Is it necessary to feel bad emotions in order to move past them?

I think people need to work through their emotions. Avoiding being sad or angry is not healthy. Working off your anger through exercise or something is good, but avoiding it will only make it worse. What’s funny is people think that feeling sad is a bad thing. If it wasn’t for sadness, how would we know what happiness was for?

Self pity isn’t healthy in any respect.

Whatever you do, don’t bottle it up! People need to work through emotions in some way or another, because if you try and suppress something it could lead to mental stress that you just don’t need.

I work through it all, top to bottom. I also try to accept my role, acknowledge my feelings and deal with my responsibilities. I don’t really think I have a quota for anger or sadness, but I do know when it’s time to move on (so to speak).

For me, the act of doing the things I mentioned above is a process, and once it’s complete I’ve usually found a place to deal with my sadness/anger and put it to rest. To wallow in something is to to devote yourself to it, focusing on it alone. You can wallow in happiness as easily as anger; but we all know too much of anything can be bad for you.

Yeah, the only way through them is through them.

Yes. You’ve got to feel them. Feelings are energy and they are meant to move out of you, and if you don’t attend to them as they are, they’ll morph into depression or anger or something else that will hurt you in the long run.

For me, years of depression was actually fear and anger about being hurt as a child turned inward. The more I’ve been dealing with the real emotions I wasn’t allowed to or too afraid to express at the time, the healthier I’ve been getting. Most of us carrry so much old stuff. When you’re brooding, it’s a sign to go into yourself to figure out what you’re really feeling. Usually it’s either anger, fear or sadness that’s been walled off. This can take some time to work through, and that’s OK. Our society has problems with things that aren’t a quick fix; don’t worry that it’s not all gone in a day or two, but don’t be surprised if it is.

You know you’ve moved through something because you feel it in your body, like a weight’s been lifted. There was person that I loved who treated me like the mom I needed to have, but it was only for a few years and then she died. I grieved; boy, did I grieve. I was sad for a long while. When I needed to, I’d cry. When the sad feelings came over me, I’d go somewhere and I’d let them happen. One day I could think of her and feel good about having known her instead of feeling sad. I’d accepted her death and I felt lighter. This was maybe a year and a half after.

If you feel sad or angry, feel sad or angry. Draw an angry picture. Write a sad poem. You’ll know when it’s worked its way through.

I think you do need to allow yourself to fully experience your negative emotions. You know what else? I think it’s ok to wallow once in a while, too. Cry, rant, wallow if you feel like it. Then pick yourself up, dust yourself off and carry on. Repeat as necessary.

I definitely think it’s necessary. When I’ve had the most traumatic/sad/angry/whatever events in my life, I’ve always allowed myself a day or two or three to be consumed by it, then get back to normal life, only being upset in whatever manor for a short period of time every day, starting with 45 minutes, then cutting back to a half hour, then 15 minutes, then 10, etc, for however long it takes to be able to move on.

Terrific question.
So. Check your gut.
Actual feelings feel intense; wallowing feels fakey.
Your own fakiness makes you honestly feel kind of sick of yourself…. and there we are, the next in a lifelong series of bona fide feelings.

Arrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh will they never stop…..

I know that we need to really feel emotions and work through them, but i’m not exactly sure how to do this… reminds me of a book i started reading called The Sedona Method I stopped reading the book because it asked you to really feel the emotions and then let them go…and i really didn’t get the letting go part of it. I’m a very visual person you see and i found it difficult to know how exactly to do this letting go business.

I mean if something bad happened to you as a kid and you acknowledge it and the feelings that it created…how is it possible to just let that go? Where does it go? The memory is still there and therefore the feelings are still there that the event evoked… so i’m still confused.

I’m good at expressing stuff in poetry and art etc, which i might try a bit more of but…I;m still not sure that will actually get rid of the emotion…once i’ve felt it enough… help

Some soldiers with PTSD go though this virtual reality expience that allows them to experience, over and over, what they went through in Iraq. The process enables them to stop jumping evey time they hear a noise, and to walk through the city again, instead of staying at home all the time. It desensitizes them.

Perhaps the same thing works with feelings. We remember something bad, over and over (some would call it obsession), and eventually we come to terms with it, and we can think about it without freaking out, and we can get on with our lives.

When something bad happens to me, I just let my mind do its thing. It’s not pleasant, but it does seem to help me recover sooner. Of course, I don’t know if this would work for anyone else.

I have zero scientific research, just 37 years of living as my proof. Yes. It is necessary to go through the bad emotions, (I’m not sure they are bad, though) to get back to the good or normal.

