The Courage to Stay with What We Feel

we’ve learned to run away from unpleasant emotions. It’s almost an instinctive reaction to escape feelings like fear, pain, or shame. Since childhood, we’ve carried pain we couldn’t express, and over the years, more painful experiences have been added moments when our emotions weren’t acknowledged or validated. We’re afraid that if we touch even slightly the sadness we carry, it might awaken all the buried feelings inside us. To reduce the pain, we developed strategies to “cut off the edges,” to numb or blur the discomfort so we don’t have to feel it. These strategies helped us survive as children, but as adults, they often hurt us, harm our relationships, and limit our lives. Research shows that we can’t truly avoid our emotions. It might seem to work in the short term, but in the long run, it leads to inner chaos.

Throughout my life, I’ve struggled with anger. I used to act out of anger and it didn’t lead to good results, nor did it solve the anger itself. In fact, it only grew stronger. I learned that instead of acting on anger, a more effective way is to observe it to feel the alive energy of anger in the body, which feels like burning fire. To allow it to be there, a little at a time, as much as I can. Gradually, beneath the anger, I discovered deep sadness and pain about goals I couldn’t reach, injustices in the world, and feelings of loneliness and not belonging. Allowing the pain to exist opened the door to self-compassion and to a sense of shared humanity that includes suffering as part of life. Accepting reality with the pain and sadness that come with it allows movement toward clarity and a more meaningful life.

Emotions carry messages. Fear, for example, warns us that something might threaten our physical or emotional safety. From an evolutionary perspective, fear had an important role in survival — without it, we wouldn’t have lived long. Fear used to signal danger, like a tiger chasing us, so we could run away. Today, many of our fears are leftovers from evolution, they don’t match the real situations we face. We sense something, interpret it as danger, and the body activates a fight-or-flight response. To tell the difference between real and imagined fears, we need to notice when fear fits the situation and when it doesn’t. It’s not always easy, fear can sneak in in many forms, and it’s often hard to catch in real time. Once fear takes hold, our body tenses, which can lead to more distress. Our goal isn’t to suppress fear or act it out, but to move closer to what feels threatening so it loses its power over us. This is how we can slowly free ourselves from it.

Our emotions guide us through life. They help us connect to ourselves and to others. They are not who we are, but when we believe we are our emotions, we get “taken over” by them, and they start to control our behavior. Recognizing an emotion is the first step toward change. Usually, there’s a triggering event before an emotion appears. We can pause and ask: What happened just before this feeling arose? What triggered it? When fear comes up, we might ask: What feels threatening right now? Am I truly in danger at this moment? We can also bring curiosity to our emotions: Where do I feel this in my body? How strong is it? How does it change from moment to moment? What thoughts come with this emotion? When thoughts keep looping in our mind, it’s often a sign that we’re avoiding the feeling beneath them. In those moments, we can pause and ask: What am I running away from right now? Then gently return to the body, to slow and mindful breathing. Sometimes thoughts like I can’t take this anymore or this will never end will appear, but if we pay gentle attention to the sensations in the body, we can notice that emotions, just like thoughts, come and go like waves. Each wave passes through us and leaves us more connected and whole.

We wouldn’t want to live without emotions. Without them, life would lack color, depth, and meaning. The courage to feel what we usually label as “unpleasant” is what expands our compassion toward ourselves and others. It’s where our emotional resilience and wellbeing grow. Sometimes we need to understand an emotion, and sometimes just to observe and let it move through us. Instead of resisting, suppressing, denying, or avoiding, we can meet what’s alive in us with soft acceptance including our vulnerability and imperfection. With patience, we may discover that paying attention to our emotions is, in fact, paying attention to all of life.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

Carl Rogers

Picture taken from DBT course by Marsha M. Linehan