Just sit with it.
How would you feel if I told you you had to spend the next hour sitting quietly in a room with no distractions or entertainment? No phones, tvs or ipads. Over and over I see clients struggle with the fear of being alone with their thoughts and feelings. This commonly presents as anxiety, and can feel like an urgent need to be constantly ‘doing’ to avoid feeling. The idea of having no distractions and even spending just a few minutes alone thinking about their feelings can really terrify people.
There’s something about the idea of just sitting quietly with your emotions that makes a lot of people squirm. Telling people I was writing a piece about sitting with uncomfortable emotions was met with a lot of ‘ewww's' and ‘yuck, I can’t do that’ from just about every person I told. The concept of being alone with our thoughts is so terrifying to so many people, it’s a driving factor for why a lot of people come to therapy in the first place. And it’s not surprising, how many times were you told to stop crying when you were little? Or not to be sad? Or not to be angry? Or to feel something you didn’t and stumble through a forced apology or a forced hug? We have all been conditioned to disconnect from our authentic feelings and bodies and act like we’re okay even when we’re not for as long as most of us can remember. Yes, society, we have a lot of un-learning to do.
We live in a world that has ill-prepared us how to manage our natural emotions. In our fast-paced world that encourages, and even celebrates, busyness people rarely stop to sit with themselves and process all the feelings that have come up for them. Because who has time for that? Having a long to do list has become a defence people use to avoid dealing with things (or relationships or feelings). Now, when there is a rare moment of solitude, it's a chance to reach for your phone instead. What would really benefit you instead though, would be to just sit with your body. Stop. Take a few deep breaths. And feel the feelings you’ve been avoiding.
Repeatedly pushing away uncomfortable emotions can lead to a lot of stuck energy in your body. Over a long period of time this energy has to go somewhere. Until you can start to process and release your feelings, they will continue to get louder and louder until they are acknowledged. So, developing a practice of learning how to work through them is definitely better than numbing them or pushing them away. As is the case with most things in life, dealing with it is better than not dealing with it. And when it comes to uncomfortable emotions, if you never feel them, you’ll never be able to heal them.
This is where therapy can be really helpful. If you have spent a lifetime pushing your feelings away, you likely have a lot of things under the surface you can’t make sense of that need to be processed. So how does therapy work? Why should you tell a stranger all your uncomfortable feelings? Because it forces you to take time out in your busy life and start to sit with and process your feelings.
Whatever it is you’ve been trying to avoid, between work and the dishes and your to-do list, that memory or memories that still creep up on you and knock the breath out of you when you least expect them to. That’s what you actually need to sit with instead of trying to push or numb away. Therapy requires us to participate in this essential practice of introspection most of us could use a lot more of (even therapists) – sitting with our uncomfortable feelings. It’s in the moments when you finally allow yourself to feel the full spectrum of the pain and discomfort you’ve been avoiding for so long, that you can finally start to ‘heal’, or come to terms with your emotions. Pain wants to be felt. It wants recognition. It doesn’t like staying trapped inside your mind and body for years and years. It wants to come out. You just have to let it.
The idea of re-visiting old wounds can be overwhelming, even terrifying to some people – but the good news is that feelings are temporary. In the process of acknowledging them, somehow they lose some of their emotional intensity. Experiencing or re-visiting them in therapy and having them be witnessed by another is even more powerful. Through the process of navigating and accepting your feelings and experiences, the intense emotions you have around them can start to lessen. Pain wants to be felt, but it doesn’t want to stay with us forever. It is a teacher, here to teach us important lessons. Once it’s been acknowledged, we can take what we need to learn from it and then it can finally let go of its hold on us.
Pain and discomfort come in so many different shapes and sizes that sometimes we don’t even know that’s what they are. When we choose to suppress or ignore big feelings, they can take on other forms in our body and lead to a whole host of physical conditions. I am a big believer in the body-mind connection, and I’m grateful that Western medicine is finally catching up with this concept (slowly but surely). Suppressing our emotions can have serious consequences both physically and emotionally. Developing a regular practice of emotional expression is an essential wellbeing practice.
Neuroscientist and author of ‘Whole Brain Life’, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, explains in her TED Talk how feelings are fleeting and, when given the right set of circumstances, should pass through your body in about 90 seconds (if you allow them to). While there is no right or wrong way to process emotions as they arise, a suggested formula to help your emotions naturally work their way through you instead of getting stuck is as follows:
1: Acknowledge the feeling that has come up and identify what it is. It can be helpful to name the emotion and where you feel it in your body. For example, there is a tightness in my chest and my shoulders feel tense. I feel angry.
2: Sit with whatever it is you’re feeling for a full 90-seconds. Don’t do anything else. Take deep breaths and just observe what is coming up in your body.
3: Don’t judge yourself. Imagine you are a small child and you just need to be seen and heard. Practice acceptance and compassion for yourself.
4: Move your body. Go for a walk. Jump up and down. Shake it out. Dance. Run. Help shift the stuck energy out of your system (this is why animals physically shake when they are afraid - they are passing the energy through their bodies).
5: Repeat steps 2-4 as many times as necessary!
“It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting better at feeling.”
- Dr. Gabor Maté