How Fighting Your Feelings Keeps Them Trapped, and What Happens When You Finally Let Go

I woke up irritable today. Achy. Overwhelmed. A vague sadness settled into my bones. The collective weight of the world pressed down on me, and everything felt like too much.

There was a time when days like this would send me spiraling. I'd launch into an exhaustive investigation: What's wrong with me? Why can't I just be okay? Or I'd turn my irritation outward: Why can't they see they've got it all wrong? What’s wrong with people?!

This overanalyzing and judging would inevitably drag me deeper into the mire. A difficult moment would stretch into days, weeks, and sometimes months of struggle. I'd become tangled in my own emotions, unable to recognize they will naturally pass if I leave them alone.

When the Pain Feels Endless: How to Trust It Will Pass

I had a session with a client today who has been struggling to have difficult conversations. He had an aha moment during our session. He realized that difficult conversations become easier when he reminds himself that the pain won't last forever. We talked about Maya Angelou's wisdom: "Every storm runs out of rain."

There’s something liberating in knowing this. Storms, whether literal or metaphorical, follow natural patterns. They gather, intensify, release, and dissipate. No rainstorm in history has continued indefinitely. No emotional state, however powerful, remains permanent. Yet, how often do we treat our difficult emotions as if they're forever?

Emotional Healing Starts Here: How to Stop Resisting and Start Feeling

I've discovered that the less I fight against difficult emotional states, the more quickly they change and move along.

I used to treat my irritability and sadness as problems to solve, something to expel or collapse into. I assumed that something was wrong and needed to be fixed. My meddling created a paradox. The harder I tried to escape my emotions, the more persistent they became.

The Paradox of Emotional Resistance: Why Fighting Feelings Makes Them Stronger

Our bodies register our resistance as a threat. When we fight our emotions, we actually make them stronger. Our nervous system feels the struggle and responds with more protection, activation, and resistance, which fans the flames rather than resolving the distress. Stephen Porges' research on polyvagal theory confirms this. When we resist emotions, our nervous system interprets that resistance as danger, triggering additional defensive responses. Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on constructed emotion shows the same pattern: attempts to suppress feelings often intensify them, creating precisely what we're trying to avoid.

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The Neuroscience of Letting Emotions Move Through Us

Our emotions need to move freely. They go underground if we suppress them rather than letting them move through us. Eventually, they find a sideways exit that can be damaging, such as suddenly blowing up at someone we love or even manifesting as physical illness. We also don't want to wallow in them or let them dictate our behavior. There is wisdom in simply acknowledging their presence without pushing them away or becoming consumed by them.

When I feel that irritability or sadness now, I note it: I'm irritated. I'm sad. I'm overwhelmed. It's OK. It'll pass in time. Even better, I’ll say: I see that you’re irritated, Carla. I see that you’re sad, Carla. This creates a little space between me and the emotion. I don't rush to analyze or fix it. I don't judge myself for experiencing it. I don't amplify it with elaborate stories about what it means. I let it be.

Acceptance vs. Resignation: The Active Wisdom of Emotional Awareness

This isn't resignation. It's an active form of wisdom. It's recognizing the impermanent nature of all emotional states and choosing not to make things worse by resisting or fighting against them.

Acceptance simply means acknowledging what is already here.

We're not just experiencing personal storms now. We're weathering collective ones—Tsunami-sized storms! Political divides, ecological crises, and social fragmentation create cumulative stress that seeps into our individual experiences.

Collective Storms: Why Your Difficult Feelings May Be an Appropriate Response

As humans with permeable nervous systems, it would be strange if we didn't sometimes feel overwhelmed, irritable, angry, or sad. These responses aren't personal failings. They're appropriate reactions to the world we're navigating together.

Jiddu Krishnamurti reminds us, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." His words offer a more realistic perspective that can free us from self-blame when we struggle in times such as these.

When I acknowledge this, I'm able to lighten up on myself. The question shifts from What's wrong with me? to What if my difficult emotions are a natural response to a challenging world? This wider perspective creates space for both personal responsibility and compassionate understanding.

Building Trust in Your Emotional Resilience

Over the years, I'm learning how to trust that my emotions will move through me in their own time. I've learned that when I don't amplify difficult emotions through resistance, over-analysis, or judgment, they tend to move through more quickly. Almost every time.

This trust hasn't come easily. It's the result of countless experiences observing emotions rise, peak, and pass. It's come from witnessing how my overanalysis and judgment often prolong rather than resolve emotional discomfort. And it's come from studying how our nervous systems actually work, rather than how we think they should work.

Through this process, I've come to see our challenging emotions as meaningful aspects of our shared humanity. There is a line in an Over the Rhine song I love: "Pain is our mother, she helps us recognize each other." Our vulnerability to difficult emotions is part of what connects us to each other and to life itself.

A New Relationship with Difficult Emotions

The invitation isn't to get rid of or collapse into these emotions but to develop an easier relationship with them. Can you recognize when you're adding to your suffering through resistance? Can you allow difficult emotions to be present without either suppressing or amplifying them? Can you remember, even in the midst of emotional storms, that these feelings will run their course?

This practice doesn't promise a life free from these emotions. It offers the capacity to move through them with less struggle, more grace, and deeper trust in your own resilience.

So, the next time you wake feeling irritable, achy, or sad, or the world feels too much, try letting those feelings be. Not pushing them away. Not pulling them closer. Acknowledge their presence and remember they are visitors, not permanent residents. When you do, your next right action will reveal itself.

The storm will pass. It always does. And when it does, you might find yourself standing in unexpected sunshine, willing and able to show up in the ways the world needs now.