Difficult emotions

All emotions have the same trajectory.

Hard ones and easy ones.

Pick any emotion and it’s the same idea—the emotion arrives, stays, then departs.

Easy emotions are no problem. Arrive all you want! Stay as long as you can! Don’t depart too soon!

Difficult emotions? Yikes.

Plug in your least favorite emotion, and there you have it: arrival (unwelcome), stay (too long and too intense), and departure (unclear whether it will happen at all).

Overwhelm. Anger. Disgust. Fear. Hate. Sadness. Stress. Fill in the blank. All hard. I’ve heard that some people also find joy difficult and cut it short. I can see how that might happen too, although I tend to chase that one to its very end though.

No matter how much I practice staying in my body and feeling emotions, I still really (really) don’t like the difficult ones. I’m working on accepting that they’re part of life, part of being human. And the more I practice, the easier it does get. The rhythm of an emotion is becoming more familiar, and on special occasion, I recall that the emotion won’t last forever, even when it feels like it will. That might all sound ridiculous, but, well, um, that’s just where I’m at.

Possibly more importantly, I’m learning that I am capable—capable of feeling the discomfort and getting to the other side of it. And always (always), the other side feels better than avoiding and ignoring. I could use some help remembering that though.

On the other side, I am “in the world” instead of dissociated. On the other side, I feel alive. Maybe tired out from all that feeling, but alive just the same.

Complement with Lifespan of an Emotion and On Holding Space for Yourself.