Troubling Emotions

By Alison Heyerdahl

How comfortable are you with troubling emotions? Are you able to feel them and look at them? Most of us try and push them away or attempt to fix those situations outside of us we think are causing our emotions.  This is a natural reaction because the discomfort they evoke often causes physical pain.  The problem is, the more we push them away or repress our negative emotions, the more they demand to be recognized.  In effect, we prolong their presence in our lives.

Why do we experience emotion?

Surprisingly, emotions are encoded in our DNA.  In the past, they helped us respond appropriately to various threats, much like our ‘fight or flight’ response.  In evolutionary terms, those who were more alert ‘made it’, so to speak, and so our brains have developed over eons to scan our environment for danger.  The threats we face these days are not so much about being eaten by predators, but about losing our jobs or partners, or about our children getting sick, and many other seemingly innocuous problems.  While these don’t pose a direct threat to our lives, they have the same effect on the chemistry in our brains.  The running commentary in our minds might be something like, ”I’ll never be able to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting… I know there were some groceries to pick up, but what were they? I forgot to reply to Sally’s message on Snapchat…”  And while this anxiety provokes us into action, the long-term effects of this type of stress can be very damaging. 

They are signals to disengage from what we’re doing, take a mini-break, and come back to address our circumstances with an open mind.

Do we want to overcome and stop troubling emotions altogether?

The short answer is no. 

Our emotions provide us with feedback on the safety of our environment and our capacity to handle different situations.  While it is normal for us to be repelled by negative emotions, it would be severely detrimental not to experience these emotions at all.  They are incredibly healthy and helpful for navigating our way through life. Furthermore, it is not a sign of weakness or low emotional intelligence to experience a negative emotion, and in fact, repressing these emotions can lead to further emotional pain.

Moreover, no emotion is without purpose.  They provide us with essential information and stimulate appropriate responses.  For example, guilt is our moral compass, indicating that we may have said something or behaved in a way that was hurtful to someone else.  It has been found that people who are more prone to guilt are less likely to steal, do drugs or resort to violence.

While we do not want to be overcome by or wholly immersed in negative emotion all the time, we must accept and learn from its presence in our lives. 

How do you deal with troubling emotions?

Rather than becoming stuck in a cycle of repressing negative emotions, we need to welcome them and accept them in our lives.  In facing and understanding our emotions, we learn new ways to respond to them, supporting our emotional growth and well-being. 

Meditation is a powerful means for exploring troubling emotions, allowing us to label them mentally.  Labeling our emotions helps us cut the attachment to these negative emotions. When you go inwards and fully experience these emotions without judgment, you become disentangled or "unstuck."  Research shows that experiencing and labeling difficult emotions deactivates the amygdala—a brain structure that registers threat—causing it to become less active and less likely to trigger a stress reaction in the body.  Instead of becoming lost and wholly identified with the emotion, meditation allows us to view these emotions objectively, and thereby develop healthy emotional responses. It essentially gives us emotional freedom because we create space around our emotions and can then respond to them from a heightened perspective.

Think of your emotions as storms that are passing by. Your consciousness is a clear, blue sky, and your emotions are like clouds that float through your mind. When your emotions become overwhelming, it’s like a big thunderstorm is raging through your skies.  The more willing you are to allow the storm to pass through without resistance, the faster the clear skies of consciousness return.   

Conclusion

Although it may seem like something is going wrong when you are feeling troubling emotions, there is actually nothing to fix or change.  As we have learned, our emotions serve a wide variety of purposes.  They provide essential information and provoke us into action.  Meditation helps us to acknowledge, experience, and label our emotions, weakening our identification with them. It also allows us to realize that we are not our emotions.  This perspective creates an open psychological space between us and our emotions, giving us emotional freedom.

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