Negative Emotions

 Lately I've been working on something. I'm trying to learn how to face my negative emotions head-on and deal with them. It's something I was never taught growing up. Instead I had to learn all of the same defense mechanisms everybody else did: run away, get angry, deny reality, etc.

None of these ways of dealing with unpleasant feelings is helpful. Usually they only make things worse and increase the unpleasant emotions. I thought that if I could learn to look at them without flinching, maybe in time I would be able to do that automatically and not get overwhelmed when I'm taken by surprise by them, as life tends to do. 

I've been talking to the people around me about this, and it seems as if we all had the same experience in terms of not getting any guidance on how to handle being sad or angry or disappointed or distraught. The adults couldn't teach us what they were unable to do themselves. This is a giant blind spot for humanity in general, because we largely refuse to go there at all. My proposal is that it is important, and that having the ability to deal with negative emotions will increase our resilience for whatever the future is bringing us. It might be rough. Best to be prepared for it. 

What I notice most of all is peoples' terror of pain. I understand it with physical pain, and I will concede that some emotional pain is terrible beyond words, but I also think that we are much more capable of surviving and dealing with emotional pain than we assume. Most of the time it will not kill you, and you live on to heal from it. It's our refusal even to look at or acknowledge it that makes it harder. Sometimes you need to rip off the bandage and take a good look at what is under it. 

I also see people suffering for a lot longer than they would have had to because they get stuck in their pain and they can't move on with their lives. Years get wasted this way. It is our ignorance of ourselves and emotions that keeps us stumbling around in the darkness, trying to make sense of it for ourselves. This is even worse for men, because they're encouraged to bottle their emotions and deny them. No wonder they do the things they do. Maybe that was always the purpose. Emotionally crippled people are easier to manipulate, after all. 

I have this feeling that to be whole, healthy people, we need to be able to deal with both the good and the bad in ourselves. We need to be able to tolerate feeling bad once in a while or else we hold it in and end up feeling bad all of the time. Life is made of frustration and disappointment and grief, and not being able to deal with reality on its own terms only makes things worse for us. Unless we can tolerate feeling bad, we can never really be happy.