I believe that we shouldn’t try to surpress or ignore our emotions. In my experience, surpressed emotions never truly go away – they accumulate in the body, creating the feeling of heaviness and the need to constantly put effort into keeping them locked away. As a Highly Sensitive Person, I have a lot of intense emotions. This means, on the bright side, that when I’m experiencing joy and pleasure, I’m experiencing it intensely, and I can use my emotions effectively as fuel and inspiration for manifesting my goals. On the other hand, my negative emotions are strong as well, and trying to surpress them takes a huge amount of energy. I often find that when I try to surpress them, it only makes my discomfort more intense, and I end up feeling even worse. So, in order to feel light and happy, I’ve decided not to avoid feeling my emotions.

I’ve come up with a strategy in what to do when I feel a strong negative emotion. First of all, I consciously allow myself to spend some time processing the emotion. This took some getting used to, because I’ve been taught to not show emotions and to not let them affect my productivity. Because my emotions are so intense, I’ve been crying a lot as a child, and adults responded by letting me know that they don’t understand why I’m upset and asking me to stop crying. Because of that, allowing myself to spend 5 – 20 minutes processing my emotions wasn’t easy at the beginning, and I’m still working on improving this ability.

Create safety

I remind myself that it’s OK to have emotional responses to situations. I create a feeling of safety in my body and I remind myself to be gentle with myself through the process.

Bring into consciousness how I’m feeling and why

I determine how I’m actually feeling and what caused it. I think, write, or talk aloud, about the experience that caused these emotions, and I name the emotions I’m feeling.

Let myself feel the emotions

Once I’ve determined how I’m feeling, I let myself feel it. I sit still or walk and let go of any effort to block the emotions. I spend some time in the emotions, until I feel them start to lessen in intensity. This step might sound painful, but it actually offers a sense of relief. It’s natural for humans to feel their emotions, so it creates a sense of relief and integrity to let myself do so.

Release the emotions

While I’m feeling the emotions, I release them in some way. It’s most natural to me to release emotions by crying, especially emotions like sadness and disappointment, but even frustration, anger and resentment can be released this way. I also find it effective to release emotions by physical exercise, especially running or some other form of cardio exercise, but even strength training works well for me. Or I like to create something while I’m fueled by these emotions, as they are a great inspiration to create music or art.

Creating art or doing physical exercise gives higher meaning to my emotions. I then don’t feel like my emotions are just blocking me from being productive, but they’re fueling me to create something or improve my physical condition.

Determine future action steps

Once the emotions have been released or at least lessened, I think about the situation that caused them again, this time focusing on how I can prevent the situation from happening next time. I know that always feeling good is impossible, but when I can, I try to avoid getting myself into repeating situations that make me feel bad. Once I’ve determined my action steps or behaviour changes, I make a commitment to myself to take these action steps. This can sometimes include having conversations with people who were involved in the situation that created these emotions. Having these types of conversations can be challenging, and I’ve written an article about how I make taking difficult action easier for myself.

Let go

Once I’ve felt and released my emotions, and decided on the action steps to take to avoid creating a similar situation again, I know I’ve done all I can, so the only thing that’s left to do is to consciously let the situation go. There’s no reason to hold on to it anymore and let it take up space in my mind.

All people experience negative emotions sometimes. There is nothing wrong with you if you feel bad about something, and you’re allowed to do what you need to do to release these emotions and prevent the same situation that caused them happen in the future. Just because some people nowadays try to ignore or block out their emotions, doesn’t mean you need to do it too. Put yourself first and do all you can to feel good.

With love, Ro 🤍