Can We Ever Be Rid of Negative Emotions and The Thoughts That Cause Them?
The first two articles I wrote about feelings answered the questions How Do Thoughts Create Feelings? and Can I Feel Better without Changing My Thoughts? We now know that what we call feelings are chemicals in our bodies causing physical sensations. The chemicals are released based on our thoughts about a situation. Changing our thinking is one way to avoid painful emotions but forcing our brain to believe something new doesn’t work very well. To get more immediate relief, we can process the feelings using the six-step method I outlined. This helps the body break down the emotion-causing chemicals and alleviates the unpleasant sensations. But what if we could prevent the thoughts that bring negative emotions in the first place? Is this even possible? The short answer is no.
Our brain is wired to continuously scan for problems. It’s simply human nature. Our mind constantly looks for what’s wrong — what’s wrong with us, with those around us, or with our lives. It will land on something, even a trivial thing, no matter how great our life seems from the outside. We don’t know how to stop those ideas from coming up, so we can’t prevent all unpleasant emotions. However, we don’t need to stop those thoughts. We want and need them for a meaningful life. If we know how to deal with the challenging emotions they create, we don’t need to fear any of our beliefs or feelings.
Mind management is like Whack-a-Mole. In the classic carnival game, the player is given a mallet to hit the moles. There are six holes on a board where animatronic moles pop up randomly. When you strike one mole, it goes down, but another one always comes up. You hit the top one, then one to the left pops up. You hit that one and one on the bottom comes out. The point of the game is to move quickly: for maximum points, hit as many moles as possible in the allotted time.
This is how it is with our brain and problems. We can find something to be upset about no matter what circumstances we have. This is why people who seem to have it all still complain. It might be that their cleaning lady did a poor job or that their child didn’t get into an Ivy League school, but the emotional pain they generate for themselves is the same as everyone else’s. And when we calm down about one subject, our mind finds something else to be upset about. We knock one down, another one pops up.
When we know to expect that, however, it is not as frustrating. When we play Whack-a-Mole at an amusement park, we don’t get annoyed that the moles keep coming up. That’s part of the fun! We can have the same outlook with our mind and its constant need to focus on problems. This is what humans do; it’s part of the game called life.
When we play Whack-a-Mole at an amusement park, we don’t get annoyed that the moles keep coming up. That’s part of the fun!
For example, we worry about how our child is performing at school. To solve that problem, we meet with teachers, hire a tutor, or spend extra time with the child on homework. The whole time we tell ourselves, “If he did better in school, I wouldn’t have to be so stressed.” Eventually, the child’s schoolwork improves, and we believe we can relax. We have a brief moment of peace and contentment. And then our husband has a conflict at work. The process starts over — worry, attempting solutions, believing happiness will come when this crisis is over.
As I mentioned in the first article on emotions, we don’t know where our thoughts come from. They just appear in our brain. As long as we’re human, some of those ideas will be about perceived problems, and negative feelings will arise from those thoughts. When one problem is solved, our mind identifies another, just like Whack-a-Mole. Knowing this pattern brings comfort. We can stop resisting the problems. It’s possible to even be amused by our brain’s ability to always find something wrong. We can recognize that this is the way our mind works and leverage that knowledge.
However, even if we could stop every thought that brought a painful emotion, would we want to? Humans are in constant pursuit of happiness, but without uncomfortable feelings, we wouldn’t be happy all the time, we would be robotic. Experiencing all the human emotions is what makes life full, interesting, and engaging.
There are many times that we want to feel negative emotion. We probably want to feel bad about horrible things that happen in the world. Also, when hardships come directly to us or our loved ones, the difficult feelings we experience can bring us closer together. Those feelings can prompt compassionate action.
Additionally, achieving a momentous goal requires a willingness to feel challenging emotions such as commitment and possible embarrassment. The most exciting times of our lives come from attempting new things and getting out of our comfort zone. To get through those occasions, we must be ready to feel nervous, afraid, disappointed, or determined. These feelings are not necessarily pleasant, but if we are willing to tolerate them, we can have more success in life.
The problem is not unpleasant emotions; the problem is what we make it mean when we have them. Unnecessary suffering comes from believing that challenging feelings indicate things have gone wrong.
When we have unhappy emotions, there are two ways to interpret them. We can infer that something in our life has gone wrong. Or we can choose to believe that these hard feelings mean that we are normal, functioning human beings. It’s easy to see how choosing the latter brings more peace and contentment. It will also open up our mind to solutions to the problem, rather than closing it off with another layer of negative emotion.
Unpleasant feelings are like an unwanted beach ball when you’re standing in the pool. The ball floats over unbidden. You want it to go away, and one way to accomplish that is to push it under the water. But then you’re stuck holding it there, and the harder you try to push it down, the more force it has to come back up. Eventually the ball blasts up out of the water. Similarly, when we try to stuff down our emotions, they don’t go away. It gets harder and harder to keep them out of sight, and sooner or later they blast out of us in unexpected ways and at inconvenient times.
If we process the painful feelings using the six-step method, it is like gently shooing the beach ball away. We’re not mad at it; we’re not embarrassed by it or trying to hide it. We know it’s a normal part of life, and we can quietly let it float away with the flow of the water. When we use the steps to process emotion, our body breaks down the chemicals causing the physical changes that produced the feeling. Our bodies know how to do this, we need to permit them to get to work.
When we use the steps to process emotion, our body breaks down the chemicals causing the physical changes that produced the feeling.
About six months into Jody’s program, I had made a lot of progress, but I still cried often and felt the weight of depression and sadness descend a few times a month. I sent Jody a message explaining that I was frustrated and tired of the tears. I expressed that I felt a general discontent for life, and I wanted to change that. Her response shocked me and changed my outlook forever. She said, “What if you said yes to the frustration, yes to the tears, yes to the discontent? It’s all part of the human experience. Don’t resist it. Allow it.”
This answer altered my perspective and greatly improved my emotional health. I wanted her to help me stop feeling that negative emotion, and she said the way to feel better is to let yourself feel the negative emotion! It was so ironic and backward, nonsensical and nonintuitive. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t figure it out on my own.
Learning that it is okay to have all the human feelings was an epiphany. It is hard to describe the complete transformation this concept made for me. I’m sure I had heard the idea before, but for some reason, the way Jody explained it made it finally sink it. When I embraced the whole human experience and allowed whatever emotion I had to be valid and thoroughly felt, I came more alive. I stopped focusing on my sadness and making it mean that something was wrong with my life. Acknowledging that these challenging feelings are normal lessened their pain. No, we will never be rid of every negative emotion. Ironically, the happiness we seek does not come from the complete absence of difficult feelings. It comes from embracing the whole range of emotions.
The brain produces uncomfortable feelings and then tells us that they are dangerous. It tells us that when we have them, something is wrong with the situation or with us. Manage that mind! Keep control and power over the situation by talking back to you brain. Tell it, Painful feelings are not dangerous. They are unpleasant, but they are a natural, normal part of life. They are generated by my thoughts and not by what happens outside of me, but that’s fine. Human brains make up stories that create negative emotion; it’s what we do. I don’t need to be afraid of these emotions or avoid them. If I try to push them away, they will always resurface, like a beach ball. I know where they come from, and I know how to process them, and I know I will always have them to some extent. It’s all okay.
Try this on: “What if you said yes to the frustration, yes to the tears, yes to the discontent? It’s all part of the human experience. Don’t resist it. Allow it.”
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