The feelings you’ve been taught to fear are the very ones you need to feel

Emotional health isn't about being happy... it's about being whole.

What if I’m not doing things wrong?

What if I’m just looking at things through the wrong lens?

Seeing yourself through the wrong filter

I’ve been asking myself that question a lot, lately, trying to understand why I see things so differently than other people do, and how the way I think about those things might be getting me into trouble, unnecessarily.

It’s true I experience a lot of dark thoughts, and heavy feelings. But is it true that this makes me depressed, or negative? Or damaged, wounded, or broken?

Or does it make me anything? Does it mean anything more than, “I tend to experience a lot of dark thoughts, and heavy feelings?”

I used to think there was something wrong with me for feeling that way. But maybe I just don’t understand what those feelings really mean — or how they help me in my life, instead of hurt me.

Maybe I’ve been lied to my entire life about what emotions even are… what they mean… and what, if anything, it says about us when we experience a particular emotion.

Is an angry man actually angry? Or is he simply feeling that way, and maybe he’s stuck in the feeling because no one ever taught him how to be angry…

Why we only make room for the good feelings

I think most people will agree, it’s desirable to feel happy, as much and as often as we can. To feel like we’re winning at life. Like everything’s going just fine… and we’ve got it all under control.

But those aren’t aren’t the only feelings we’ve been given. Not by a long shot. Brene Brown lists 87 emotions in her book, Atlas of the Heart. Only one of those is called “happiness.”

Why is it wrong to feel the dark, heavy, “dreadful” emotions that typically send people into therapy? Or, if not therapy, into a downward spiral…

Do sadness, grief, anger, anxiety, shame, depression, and hate, actually destroy a person? Or is it the person’s inability to feel these emotions? To understand them? To allow them to flow freely?

Are these feelings meant to be avoided at all costs?

Or are there lessons to be learned from feeling these so-called “negative emotions?”

Is there beauty and meaning in pain and suffering? Or should these feelings be ignored? Bottled up? Overcome? Transformed? Conquered? Diminished?

Or are they simply supposed to be felt?

Should we believe the hype that humans can somehow “rise above” their negative emotions? If so, how do we do it? Because any time I’ve tried, all that happens is I wind up disconnected from my own heart… from my own ability to feel anything… good or bad… positive or negative… empowering or overwhelming.

We should 100% commit to personal growth, and to creating a culture of respect, love, kindness, generosity, wonder, excitement, passion, innovation, beauty…

We don’t want a whole society of people filled with uncontrollable anger, rage, hate, madness, destruction, jealousy, grief, and sorrow.

But that doesn’t mean we should try to eliminate those feelings from our lives completely.

Good, bad, and ugly — we need to feel them all

We need to start making space in our lives for both ends to the spectrum.

We need to feel love and hate. Compassion and anger. Hope and misery.

Darkness and light.

We can’t have one without the other. Our world won’t allow for that possibility.

You cannot have happiness at the exclusion of sorrow. If you try to block one… you end up blocking them both. Avoiding the difficult emotions leaves you unable to connect with the happy ones.

Instead of simply avoiding pain… you’re making it impossible to experience joy.

A lot of world beliefs teach that our spirits are light, and that in our pure form, light is all we know, and all we long for. So why do we even have dark and undesirable emotions?

Why shouldn’t we avoid them, and sweep them under the rug? Why shouldn’t we tell a grieving man to “cheer up” or look on the bright side of life?

Why shouldn’t we steer people away from these feelings that only bring us down? After all, it’s not healthy to be depressed all the time. Why shouldn’t we just take a pill, or learn to think happy thoughts?

But what happens when you tell a teenage girl to just cheer up? When you gloss over the dark thoughts and feelings she’s describing? When you tell her, “Things aren’t that bad, just get over it.”

When you encourage only happy thoughts, and show her by your example that her tears, and her sadness, are something she just needs to let go and pretend like it doesn’t even bother her?

Those so-called negative emotions don’t just go away, just because you decide to only focus on the positive. They don’t disappear just because you’re not looking at them.

They collect, and they gather, and grow, under the surface. They get bigger and badder, the longer you avoid them.

They seep into your subconscious.

They poison your heart and your mind. They start to take control of your reactions to life’s challenges, making you act irrationally, and not even understand why.

And nobody wants to appear irrational.

The true cost of avoiding our pain

Oftentimes, we’re encouraged to make the bad feelings go away. Only, they don’t go away. They stay right where we leave them… waiting to be noticed… waiting to be addressed… waiting to be felt so they can finally be released back into the wild.

And we try to make them go away without feeling them first… and when we can’t make them go away ourselves, we go to doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists, and ask them to make it all go away for us.

What if that’s the wrong way to address our feelings?

