Well here’s the reality.
Life just isn’t happy all the time.
In fact, if you really get honest with yourself, you’ll see that it’s much closer to 50/50 – 50% positive emotions and 50% negative.
And why that’s so important is because, when we want it to be sunshine and daisies every day and it’s not, we resist and react and make it way worse than it really is.
I like to use the visual of a tea kettle on the stove.
When we are constantly resisting, it’s like the stove is always on, and the pressure inside just keeps building and building until it finally screams out of us through reacting.
But thankfully, you don’t have to feel like a tea kettle fully pressurized and ready to burst all the time…
(Check back next week for part 2 and how to feel your emotion rather than resist/react/and avoid it.)