We tend to go on about growing your capacity to feel your feelings. That might sound very abstract to some of you. All we mean is simply, allowing ourselves to feel (not necessarily express) our feelings when we feel them. We think it is a great predictor of success and well-being when a person is willing to feel what they are feeling when they are feeling it. Equally important can be the great cost, exhaustion, and suffering that comes from all the work we need to do to attempt to suppress what we’re feeling.
Today, let’s talk about how resisting your feelings can lead to undesirable outcomes. Here’s how it works: A stimulus comes along that makes us either angry or sad and we get fearful, duck our heads under the covers and hope that it passes. We are rewarded, because those feelings do pass eventually, but other stuff passes too. And that “other stuff” frequently needs our attention…but we can’t see it because we are too busy avoiding those emotions and preventing them from coming to the surface.
Let’s talk about a real example to bring this home. To use something that most of us will be able to relate to having fear about, let’s say you invest a lot of money into a friend's business. A few months later you stop by his shop and you can tell immediately that he is marketing his products all wrong. You’re nervous because you have a lot of money invested in his success, but you don’t want to upset him by insulting his marketing plan. You head home and decide not to say anything, in fact the whole thing has made you so upset that you decide to take an alternate route every day to avoid seeing his failing store. This is an example of ducking your head under the covers so that you don’t have to confront your feelings about asserting your opinions with your friend. In the meantime, while you are avoiding that street, he continues to fail with his marketing plan, hires more people, and overstocks, driving the business (and your investment) into the ground.
When we duck our heads under the covers, we often do avoid our feelings for a bit, but a lot of stuff that needs our attention passes us by as well. Problems that we could have addressed and solved become massive mountains due to neglect. The moral of the story is that avoiding our feelings is often costly.
To the strength of feeling what’s there,