Growing up, I had my favorite Aunt. She was so cool. Everything my Mother wouldn’t let me do- because she was really overprotective – I did at my Aunt’s house. My Aunt didn’t do it out of spite – they were actually best friends. My Aunt took the time to explain that they grew up so poor, a doctor or dentist was a luxury, something they never could do, so my mother just wanted me to be healthy and keep all my teeth – even though we could afford all of those luxuries – it was just something that still scared my Mom. That’s the kind of person she was, she allowed us to experiment with things, but there was a lesson – life, family…anything – there was a purpose. She taught us to appreciate things.

Three years before I had my daughter, I got the news that she had ALS. Talk about a crash course in all things ALS, I had to know everything about it, down to how much money it was receiving in research money, each year.

Eventually, she was to the point where it was a matter of days. The morning it happened, she came home from the hospital. After the ambulance brought her home, we decided to take her outside to her favorite place, the swing in front of the orange groves. Three of us held her, cradled her. We hadn’t heard her talk in a long time, either she could and it drained her too much or she had lost the ability – but that day, she said, “thank you.” It took her a long time to get those two words out, but she did. Within 30 mins, she was gone. The hospice worker was there and helped us – I couldn’t believe that it happened, right in front of me.

I cried, I was angry. I was so sorry, for so long, that I was there. I thought it was the worst thing I could have experienced. Fast forward 10 years, my cousin was talking about it, she was laughing about how she always had have the last word. Next thing I knew, I was busting out laughing. She was right! We spent the next few hours talking about that day. Talking about the fight to get her out of the hospital, because it wasn’t what she wanted and we knew she would hold on and suffer, until she got her way – to go home.

In one afternoon, I went from being so sad about the entire event and watching her die – to laughing and being thankful I was there with her.

Nikipedia, I spent years being sad and angry about what she went through, but I learned from it – I learned a huge lesson. I also learned to be there at the end, is an incredible blessing. I learned I had to go through the bad emotions, to get back to good.

see, those bad emotions can be good – that’s why I don’t think they are so bad!

@augustlan: You said exactly what I was thinking.

Here’s some therapist handout info:

1. Opposite action to change emotions- opposite action is ACTING (actions, thoughts, facial expressions, body posture) your way into feeling differently. Acting opposite to your current emotional urges will eventually change your emotion. Acting is not suppressing your emotions/feelings.

2. Opposite action works best when the emotion is NOT JUSTIFIED by the situation and it is done ALL THE WAY.

3. An emotion is justified when it is effective or adaptive to the situation that prompted the emotion AND the emotion’s actions fit the facts of the situation.

4. Step by step: a) describe your emotion, b) decide whether you want to change your emotion (pros/cons and whether it promotes your well-being), c) if unjustified, do opposite action all the way, d) if justified, try problem solving to change the events that prompted the emotion, leave or avoid the situation, or radically accept the situation and your emotional response to it (, or suffer), e) keep practicing.

There’s something that feels fundamentally wrong about this approach. I know it works, but I guess I feel like it’s missing something. Maybe it’s just that I don’t believe that unjustified feelings actually exist.

It’s weird, because I’ve been feeling good for a while now, but just reading what you wrote, kevbo, kind of made the bottom sink out of my stomach. The way I deal with unjustified feelings is to not think them. They have such power when I do think them. I suppose this sounds contradictory to the idea that unjustified feelings don’t exist.

One could argue that simply not thinking them is kind of acting like they are ineffective. Still, there is, it seems to me, always uncertainty about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of an emotion. Is shame always bad? Is shame always ineffective? Is self-hate always bad or ineffective? Is a sense of worthlessness always bad or ineffective? What if you are shameful and hateful and worthless? How can you know whether these things are true or not? Especially if truth is subjective?

I guess that if truth is subjective, it means you can decide truth is anything you want. You can decide you shouold be happy, and the shame and hatefullness are in your way, so you turn them upsidedown, and say you are good for all the things you thought were bad.

That’s what bothers me. It seems so arbitrary. So unrelated to anything. It seems to me that not all of us are worthy of survival. I know if I were standing there in front of some ultimate judge who was deciding who could continue living, and would have to die, I’d be in the group to die.

Caveat: I left off the last step: 5. practice, practice, practice.

Hmmm. It seems you are doing what is described (not giving unjustified emotions the space to bring you down). You have to remember, too, that this advice applies mainly to people who have a habit of spiraling into cognitive distortions and then reacting to those distortions (e.g. “Everybody hates me.”) This gets someone in that frame of mind to slow down and really determine whether, in fact, “everybody” hates them. Just an example.

