Befriending Your Feelings
Your Relationship with Your Feelings Can Be The Pathway to Building Resilience
In a world that often values toughness and productivity, it’s easy to dismiss or suppress our emotions when they surface. But recognizing and embracing your feelings can be a superpower that helps you develop resilience, grit, and distress tolerance. Befriending your emotions, including the ones we typically want to avoid, like anxiety, worry, envy, sadness, and the like can enhance your ability to cope with adversity and grow stronger through challenges.
Begin By Understanding Your Emotional Landscape
Emotions are essential signals that can guide our decisions and interactions. Whether it's joy, sadness, anger, or fear, each emotion carries valuable information about our experience of the world. To start befriending your emotions, it’s crucial to first recognize and name them as they occur. This practice, known as emotional labeling, can reduce the intensity of emotions like fear and anger, making them more manageable. If you find yourself struggling to name emotions check out the feelings wheel to develop your emotional vocabulary.
Practice Tuning In
Checking in with yourself is a fundamental tool in developing emotional acceptance. By staying present and observing our feelings without judgment, we learn not to over-identify with our emotions. Techniques such as mindful breathing, meditation, or simply pausing to observe your feelings can help create a space between experiencing an emotion and reacting to it, allowing for more thoughtful responses and less impulsivity.
Embrace Vulnerability
Vulnerability is often seen as a weakness, but it is actually a form of courage. Allowing yourself to feel difficult emotions can lead to a deeper understanding of yourself and a stronger connection with others. Brené Brown, a research professor, has extensively discussed how vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. By embracing vulnerability, we open ourselves up to personal growth and resilience.
Develop Emotional Agility
Susan David, a psychologist and author, promotes the idea of emotional agility — the ability to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. To develop emotional agility, practice stepping out of your emotional streams from time to time to view them objectively. This helps in not getting swept away by emotional undercurrents and in making choices that align more closely with your values and intentions.
Lean In With Curiosity
When you experience negative emotions, approach them with curiosity instead of fear or aversion. Imagine inviting your feelings to the dinner table as a welcome guest. Ask yourself, “What is this feeling trying to tell me? What can I learn from you?” Such questions can uncover underlying needs or issues that need to be addressed and can transform overwhelming emotions into solvable problems.
Reflect and Reassess
Regular reflection on how you've handled emotional situations can provide insight into patterns that either serve or hinder you. Keeping a journal or talking through your feelings with a trusted friend or therapist can be effective ways to process emotions and develop healthier coping mechanisms.
Befriending your emotions is not about controlling them but understanding and respecting them as a natural part of your human experience. By doing so, you can turn your emotional experiences into allies that fortify your resilience, enhance your grit, and improve your distress tolerance. Remember, it’s not the absence of distress and difficulty that defines our lives, but how we respond to them that shapes our journey toward wellbeing.
Art Journal Prompt
Start today by identifying one emotion you usually try to avoid. Spend some time reflecting on why it makes you uncomfortable and how you might address it more openly moving forward. Your path to emotional resilience is unique and ever-evolving; embrace it with compassion and curiosity.