What if they don’t need to “go away” — what if they need to be integrated?

What if, in this life, we’re supposed to feel good and bad, at different times and in different circumstances? What if we came here to experience the full spectrum of human emotion?

What if denying the negative emotions is denying ourselves? Disconnecting from the very thing that makes us unique?

What if the darkness isn’t meant to be ignored, or made to go away?

What if it’s meant to be understood? What if it’s meant to be felt… and ultimately… to be mastered?

(Can we master our emotions though? Or are we actually attempting to master our response to them? Is there a difference?)

You can’t control the emotion itself. You can’t stop yourself from feeling angry, or sad, or guilty, or anxious, or depressed, or any of it. It comes and goes, according to its own schedule. We cannot prevent any emotion from entering into our consciousness.

We will never in this life “rise above” our negative emotions. But we’re not supposed to — so why do people even try? That’s not any way to feel the emotion that’s calling for our attention… and it’ll never let you learn what the emotion is trying to teach you…

It’ll never let you put the emotion down and stop punishing yourself for feeling something you’ve been told you’re not supposed to… but that in reality, you can’t control.

We can’t stop feelings — but we can shape the flow

We don’t control our feelings. They just come in, all on their own. We can only control our choices; how we respond to the emotion; what we do with what we’re feeling… how we allow it to guide our decisions…

When we try to deny the bad feelings… when we disconnect… when we self-medicate… when we bottle everything up and compartmentalize and just never face it all…

We end up holding those emotions in place. If we don’t give them somewhere to go, they don’t go anywhere. They stay in our bodies, in our hearts and minds, looking for an outlet and never finding one.

They just build up inside. They turn into a dam, and that dam builds up and makes room in our heart for a whole reservoir of negative emotion.

As that reservoir expands, it drowns out everything else. It destroys our ability to be happy, to feel successful, to build healthy relationships, to think and to see clearly, to hear the truth and accept it, rather than fight against it.

When we’re not allowed to “feel bad,” there’s nowhere for that reservoir to drain into. It just keeps filling up.

We surrender ourselves to merely trying to contain the damage. To limit the spread of this negativity. To focus only on the good things we want — but that, as long as the reservoir remains, we will never be able to enjoy or appreciate.

When you have not addressed the negative, the positive will never satisfy. You won’t be able to enjoy your happiness, because happiness is being constantly drowned out by the cesspool of negativity that lives inside you, that you’re trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

You can’t go on that way.

Humans aren’t supposed to live our lives that way.

Our society will crumble if we refuse to acknowledge the dark. We don’t have to embrace it (or maybe we do? I’m not really sure on this one…)

But we do have to allow it.

We have to admit that it’s there, and that it gets inside every one of us, and that there are healthy ways to feel it… and ways that are unhealthy, that are in fact, destructive. But in order for the reservoir to drain, the feelings have to be felt, one way or another.

It’s the only way to maintain real emotional health — and it’s not being taught to us, anymore.

Your feelings cannot be rationalized. They cannot be reasoned with. They can’t be justified, or explained away.

They need to be felt. They need to be experienced. They need to be allowed to run their course.

When a toddler cries, we don’t make them wrong. We hold them, and we comfort them, until they’re done crying.

Why then, do we tell our children, and our teenagers — and ourselves — that crying is something we need to avoid? Why do we allow infants to cry, and penalize everybody else for the same exact thing?

I know, we say things like, “Babies don’t know any better.” Or, “They can’t help themselves.”

But what if babies do know better than us? What if it’s right to cry? What if it’s healthy, and safe, and smart, to let the emotion out? What if the mere act of holding it inside, is what’s making us all so miserable all the time?

Teenagers aren’t wrong for feeling their emotions… they’re wrong for thinking the emotions are in control… that they have to be obeyed… because they feel everything so strongly, they think if they don’t act on it all, something really horrible will happen.

Well… what if we don’t have to “act” on every emotion, ever — but what if we do have to “allow” every emotion we ever feel to simply run its course, and to work itself out of our body?

I believe that with training, and with emotional intelligence, you can learn to let your emotions flow. I don’t think you can ever really control the emotion… but I do think you can learn to control the flow.

I think you can learn to convert your emotional reservoir into a canal.

You can build the container through which your emotions flow, and over time, you can build your emotional decision tree, so that when you feel angry, frightened, or overwhelmed, you know there are options you can choose from. You know that you don’t have to go with the first response that pops into your mind.

But even then… you still have to allow each emotion to flow through the canal, freely. You can’t stop them at the entrance, and expect them to just go away. You have to experience each one in its proper turn.

And ultimately, you have to accept that no emotion, in and of itself, is the cause of your problems. No single emotion is truly good or bad… only the way we allow the emotion to guide our choices.

