A client I worked with had a reliable way of handling hard feelings. They didn’t feel them.
For years it was food. Later it was shopping, then drinking. Over time they came to see these weren’t simply bad habits. They were old coping strategies. Early in life they had learned that certain emotions were not acceptable to express, so they learned to numb them instead.
As we worked together, they began to let themselves feel those emotions, a little at a time. Along the way I shared a saying I come back to often: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. The eating, the drinking, the shopping hadn’t spared them the pain. They had only stretched out the suffering.
Then came a rough patch. They noticed the familiar pull to go shopping. This time they didn’t go. They stopped and did an exercise to feel what they were feeling, fully.
That pause is the whole point.
Pain is the feeling itself. Sadness, grief, frustration, fear. It shows up whether we invite it or not.
Suffering is what we add when we refuse to feel it. We scroll. We stay late at work. We snap at the person in front of us. It works for a while. Then we’re tired, or alone, or quiet for the first time all day, and the feeling is still there.
Feeling it is slower. It means noticing where the feeling sits in the body, staying with it a little longer than is comfortable, and letting it be as big as it is. In my experience it often passes sooner than we fear.
The only way to heal it is to feel it.
What do you reach for when a feeling gets hard?
Bestest,
Patricia