No Matter What You Are Struggling With, You Need This Skill!
One of the skills that I teach the most in my psychotherapy sessions is one that is necessary no matter what you may be struggling with, or what mental health diagnosis you are facing. This is the ability to tolerate discomfort, to allow emotions to flow and to stop resisting your emotional experience.
The majority of us have learned to deny our emotional experiences. As soon as we start to feel any emotion that is unpleasant, or sometimes even pleasant but extreme, an alarm bell goes off in our system that is cuing *threat* *threat* and we push it down or away. We have been taught to do this by our families, culture, religion and society at large.
Various beliefs are guiding this resistance to our emotional experience. Here are some examples:
“I must be even keeled”
“If I start crying I wont be able to stop”
“If I show emotion, it means that I am weak”
“If I show emotion I will burden others”
“I shouldn’t indulge emotions that don’t make sense”
What happens when we deny our emotional experience? A whole slew of effects, but most simply put…it persists. As the expression goes, “the more we resist, the more it persists.”
Here are some examples of the ways in which we tend to deny our emotional experiences :
1 - by thinking and analyzing - we move away from our emotions by moving into the cognitive
2- we literally hold back our tears
3- we tense up and push through
4- we distract
5- we vent
Here is what we know about allowing our emotional experience to flow. Let’s say you are triggered by something in your environment, or something internal such as a thought or sensation. Dr. Jill Taylor’s research shows that if you are able to allow whatever emotion is coming up to move through you, that it will pass in 90 seconds. This means not blocking the emotion by intellectualizing, holding it in, tensing up, pushing through, distracting or talking it through. We also call this practice “riding the wave”...allow the wave of emotion to wash over you and then crash back down.
Here are some ways that you can help yourself to allow an emotion to move through you as opposed to resisting it:
Identify the emotion/name it.
Where are you feeling it in your body?
Place your hand on that part of the body.
Explore dual attention by placing your hand on the sensation in the body, and maintaining awareness of the emotion itself, also notice your breath while you breathe through.
And there you go, 90 seconds later, you did it! Back to baseline.
Written by:
Tara McRae MSW RSW Registered Social Worker, Psychotherapist