Your feelings are not your enemy

It’s not wrong to cry. It’s not wrong to be angry. It’s not wrong to feel lost, or frustrated, or overwhelmed. Those are things every one of us will feel at different times.

We’re supposed to feel them. We’re not supposed to outgrow them, or meditate until we raise our consciousness to a level where we’re too good for them. We’re not supposed to hold onto them, and simultaneously refuse to even acknowledge their existence.

We need them. They’re a necessary part of our survival. Each one reveals things about human nature that we need to understand.

You’re not doing anyone any favors by “controlling” your emotions. You’re not doing any good at all, until you’re feeling them… the way they’re supposed to be felt.

And maybe that’s what emotional health really is. Not the absence of hard feelings. Not bottling them up so tightly they poison everything else. But learning to live with them.

Learning to let them move — through us, not against us.

You don’t need to be afraid of your feelings. You don’t need to conquer them. And you sure as hell don’t need to pretend they’re not there.

They’re not the enemy — they’re part of the roadmap.

And the sooner we stop fighting them… the sooner we learn how to feel them, without letting them call all the shots… the sooner we remember what it means to be whole.

Not perfectly happy. Not perfectly healed.

But whole.

That’s the real work. And it starts by giving yourself permission to feel — not just the “happy thoughts,” but all of them.

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Feeling the things you’ve been taught to fear

You don’t have to fix your emotions. You just have to make space for them.

Here’s how to begin:

1. Name what you’re feeling

When the hard emotions show up — anger, shame, sadness, grief, fear — don’t run from them. Pause.

Ask yourself: What am I feeling right now?

Name it honestly, without judgment. If all you can say is, “I feel awful” — that’s enough to start.

2. Remind yourself: feeling ≠ failure

Our culture trains us to believe that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong. That’s a lie.

Feeling heavy emotions isn’t a sign you’re broken — it’s a sign you’re human.

When the dark feelings come, try telling yourself: “This isn’t wrong. This is part of being alive.”

3. Let it move through you — without acting on it

You can feel anger without punching a wall.

You can feel grief without collapsing into despair.

You can feel shame without shutting down.

Emotions aren’t meant to control you — they’re meant to move through you.

Practice noticing the feeling, breathing through it, and letting it pass, without needing to act on every urge that comes with it.

4. Find safe ways to release it

If you’ve bottled things up for years, they won’t just disappear because you finally noticed them. They need somewhere to go.

That might look like:

• Talking to a trusted friend

• Crying in the car

• Writing it out in a journal

• Moving your body — a walk, a workout, a yell into a pillow

Find your release valve. Don’t keep it all trapped inside.

Your feelings deserve to be felt — and your body deserves the relief of letting them go.

Self-reflection: making space for what you’ve been taught to fear

You don’t have to fix your emotions. You just have to feel them. Start here…

1. What difficult emotion have you been avoiding lately?

(Anger, sadness, shame, anxiety, grief… or maybe you can’t name it, but you feel heavy inside. Just describe it in your own words.)

Write your answer.

2. What story have you been telling yourself about that feeling?

(“This means I’m weak.” “I shouldn’t feel this way.” “It’ll never pass.” — Get honest about the narrative running in your head.)

Write your answer.

3. How would it feel to believe that this emotion isn’t wrong — it’s human?

(No need to force yourself to believe it yet. Just imagine… how might that soften things, even a little?)

Write your answer.

4. What small, safe way could you let this emotion move through you?

(Talking to someone? Crying? Walking? Writing? Screaming into a pillow? You don’t need a perfect plan — just one gentle outlet.)

Write your answer.

5. What would change if you stopped trying to feel better — and simply let yourself feel it all?

(There’s no right answer. Just sit with it. Let the question work on you.)

Write your answer.

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Final Thought

Most of us were never really taught how to feel.

We were taught how to keep going. How to stay busy. How to hide the parts of ourselves that felt heavy, or inconvenient, or hard to explain.

We learned early on, which feelings were “acceptable”… and which ones made people uncomfortable. We learned how to tuck those hard emotions away and never look at them again.

But those feelings were never the problem. It’s the silence around them that hurts. It’s the quiet ache of holding it all in that leaves us feeling disconnected.

You were never meant to ignore the hard feelings.

You were meant to be whole. And being whole means learning that feeling isn’t failure… it’s what makes us human.

Your dark emotions don’t make you weak. They make you real.

So be gentle with yourself. You don’t have to be happy to be healthy. You just have to let yourself feel whatever emotions come to you.

The feelings you’ve been taught to fear are valuable. Let them move through you. Let them teach you. Feel them… learn from them… and then… when you’re ready… let them go.

You will feel better, once you start to let everything out.