Why Letting Ourselves Feel Bad Is the Key to Feeling Better

For as long as I can remember, I have been in the business of making a living. Ever since I was very young I remember feeling different from my peers. I was constantly embarrassed and paralyzed by insecurity and fear, which left me in a state of constant self-loathing.

The hardships of my youth, including my father's suicide, left me convinced that life was hard.

Unfortunately, I also thought that it shouldn't have happened and that something was wrong with me because I was in so much pain in my life. My head shook in embarrassment and I wondered, “What is wrong with me? Why am I able to skip this, or that? ”

My solution to the pain I felt was to fight back and overcome all the difficult feelings I had.

I truly believed that I just needed to find the right formula, accomplished, and great steps, and then I would not have these painful feelings and I would eventually feel right on my skin.

Along the way, I achieved all the goals I had set for myself: I lost weight, graduated, made money, made many treatments; I built a life where everything looked the way it should, but I still suffer from fear and insecurity.

The goal I was going to fix would not only add insult to injury, because my main process of thinking that something was wrong with me and if I wanted to be happy, as I thought everyone was, then I needed to stop having what I was experiencing had seen "bad" feelings.

Instead of giving myself a break, I found a way to resist the most.

I constantly fought with myself, and every time I felt uncomfortable, I would jump on the bandwagon and begin to change. I could not distinguish between "I have a 'bad feeling,' and" I'm bad. "

When we react negatively to our negative emotions, treating them as enemies who should be defeated, removed, and defeated, we run into trouble. Our unhappy response can cause what may be short-lived, turning grief into persistent dissatisfaction and utter unhappiness.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try to avoid emotional pain, it follows us everywhere. Strong emotions, such as embarrassment, anger, loneliness, fear, despair, confusion, are a natural part of human experience. It is simply not possible to avoid feeling bad.

However, we can learn how to deal with difficult feelings in a new, healthy way, by making the acceptance of our feelings, fully accepting them as they are, for a moment. For me, this has meant creating space in my life for all aspects of the experience, up and down.

Unfortunately, in Western culture very few of us have been given the tools to cope with our difficult feelings, or those of someone else. Not only do we want to avoid suffering in every way, we want to prevent the people we care about from experiencing their pain.

I recently found myself in a situation where I had suffered a loss in the past, and even though it had been two years since the loss, I found myself in a state of shock, as if it had just happened yesterday.

Through my grief, I reached out to a few friends with comfort and wondered how hard it was for them to put up with my difficult feelings.

In an effort to help, they sought to alleviate my grief and told me such things as I had always felt sorry for myself; that I needed to practice additional gratitude for that moment.

Also, they were not trying to harm; they were trying to help me stop feeling sad.

Thankfully, I did enough work on this process to realize that this was not what I needed. At that moment, I just wanted to let myself be sad.

I knew the feeling would not last forever and I had a choice, I might have pulled it out by fighting with me, or I could see that, for whatever reason, at that moment, I was just feeling sad.

Also, our reaction to our difficult feelings can turn what might have been just a moment, passing (as has always happened to me in this situation) into endless dissatisfaction and unhappiness (twenty years of my life).

By learning to testify of our pain and respond with kindness and understanding, rather than greeting difficult feelings by fighting them, we open ourselves to real healing and new life experiences; this is a feeling.

If you are prone to self-pity because you feel sad or lonely, if you are hiding in the world whenever you make a mistake, or if you are constantly worried about how you could prevent a mistake in the first place, compassion may seem like an impossible idea. But it is important that we embrace this idea if we want to live truly free.

When we fight emotional pain, we get caught up in it. Strong emotions become destructive and destroy the mind, body, and spirit. Emotions are trapped, cooled in time, and then we stick to it.

The happiness we crave in a relationship seems to fade. Satisfaction at work is beyond our control. We pull ourselves up during the day, arguing with our physical aches and pains.

Often we do not know how many of these daily problems are based on how we cope with the inevitable hardships of life. The problem is not so much sadness, but how our minds react to grief.

Change comes naturally when we open ourselves up to emotional pain with extraordinary kindness. Instead of criticizing, criticizing, and trying to correct ourselves when things go wrong or we feel bad, we can start by feeling sorry for ourselves. This simple change, or not at all, can make a big difference in your life.