Unjustified feelings very well might not exist for you because you’re grounded enough to recognize the difference. Either way, it’s okay to have negative emotions, it’s just a matter of how to constructively deal with them depending on whether they are appropriate.

Forget truth or effectiveness for a minute. You’ve identified a bundle of emotion- shame, hate and worthlessness. Do you want to feel that way or do you want to change your emotion? Let’s assume you want to change the emotion to feel better. So what is true above everything else is that you don’t want to feel that way.

Now you need to dig into your toolbox to find the right tool to change your emotion. You have two choices: justified or unjustified. Which is the right tool? If you are lost in a sea of arbitrary decisions, then just pick one and try it out. Flip a coin. See what happens. If it doesn’t work (if you still feel the negative emotion or worse), you’ll get another chance, and you’ll know what the right answer is. If it works a little bit, then you probably picked the right tool and just need more practice at using it.

Regarding your last comment. Is there an ultimate judge? Who? Who is this ultimate judge? Or is this ultimate judge an amalgam of people and things you know… Mom, Dad, religion, siblings, significant other. Is this ultimate judge real or a mirage? Is it effective or adaptive to react to the opinion of a mirage?

Well, if there is an ultimate judge, it’s the amalgam one. If you want to look good in the eyes of others, and you never get any good feedback, and you’ve tried and tried to do something they like, then who wouldn’t feel worthless?

Now, you could say you no longer care what anyone else thinks of you. You could try to set up some new, personal criteria by which you were successful, and you could feel happy about yourself. If the barrier is too high to get over, you just lower the barrier. After all, the barrier is arbitrary.

Obvioiusly that’s hard to do, and as you say, we must practice it a lot. But you can never forget that you once had this goal, and you dropped it. You may always secretly want to achieve that, even though you know you can’t.

You can spend the rest of your life being gratefull and appreciative for what you have, but if you never get the appreciation of the people whose opinions you care about, I don’t know how much your method can work. No matter how much you work to believe that who you are is good enough, there is always thap failed person inside who lets you know you’re on borrowed time. Sooner or later, he’ll make his appearance, and when he does, you’re sunk (hopefully in shallow waters).

Or you can act with intention to find like and sympathetic minds and make them your ultimate judge.

Be open to finding one person who shares (the positive aspects of) your wavelength.

@daloon Sometimes the people in our lives judge us on their own scale, when really they don’t have the right to judge us at all! Once you fully accept (dare I say love?) yourself, others may not respond to it well.

In fact, this was one factor in my divorce. I came to accept who I was and stopped trying to fight it. My ex-husband saw that as a cop-out, and never was able to accept me as I am. I truly thought I was an unacceptable person to be married to, and was meant to be single for the rest of my life. I was totally ok with that, but my therapist told me it was bullshit. I was an unacceptable person to be married to for that particular man, but she was sure that would not be true of every man. Lo and behold, she was right! The man I married loves and accepts me exactly as I am, warts and all.

My point, and I do have one, is that sometimes we are looking for approval/good feedback from the wrong people. That is not our fault, or theirs. Just a fact.

@daloon and @kevbo and @augustlan is it possible to simply love oneself and not need anyone else’s approval or acceptance then? do you think no matter how much self-acceptance we have, there will always be in innate need to be loved/accepted by others regardless of history and moving through bad emotions.

In my life, it has usually been the case that people who proclaim the loudest that they don’t care and don’t want to be loved, are the very people who crave it the most.

Apathy, denial & avoidance are very different beasts.

Yeah, but baby steps is where I was going.

To follow up on my earlier comment, the bedrock truth of the matter is that one still doesn’t want to feel that way, so doing something constructive to change that is still positive, whether it’s lowering the barrier or something else. Also, making small, but manageable changes is a prerequisite for building momentum. A small change isn’t hard, but still moves one toward feeling a little better. Once that change is mastered, one can push the change a little further. Success breeds success.

I know it’s silly to resist these ideas about getting better, and yet, something inside me does. I get all sad just thinking about it. Like I’m mourning something. I don’t know… the me who had big dreams?

Also, the things I want to do require the strong approval of others. You can’t be in a band by yourself. You need musicians who like your style and who are motivated to get together, as well as motivated to seek out gigs.

Similarly, if you wanted to have your work published, you’d have to have a publisher like it.

Oddly, when I was sick I had an excuse for not succeeding. Now that I’m not, I’ve lost the excuse, which feels worse. I used to have the oomph required to keep going despite setbacks. I don’t think I have that any more.

Oh I definitely think we still crave love and acceptance if not approval…we just may need to re-think our avenues for acquiring it.

I really don’t think you have much choice, once the emotion is there, there is no stopping it. But you can stop how long you wallow in it.