A Counterintuitive Guide to Dealing With Negative Emotions

You have to embrace them before they will go away.

A friend of mine video-called me yesterday. She is going through a breakup at the moment, so she wasn’t exactly in the best mood. At one point, she started to cry. The moment the tears started rolling down her face, she turned the phone camera away, pulled herself together and then appeared on my phone screen again, smiling.

Her behaviour is the epitome of what people do when they experience negative emotions.

During the last couple of years, a lot of human beings have opened up to me. They told me about their secrets, dreams, fears, emotions and about what moves them deep inside. That is because, in every conversation I have, I strive to create a safe environment for people to unload by actively listening, asking the right questions, being trustworthy and non-judgmental.

Whenever someone told me about the negative emotions that they experience and how they deal with them, I noticed a similar pattern.

Instead of feeling and embracing the negative emotions, the moment they start to get even a hint of it, they do one of the following. They act stoic and cool, pretending that the shit they’re going through doesn’t even bother them or they deny the emotion altogether.

If denial doesn’t work, then it is straight into distraction, into taking the focus away from the negative feeling — e.g. through Netflix, sex, playing games, becoming a workaholic or doing drugs. Or they might suppress whatever feelings they have and suck them up, never bringing them to attention, never dealing with them.

People will bend over backwards to avoid negative feelings.

The only thing that they don’t do, however, is allowing themselves to feel. To give in to the emotion, to embrace it and let it flow through them. Funnily enough, this is also the only thing that enables you to let go for good.

Resistance Only Causes More Pain

As the saying goes “Whatever you resist, persists.” If you want to let go of a negative emotion for good, you have to get rid of your resistance and let it go right through you.

‘The tendency to avoid emotional suffering is the cause of all mental illness. To lead a healthy spiritual life you have to face problems directly and experience the pain involved.’— Scott Peck

I know this is very counterintuitive, but think of it this way: On the one hand, there is the pain you experience. A breakup, stress at work or the loss of a loved one. This pain is like a bullet.

When something bad happens, this pain bullet gets fired at you (bang), aimed right at your heart (ouch).

Now you have two options.

You can either build resistance by setting up a brick wall, protecting yourself from all the pain that gets fired at you. Or you can become a fluid ocean, allowing the pain and negative emotions to go right through you like they are hitting water.

Have you ever watched a video of a gun nerd on YouTube firing rounds of ammunition into something solid, like a brick wall? While the bricks may stop the bullets, they get destroyed in the process. They explode, sending shrapnel and debris all around and after enough shots, the place will look like Hiroshima 1945.

But if you fire shots into an ocean, it’s a completely different story. The rounds cut right through the water, slowly losing their energy, leaving no trace or damage behind, sinking to the dark depths, and ultimately dissolving in the ether. After the turbulence has cleared, the water is still the same — no damage has been done.

By embracing the pain, you will allow it to dissolve. By letting go of your resistance, you will let go of your negative emotions.

Embrace the Pain

This is easier said than done. We’ve spent our whole lives living under the notion that practicing vulnerability will hurt us, that allowing these negative emotions is like opening the gates of hell.

But there is a very simple, three-step process you can use to let go of your resistance and therefore your negative emotions. All you need is a quiet place and some time for yourself.

1. Become aware of what is happening

Think of whatever negative emotion you want to let go of. It might be disappointment because you didn’t get accepted by your dream job, it might be betrayal because your partner cheated on you or it might be sadness and loss because someone close to you died.

Now, I want you to close your eyes and focus on the present moment. Get out of your head and connect with your body. Feel where the pain and negative emotion lies exactly. Is it in your chest, in your forehead, in your stomach or your back? How does it feel? Is it a tingling sensation, pressure which makes you feel tight or a hollow space yearning to be filled?

Don’t judge these sensations, simply become aware of them. Become aware of which part of your body the pain bullet is aimed and how it makes you feel.

2. Experience it fully

Once you are aware of where the pain sits, you can open yourself up to it. Take down your brick wall and become a wide, open ocean. Allow the bullet to hit you.

Don’t try to do anything about the pain but sit there and acknowledge it. Focus on the feeling, but don’t try to label, understand, change or get rid of it.

Allow the bullet to enter the water, allow the pain to simply exist and experience it.

3. Let it come up and let it out

Once you get rid of your resistance and turn from a brick wall into water, you can allow yourself to feel the sensations and emotions that are bothering you. You can allow them to go their natural course. You can allow yourself to hurt.

Embrace them. Welcome them. Have the bullets go through you as they wish. Be curious about this process and monitor them closely: Where do the bullets go? Which path does the pain take? Where does it come from, where does it go and what emotions does it cause?

By embracing and feeling your emotions and allowing the pain to go right through you, the bullets will lose their energy. They will become slower and slower until they run out of steam and sink to the ground. The negative energy they brought with them gets released through you — either through crying, screaming, cursing or sitting there in silence and allowing it to flow through you and evaporate.

And in the end, after all the turbulence and waves have cleared, the surface of the ocean becomes still again, unharmed by what went through it before.

When people are with me and they cry, there is one simple sentence that always turns their world upside down: “Let it out.” They usually give me a weird look when I tell them this, first not allowing themselves to give in.

It isn’t what they expect because usually when you are bawling your eyes out, people tell you that everything is going to be okay and you should stop crying.

But when I insist and tell them to give in and stop resisting, they go through something you could describe as a cleansing ritual. The simple fact of encouraging someone to let it out makes a hell of a difference. It takes away their resistance and therefore, their pain.

Become an Ocean

I know that all of this can sound very scary. Negative emotions can be quite intimidating and forceful and giving in to them is not easy. Big changes and progress don’t come overnight and dealing with your emotions is no exception. Taking a big .50 calibre pain bullet is going to be a lot harder than dealing with a 9mm, so you need to start small and practice on a daily basis.

There are a couple of things which I have found to be real game-changers in this regard. These are:

• Meditation. The cornerstone of developing awareness and getting in tune with your body and mind. If you are not aware of something, how do you want to work it? So sit down and focus, five minutes a day will be enough for starters.
• Journaling. Journaling about your thoughts and emotions is yet another powerful technique to become aware of what exactly is going on within you. Ever had the experience that your thoughts unravelled while you were talking about them? Well, journaling is like talking to a piece of paper. By writing, you explore and examine your inner self. I got a little notebook from the dollar store. Scribble down whatever comes to your mind about how you feel or felt that day. $1 and a couple of minutes a day for peace of mind sounds like a great deal to me.
• Talking about emotions. This is the same principle as journaling, but if you are lucky to have someone in your circle of friends you can talk to about the (negative) emotions you experience, do it! Plus, having someone to listen to you and being able to unload is great stress relief.

This technique does not only work well for acute emergencies and for the big bullets that hit you. It can also be used to teach you how to handle your emotions in a healthy way in general and achieve emotional maturity.

‘Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is… The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.’— Dan Millman

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