Negative Emotions
Hello World!
Negative emotions - There’s a fun topic everyone loves!
“The pursuit of happiness”, “don’t worry be happy”… Many of us are taught that our goal in life is to be happy. That it’s something to strive for. And I don’t think advertising companies have any problems with us having this state of mind keeps us as willing consumers.
I actually even remember googling “How do I become happy"?” one time (one time… A DAY) during my darkest times, because I thought that there was something wrong with me for having negative emotions. I thought, “I should be happy, but I’m not. I must be doing something wrong…”
But here is the truth:
Life is 50/50.
Half the time you feel positive emotions, and half the time you feel negative emotions. When you feel negative emotions, nothing has gone wrong, you are just a normal human being having a normal human experience.
People think they want to be happy all the time, but they really don’t. If someone you love dies, you don’t want to feel happy, you want to feel sad. If there is an injustice in the world, you don’t want to feel ok about it, you want to get angry. Without negative emotions we would also not be able to know what a positive emotion was.
When I say “negative”, I don’t mean “bad”, I just mean that it falls somewhere along the “unpleasant” spectrum.
The problem with negative emotions aren’t that they exist, but what we usually do with them: avoid, resist or react. And this response is what creates problems. We try to escape our emotional life and numb with social media (hello my numbing agent of choice!), or Netflix, or food, or whatever; or we push it down; or we let it fuel our actions that cause us to show up in way we don’t love, ways that when we think of them aren’t really who we want to be. We create all this turmoil in order to not feel, and not only is it still there, but we layer on self-judgement usually too. For me the cycle was:
Negative emotion —> Escape with IG —> Self judgement for using IG —> Negative emotion —> Escape with IG…
So how do you stop the cycle?
Feel the feeling. Instead of rejecting it (and yourself), what would it look like to accept it? What would it look like to fully allow it, to breathe it in and welcome it?
We are afraid to allow negative feelings because we think that if we do they will never leave. But the opposite is true. When you process it through, you realize that though it may be uncomfortable, it’s not as bad as you think. The escaping might feel comfortable in some ways, but it is also escaping your true emotional experience. If you escape it, it means that you actually can’t address what was causing it in the first place. Feeling it puts you in a place of power. And negative feelings can’t hurt you. They are simply vibrations that stay for a while and then leave. They want to be felt. They are there to teach you something and when you allow them, sometimes you learn that it’s just You tapping on your own shoulder asking to be acknowledged.
What is a negative feeling you often feel, and if you closed your eyes and concentrated on it, how would you describe how it feels in your body?
If you are struggling with negative emotions and would like some help on how to process them, I would love to offer you a free coaching session so we can work on it together.