We are all feeling a lot right now. With the state of the world and just us being humans, we are always feeling a wide range of emotions.

We have to learn how to understand and be with each and every emotion whether desired or not.

So love, get ready to go deep as we dive into the heavier emotions like sadness, frustration, anger, and overwhelm (just to name a few).

Sometimes, in the world of self-growth, we tend to overlook these types of feelings. We often want to focus more on “positive” stuff like feeling motivated, happy, and grounded.

But, we’re human.

And that means experience the full range of emotions.

So, we’re going to talk about what holds us back from processing, feeling, and navigating those more difficult feelings.

Difficult emotions are challenging. But, what makes them more challenging is our fear of them.

We fear feeling heavy emotions. There’s a fear to touching them, looking at them, and allowing ourselves to actually feel them.

I’ve found that there are 2 big fears around feeling these difficult emotions:

1. We are afraid that the difficult feelings mean we are regressing on our growth journey

2. We are afraid that if we go there, that it’s going to be too much and we won’t be able to navigate them

With all fear, usually our fear of the thing is far worse than the actual thing. Our fear of these emotions is usually MUCH scarier than actually processing and feeling the emotions.

When we allow ourselves to do the scary thing, we allow ourselves to step into courage and we show ourselves that we are so damn capable of navigating our way through the challenging times.

So, let’s look further at these 2 big fears.

The fear of regressing on our growth journey

When I first entered into the world of wellness, growth, and healing, those first moments were really exciting.

I was unconvering all of these truths and touching on old wounds. It can be a messy time, but it’s so enlightening at first. You start to feel lighter, happier, and joyful. When the difficult feelings come up, I felt I could work through them in a really healthy way.

Then, at some point, something shifted. Life happened. Something very difficult and challenging would come up and the feelings I thought I’d never feel again are right there.

And then you think, “Wait… what am I doing wrong? Why am I feeling these things? Am I going backwards?”

I thought that the purpose of self-growth and healing was that I was NEVER supposed to feel any of the more challenging feelings ever again.

And love, I really laugh about that now!

Truth is, I was having a very human experience. It’s all apart of the journey.

Brooke Castillo says that an amazing life is supposed to feel 50% incredible and 50% terrible and that that is a ratio to an amazing life.

So then, what is the point of all of this growth work? It’s to give us the tools to better navigate the moments where the heavier, more difficult feelings do come up.

The point of this work is not to feel amazing all of the time. When we falsely believe this, in those very human moments, we’re not only feeling a lot less awesome, we’re also judging ourselves for doing growth the “wrong” way.

The fear of getting stuck in emotions

This is a fear many of us are aware of. We fear that if we allow ourselves to even touch this difficult feeling, we will get stuck.

We worry that we aren’t going to be able to make our way through, that it’ll be all too overwhelming.

So, what do we do?

We run from feeling the feeling.

Even as a coach, I still do this. And I know that the best thing to do is to process these feelings, to sit with them, and to work through them.

I once heard emotions described as energy in motion. When we have an emotion, it’s energy in our bodies and if we don’t allow that energy to move in and through our bodies in a healthy way, it’s going to manifest in another way.

For some of us, it moves outwards as unintended reactions to others. It can be unkindness or impatience.

For some, it goes inward and we become those things to ourselves.

When we avoid feeling our emotions, we think we are bypassing feeling the feelings, but instead, they’re just manifesting in other ways that are ultimately unkind to ourselves and others.

And looking at those emotions as the energy in motion, avoiding feeling and processing them leaves that energy within our bodies needing somewhere to go. So, it sits with us. It stays with us. We prolong processing the feelings.

When I allow myself to finally feel the feelings, I feel a true release.

The more we allowe ourselves to do this scary thing of feeling the heavier emotions, the more we show ourselves that we CAN do it.

We have the tools to do it. We have the resilience to do it.

But love, you need to do it to show yourself that you can do it.

Tune into the podcast to hear the full episode — 183 | Navigating Difficult Feelings

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About your host, Shirin Eskandani