how to accept the discomfort of our hard feelings?

Feelings that are hard to swallow come at all times during the year. Mostly when we least expect it. Sometimes they creep up on us and we don’t know whether to act on them or what to do. A sense of paralysis can be overwhelming. It kinda makes you either dig a hole in earth and deal with whatever comes with those feelings or rip a wall off with your bare hands.

Hard feeling include but are not limited to grief, fear, incompetence, insecurity, guilt, regret, shame. e.t.c.

I am going to talk about those feelings in a way to encompass all of them and with a hint of personal experience. Therefore, the format of this blog will be more of an essay rather than a “how-to” Please take everything with a grain of salt and know that if you are struggling with your mental health, you should seek professional help.

Here are some international resources

Understanding our feelings

After some lengthy introductions, let’s start by saying that feelings are something very personal, but very universal. They are also something that we all experience in different ways. Our coping mechanisms are not the same and the reason one person feels fear might differ greatly from the way another feels fear. But there is something primal within us that allows us an empathy to understand how a person standing in front of us is experiencing an emotion.

Feelings are part of the response of our body to our environment. Sometimes that is our internal environment when we create fantasies and stories in our heads that generate feelings, and sometimes it’s our external environment.

The feelings from both are very real, and not one is less than the other.

What is different is that one seems more immediate and comes attached to something that is happening to us. These two environments connect the way all water in the world is. They often transfer the emotions between them, especially when they are intense.

Hard emotions

Losing someone, a change of heart, the jealousy of a best friend, the grief of childhood. They are emotions that stay, at least for a few days. The real question is, how do we deal with them?

Trying to escape these emotions can feel worse. It can cause the body to act up messing up with your sleep cycle, your hormones, and your appetite. But what happens when we are not trying to escape them but they are blocked? Does that awful feeling of not being able to cry feel familiar? That impotence drives hard feelings.

Whether your body is expressing it, it can often feel like we can’t do anything to get rid of it. And I think that’s where we are wrong.

I know that you have probably heard all the “feel your emotions” talk, but it’s way easier said than done. Especially when you have a whole life that is still happening and time is still going by. Not everyone can afford to pause their lives even if it’s necessary.

What do I do with these emotions?

Keep in mind that these emotions are yours. They are your humanity, your mundaneness. The way you deal with them is completely in your hands. What works for me is dropping into my body. Not superficially but in a trust fall kind of way. Becoming liquid and letting go. To do this, we have to trust ourselves. We have to trust that our liquidness will re-solidify.

When you become liquid and allow all the emotions to dawn on you, cry. Crying is the most divine release. If you can’t cry because there is enough tension, choose a wall and stare at it. It might sound really dumb, but on the wall you will find all the hidden feelings.

In the silence and in the stillness, you will find the release. In the fact that in that very moment, you have to do absolutely nothing and figure nothing out is how you will find calm. Because sometimes it is not the feeling of what has happened that is haunting us but the worry of what will happen next. Of the things that we need to do, or fix, or talk. But when you are with that wall, you are asked for nothing. You are asked to stop fantasizing, stop creating stories. Time is the one that is there for you.

The way time gives us relief and pain at the same time is astonishing. To know that you have time is both a blessing and a curse. But what happens when we choose to act slow instead of fast? Ask yourself if the decisions that come with those feelings need to happen right now, right at this moment? But be completely honest with yourself.

What would happen if you gave time for the feeling to linger and to settle into your body? What if there was an acceptance from your part towards this feeling? Acceptance and understanding for why is here and why it needs to be here. Or even acceptance and understanding of the notion that we can’t understand.

On fixing things

We want to fix, mend and repair all the time. I believe things sometimes need to stay broken for a bit. Allow yourself to get lost in the forest for a little while because there is where the transformation happens. Escaping the discomfort that any of these emotions brings is not allowing them to exist and fulfill their purpose.

The world moves so fast already; it is not chasing us; we don’t always need to run along. There is something about sitting in the liminal space of the unknown that lets us open up to these feelings. Like that wall.

I hope these words set some kind of peace with you, that they allow you to breathe for at least 5 seconds and to tell you that while you are on whatever part of the world feeling those hard human emotions, I am also in my little piece of it feeling them as well.

I believe that feeling our emotions is more of an art than a science.