Emotions are an inevitable part of our lives. Most of us enjoy the ones that feel good: happiness, excitement, satisfaction, and pride. The ones that aren’t quite as enjoyable: sadness, grief, anger, and disappointment, to name a few, can be a struggle to accept at times.
What happens when we experience emotions that make us uncomfortable? How do we cope when we don’t want to feel these emotions? Many people don’t know what to do when their emotions make them uncomfortable. With these tips and strategies, you can get through with clarity and peace.
Consider Why You Feel the Emotion
Emotions don’t typically come out of nowhere. Whether they’re enjoyable or uncomfortable, there is often an event or trigger behind it. For example, you may feel happy because you’re spending time with a loved one. Or you may feel angry because a coworker said something hurtful behind your back. In both cases, there is a reason behind happiness and anger.
Because events, and even our thoughts, trigger our emotions, it’s useful to consider why we feel the way we feel. If you’re upset, what caused it? Can you pinpoint the exact reason you feel uneasy? Once you get to the root of your emotion, you can go about fixing the issue that’s causing it, or even simply accept the emotion as valid.
Don’t Try to Block the Emotion
Many people try to block out or avoid things that they don’t like. It’s a common and understandable coping mechanism, but unfortunately, it’s only going to make things worse. You may want to block out your uncomfortable emotions, but when you do so, they will keep coming back and building up over time.
Instead of avoiding or blocking the emotion, allow yourself to feel it instead. Acknowledge and identify the emotion. It will likely be unpleasant, and you may not know what to do about it. Hold the emotion for a couple of minutes and feel it fully. You don’t have to wallow in the unpleasant emotion but make an effort to hold space for the emotion in you. Once you start feeling happier emotions again, you’ll feel that much better. Though uncomfortable emotions aren’t enjoyable, they do help us appreciate and embrace the happier ones.
Share Your Experiences with Friends
If you have friends the same age as you or at a similar place in life, you may benefit from sharing your thoughts and emotions with them. When you feel an uncomfortable emotion, you can run it by your friends and see what they think. Someone will likely have experienced a similar feeling, and they can explain how they worked through it.
When we feel uncomfortable emotions, it can feel incredibly isolating. We tend to think that no one else feels the way that we do or that we must suffer alone. Many people have likely felt the way that you do, and everyone experiences uncomfortable emotions sometimes. By opening up about your feelings with friends, you’ll realize that you aren’t alone, and that other people have felt the same way as you.
Consider Seeing a Therapist
While talking with your friends helps you find camaraderie in your uncomfortable emotions, seeing a therapist will help you take it a step further. You may be hesitant to see a therapist because then you’ll have to express your uncomfortable emotions, which is something that many people want to avoid. The only way to move past these uncomfortable emotions is to work through them, and therapy will help you do that.
Once you start to pinpoint the triggers for your uncomfortable emotions, you can start to understand them, accept them, manage them, and overcome them. You may feel angry, frustrated, or nervous much of the time, but you don’t quite understand why. Your therapist will help you figure out the “why” behind your emotions, and more importantly, how you can begin coping and moving forward. It’s not easy to feel uncomfortable emotions, though it is easy to try to avoid them. You can’t avoid them forever and the sooner you allow yourself to feel and understand them, the sooner you’ll get to a happier, healthier relationship with your emotions all-around.
The therapists at the Relationship Counseling Center of Austin work with couples and individuals to work through uncomfortable emotions in a safe way. If you need guidance on how to navigate the ups and downs of your own feelings, a therapist can help. Contact us by calling (512) 270-4883, or submit an online request on the RCC Austin Scheduling page.