When We Avoid Emotions We Don’t Like, Our Lives Get Smaller and Smaller

“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” ~Gabor Mate

Most of us stave experiences not necessarily considering we don’t like them or want them, but considering we don’t want to feel how we will feel when we go through that experience.

Our lives wilt unsimilar by the emotions we don’t want to finger considering we don’t want to move toward the thing that could bring strong emotions like fear, shame, sadness, or disappointment.

We don’t want to go to that party considering we’ll probably finger worrisome and embarrassed.
We don’t want to ventilator that work opportunity in specimen we finger disappointed if it doesn’t work out.
We don’t want to take that trip considering it might finger scary.
We don’t want to slow lanugo our rented lives considering it feels too terrifying to contemplate emptiness and quiet.

And then we get this idea well-nigh ourselves that this is just who we are. We are just:

• People who don’t like parties
• People who don’t travel
• People who are fearful
• People who are procrastinators
• People who are just busy, but intensely stressed

We have this idea that this is just who we are, and therefore, this is how we should live. Perhaps we finger an wrongness or an wound at stuff “this type of person.” Or maybe it just feels so unconscious, so embedded in our personality that we don’t do unrepealable things, that we winnow it as just the way we are.

For most of my life I thought I was a nervous, cautious, fearful person. That was just how I was born. I thought I couldn’t transpiration it, just like I couldn’t transpiration my hair verisimilitude or my deep love for mashed potatoes. It felt biological. Some people were unflinching and courageous, I was fearful and wrung of scrutinizingly everything.

I carried this with me, this idea well-nigh who I was, until I learned that emotions like fear and terror, wrongness and rage, despair or sadness are just emotions that we need to learn how to be with. And if we don’t learn how to be with them, they can create an outsized influence on our lives—creating this idea well-nigh who we are and what kind of personality we have and causing us to stave things that trigger these feelings.

But what we are unquestionably lamister is not the experience, people, or things but the feelings we finger when we think well-nigh that thing or try to do it. The feelings virtually meeting new people, starting a new work project, stuff in the thick of the uncertainty of traveling, etc.

It’s the feelings that are so difficult for us, not the experiences. So we start to make choices on what we are prepared to do and what we are not. We mold our lives virtually the things that generate emotions we don’t know how to be with. And we don’t throne toward things we don’t like considering of how we will finger and what we think will happen when we walk toward that feeling.

Because our soul isn’t used to really stuff with the emotion we are avoiding, or it has proved problematic in the past.

This is considering a lot of our emotions vivify our survival network. And when our survival network has been activated, things finger urgent, maybe dangerous even, unsafe.

Maybe we have sweaty palms, a feeling of doom in our bodies, a racing heart, a desire to escape quickly, panic, or plane an zillions of uncontrollable rage.

So our smart-ass starts to socialize this emotion with survival stuff activated. It’s like it labels “new work opportunity” or “traveling” as an undesirable or unsafe wits considering of the emotions that generate virtually that experience.

We just don’t know what to do with these emotions.

Our brains say, “Don’t go near that! It’s dangerous!”

So we wilt like a player in a video game, running virtually lamister falling boulders, jumping over pits of snakes, maneuvering out of the way of giant fireballs.

But what our smart-ass perceives as threats are not unquestionably threats but emotions it doesn’t know what to do with.

The pits of snakes aren’t snakes but fear virtually traveling. Or the boulders are the fear of thwarting or despair. Lamister the fireballs is trying to stave shame.

The harsh thing, though, is that plane though we are trying to sensibly stave these emotions, these survival reactions, we don’t get to stave them completely.

The shame, the fear, the rage, the terror—they are there in our soul and popping up in other places. We can’t stave them completely, and by trying to stave them we simply make our lives smaller and smaller and smaller.

Are we doomed to spend our lives in avoidance mode?

Do we just have to winnow that some things are just “too hard,” “too stressful,” “not for people like us”?

No. Way.

That is the really heady thing well-nigh our brains. We have learned to be this way considering of how we learned to deal with emotions. But that doesn’t midpoint we can’t learn a new way. That we can’t ‘rewire’ the responses we have learnt.

By working with my own fear, by learning how to be with it I stopped feeling so scared well-nigh everything in my life. I totally reverted how I saw myself. I no longer believe myself to be a fearful, overly cautious person

I gave myself time to learn to be with the energy of the fear in a way that was so gentle and slow that it helped me to finger unscratched virtually the emotion in a way I never had before.

I realized that the problem is not that we are lamister our emotions on purpose, it’s that we don’t understand them.

This is what is so nonflexible well-nigh how so many of us learn to live our lives.

We aren’t given the tools to work with our emotions (most of us aren’t anyway), and then we are tint out into the world to just ‘make a life.’

Have good relationships!

Be successful! Get a good job!

Cope with work colleagues / clients / stressed-out bosses.

Deal with grief, aging, health problems, loved ones dying!

Be a good parent, plane if your parents were a little shoddy, absent, authoritarian, unloving.

How are we supposed to navigate the world when it generates so much emotion for us and we never learned how to deal with emotion? When we finger constantly pushed hither and thither either by our emotional reactions or other people’s?

Awakening the act of self-compassion and empathy for the emotions we struggle with is one of the most powerful steps we can take when we start this journey.

Deciding: Wow, I wasn’t given the tools to navigate the whole myriad of emotions that I encounter every day! And that is tough!

Giving ourselves a little grace, a little tenderness, a little understanding virtually this is such a powerful step yonder from how we normally respond to emotional activation.

Can we offer ourselves some kindness and understanding instead of vituperation and judgment? It makes sense I finger like this—I haven’t learned how to deal with emotions like shame, fear, grief, etc.

Offering compassion in the squatter of strong emotional reactions is a powerful step considering normally we are in the habit of trying to dismiss/justify/vent our feelings: I shouldn’t finger like this! It’s all their fault! I am such a terrible person! Everything is so terrifying! They made me angry!

Instead, can we decide to start walking toward stuff on our own side? Can we winnow the challenges we have faced with emotions? And instead of blaming and shaming ourselves, can we decide instead to move toward kindness, understanding, empathy, and compassion?

When we allow our emotions to exist and meet them with empathy, creating a sense of internal safety around them, it’s much easier to support ourselves through experiences that might vivify them.

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