Make friends with discomfort, avoid emotional avoidance

For the purposes of this article, let’s define emotional discomfort as any emotion that may be difficult for us to tolerate and thus, may cause strong urges for us to want to avoid. Think of emotions such as: sadness, guilt, hurt, pain and betrayal. When feeling these emotions, we may have the urge to distract from them (i.e., keeping an excessively busy schedule), avoid thinking about them, denying their existence (i.e., minimizing our emotional pain, pretending that we may not care), using substances (i.e., to numb and temporarily forget) or excessively focus on others’ problems as a way to distract from our own. The above strategies are all part of the same strategic move: emotional avoidance.

Why is emotional avoidance harmful? The problem with emotional avoidance, is that although it is a great strategy for temporary relief – it is just that. Temporary. Eventually, any emotions that are not felt, become trapped in a box of unexpressed emotion, causing havoc in our emotional system in the long-term. This may eventually lead to problems with anger, unexpressed grief, lashing out, withdrawing, isolating, amongst many other destructive behaviours.

A more sustainable strategy to tolerating emotional discomfort is to sit with it. Sitting with it means that we are co-existing with the discomfort, without trying to resist it or change it. We are accepting the discomfort, watching it in our bodies (i.e., observing the tension in our bodies), discussing it with people we feel safe and allowing it to be felt and effectively experienced. The following are strategies that can be used to better experience emotional pain:

1. Observe and Describe: label your emotional experience. Without judgement. Observe its impact on your thoughts and on your body.
2. Let go of the ‘musts and shoulds’: let your emotions be felt without having a certain expectation (i.e., I should not be feeling grief, I should not be so sad about this).
3. Write about it, talk about it with people who are safe.
4. Learn to co-exist with emotions much like you co-exist with other types of discomfort in your life.
5. Remind yourself that emotional pain is temporary. It peaks, and if felt effectively, it will dissipate.
6. Remind yourself that the more you resist emotional pain, the more it will persist.
7. Remain connected to your activities and routines.

Befriending vs. rejecting emotional discomfort is a skill. If we did not learn it in childhood or if we were taught that emotions are an equivalent to being ‘out of control’, we may have trouble sitting with our emotions. However, this is a skill that can be developed, experienced and acquired, even later in life. Much like playing a musical instrument, the consistent intentional practice and mindful awareness of reminding ourselves to live and tolerate discomfort makes it easier for this skill to be acquired and used as part of our lives.