How To Let Go Of Painful Emotions
Techniques for letting go of Emotional Suffering.
Want to get rid of painful and negative emotions that no longer serve you? Learning to let go of that which doesn’t serve you is very hard but well worth the effort.
You always have the “choice to change” what you doing? Here are your options to let go of painful emotions:
– changing or not changing
– good or bad
– wise mind or emotion mind
– talking or being silent
– acceptance or approval
Acceptance:
When we begin to accept that our negative emotions don’t need to rule us then we can take control of our emotions so that they no longer cause us suffering and distress.
It’s through this acceptance of our emotions, that we realize that they are there for a reason, and that they serve to teach us more about ourselves. Even though we may not approve of these negative emotions we can definitely learn to accept them as what we are going through and not who we are.
By choosing to accept your feelings, that doesn’t mean you approve of them or that you’re okay with feeling the pain associated with them. If you start resenting and judging yourself for having these painful emotions you can become angry and feel hopeless.
Once you allow the feelings in, accept and acknowledge that those feelings are there, and that you don’t have to approve of them, it was not such an impossible task.
Accepting Your Emotions May Affect Your Suffering In A Positive Way.
The Steps To Accepting Painful Emotions:
1) If we are running away from, and avoiding our negative and painful emotions we are not accepting them as they are. By just accepting them, it may help us to reduce our suffering.
2) At times this acceptance can reduce our pain. Notice the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering is the pain but also our chaotic efforts to push the pain away, and feelings about the injustice of our suffering and the pain of having our pain.
Below are Marsha Linehan’s Steps For Letting Go of Our Suffering.
* Observe your emotion. Acknowledge that the emotion exists. Stand back from it and get yourself unstuck from it.
* Try to experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going. You may find it helpful to concentrate on some part of the emotion, like how your body is feeling, or some image about it.
* I try to imagine an ocean wave flowing through me, but not so big that it knocks me over.
* Don’t try to push the emotion away. This makes it bigger, and increases our suffering. Don’t push the emotion away.
* Don’t judge your emotion. It is not good or bad. It is just there. There are no bad emotions, just emotions.
* Anger, fear, sadness are all painful emotions, but they are not bad. Everyone has them, and they are just as valid as the happy emotions.
* At the same time, do not hang onto your emotion. Don’t rehearse it over and over to yourself. Don’t escalate it or make it bigger. Sometimes when we feel a very painful emotion, like anger or a deep grief, we hold onto it, or we intensify it, making it stronger or bigger, in our efforts to deal with it or to give it our full attention. Try not to do this. Just let it be, however it is. This can result in a lessening of the pain.
* You are not your emotion. Your emotion is part of you, but it is not all of you. You are more than your emotion.
* Having the emotion does not mean you have to act. You may just need to sit with the emotion. Often acting can intensify and prolong the emotion.
Practice embracing your emotions. This can be a difficult challenge.
We can learn to embrace our emotions just the way we can learn to embrace (accept) anything else about ourselves or our experience that we cannot change – our age, our height, our eye color, the ducks that quack in the early spring time; etc.
*Please Note: That acceptance and approval are two separate things. You don’t have to like your skin color, but it is what you have and you can’t change it. So if you just accept or embrace it, you will notice that you feel better than if you keep fighting against the idea that they are there.
