Emotional acceptance

I’VE gotten so many emails recently on how to overcome certain emotions. While I will tackle a few of these in time, I think many are underestimating a very important mental health tool: emotional acceptance.

Emotional acceptance is the willingness and ability to experience what we are told (and believe to be) negative emotions. These can be stress, sadness, guilt, fear, anger etc.
Dreams, goals, plans and life, in general, comes with these hardships and let downs so attempting to avoid these emotions are futile. These feelings are inevitable so we are better off relinquishing to them and instead be prepared to healthily deal with them.

Many of us tend to shy away from how we really feel. We may be embarrassed or become even more guilty or angry at ourselves for feeling the way we do. Although these emotions are considered negative, I believe just the opposite. They shouldn’t even be called negative emotions as they serve a great purpose in our lives.

For you to accept this advice, it would be beneficial that you know and understand the purpose of emotions in the first place. They provide a platform for information about what is happening around us, how we feel towards it and sometimes even how to behave in the particular situation.

Think about it – If we do not feel fear, we participate in recklessness. If we don’t feel guilt, we could never repent or practice redemption. If we don’t feel any stress, then are we really challenging ourselves as individuals? If we don’t feel bad or low sometimes, how would we know what areas in our life need special attention?

You see, sometimes in life, we could be doing everything that we feel is right and still feel wrong; still feel like we aren’t doing anything right. However, it’s important to know that the more we fight these emotions, the worse we feel and the longer we experience them. My advice is to surrender to them.

Emotions such as sadness, guilt or anger allow us to determine what our individual wants, needs, desires and even personal boundaries are. Without these feelings, I don’t think it is possible for us to truly know ourselves. I don’t think it is possible for others to properly know us either, which means our relationships suffer.

It would help us to view ‘negative emotions’ as motivators that are trying to send us a message. They are informing us that we feel a certain way because we aren’t satisfied with our current situation; that we still have somewhere to go. These ‘negative emotions’ are reminders that there are still things that we want or desire and more importantly that they are within our reach. It means that our journey is not quite finished yet. Therefore, these emotions should be providing hope as they can generate positive change.

We are often told to hide our feelings, to put on brave faces and smile even when we don’t feel like. I believe that is terrifically bad advice as it both forces and encourages people to feel guilty or ashamed of normal and essential emotions. Instead of using our energy to fight off these emotions, we should use the energy to healthily and effectively deal with how we feel. This allows us to constantly build our coping skills and our ability to be resilient. This means that every time we feel sad, angry or any other ‘negative emotion’ and we effectively deal with it, we are building a more capable and resourceful self. That is never something to be ashamed of.

Please remember a few things.
1. Accepting a ‘negative emotion’ actually forces it to lose its destructive power. Instead, we learn what is meaningful in our lives and practice personal growth.

2. If we don’t permit ourselves the lows, then we automatically reduce the satisfaction of the highs. The point of life isn’t to be happy all the time (as sadly, that’s impossible) but rather how to healthily deal with the times when we are not.

I’ve created a new life motto for my ‘bad days’ which I hope will help you all as well. It goes “I’ve had a bad day but that’s okay- let tomorrow come anyway!”
Thanking you for reading. Please keep sending any topics you’d like to talk about to caitlinvieira@gmail.com

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