Dealing with Hard Emotions

A little while back on Facebook I saw this quote by John Gottman:

“Your emotional awareness and ability to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in life.”

I think there is a lot of truth to that. The most difficult thing about most hard things in life is the emotions that come with a particular event or circumstance. I feel like we spend a lot of our life developing coping mechanisms to deal with hard emotions we experience, and then we spend the rest of our life trying to unlearn the unhealthy coping mechanisms we’ve developed and replace them with healthier ways of coping with hard emotions. We know we’ve really progressed when events or circumstances that used to trigger hard emotions for us no longer do because we’ve learned to see those events/circumstances in a different, more truthful way.

I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve personally learned while learning to cope with difficult emotions in healthier ways in my life, in case the things that I’ve learned could help someone else in their own learning process. 

One of the biggest lies I believed before learning to handle hard emotions better was that the way I felt was a result of other people's words/actions. I gave way too much control of my feelings to other people. Because of this I loved other people, but I was also terrified of them. I loved people because they had the power to make me happy when they noticed me or spent time with me, but I was also terrified of them because they had equal power to make me sad when they ignored me or rejected my overtures of friendship. 

This false belief caused me problems in a few different ways. First of all, it made me incredibly sensitive to the way other people reacted to me because I was always trying to gauge my acceptability as a person and how I should feel about myself based on how others reacted to me. Obviously problematic. As I mentioned in an earlier post, how other people react to you is often a much better reflection of them and their current emotional state than it is of you and your value as a human being. 

Another problem this false belief caused me took me a bit longer to recognize, but was equally damaging to me and to my relationships. Believing that my feelings were determined by others and their interactions with me, I tended to put too much of the burden of keeping me happy and feeling good about my life on those who were closest to me. I thought that when I was sad I needed those close to me to show me love to make me happy again. I knew I usually felt happy when I was with people I loved a lot, and so I focused my life on spending as much time as possible with people I loved and feared the times when I could not be with them. I became emotionally dependent on other people, which hurt both them and me.

The biggest lesson I had to learn in dealing with hard emotions is that other people are not in charge of my emotions; I’m in charge of my own emotions. I found this to be both a freeing and a terrifying truth. No one is responsible for making me feel happy in my life except me. I have the power to do that, and I also have the responsibility to do that. Only me. Of course it’s easier to be happy generally when you have people in your life that love you and a job or activities to do that you enjoy, but day to day, minute to minute, you are the one that has control over your own feelings and actions and the one that determines your own happiness by how you think about and interpret the world around you and what you choose to do.

One thing I noticed as I learned to unravel my feelings and trace them back to their source was that the trigger for hard emotions I experienced was often different than I initially thought it was. How I explained to myself the reason for my sadness was often not the actual trigger at all, making it difficult to resolve the actual problem. I think that is often the reason we struggle to resolve difficult emotions: we’re looking for solutions in the wrong places to fix things that aren't actually the source of the problem at all.

Let me give you an example. Often I get sad when I try to use my relationship with someone as a coping mechanism for a different problem. For example, maybe my house is a mess and I need to clean it, but cleaning sounds hard and my motivation to tackle the actual problem of a messy house is low. What’s actually making me unhappy is a messy house, but instead of tackling the actual problem, I try to find a different way to feel better, such as hanging out with a friend. When my friend can't hang out, I am sad that I cannot use that means to feel better and start bemoaning my lack of friends or their lack of desire to hang out with me, when my real problem is not a lack of friends but the fact that I have a messy house that I haven't cleaned yet, but I’ve convinced myself otherwise. Or maybe I have the responsibility to make a phone call or perform some other task that sounds hard, but I’m avoiding it, and so I start feeling a desperate need to know I am loved in spite of failing to accomplish something that someone else is expecting of me or that I know I need to do, when really if I just did the thing I knew I needed to do instead of procrastinating I would have no need to compensate for my failure to do it by getting reassurance of love from someone else.

So, the end lesson I’ve learned from all this is that when I start feeling difficult emotions such as loneliness or a desperate need to feel loved, one of the best ways for me to feel better is not to wallow in my sadness or start seeking reassurance of love from my friends, but instead to push through the hard emotions and start doing something that I know needs doing. If I’m feeling frustrated that I’m living in a messy house, I need to get up and start cleaning it, not wallow in my frustration and wait for someone else to take care of my problem for me. I have the power to solve my own problems and change the way I’m feeling. Often all it takes is a little productivity to realize that my problem is not a lack of people that love me or the amount of love I’m being shown--neither of which is a problem I have the power to solve, since it involves the agency of others--but rather my failure to create meaning in my life outside of other people and work to accomplish good things on my own. Once I start working to accomplish something, even if I really am not feeling motivated to do so starting out, by the end I feel so much better about myself and my life, and all the other problems I thought I had and the hard emotions I was feeling dissipate in the positive feelings created by working to accomplish something good. 

Yes, so that’s my two cents of wisdom for today: if you're feeling sad, particularly if your sadnesses tend to stem from things you make up in your head and not actual life problems, push through the sad feelings and start working to accomplish something you know needs to be done, even if that task seems to have nothing to do with what you’re sad about, and you may find that what you were sad about is actually less of a problem than you thought it was and that productivity has miraculously produced an overall happier state of mind for you. Prayer usually helps a lot too. When I pray for help to see things differently and feel better, and then I get up and do something, the Spirit will often also teach me a little nugget of wisdom or a different way of seeing things that magically makes me feel better as well, and makes me a wiser person overall. I love you all, and I wish you well in learning to cope with your own difficult emotions--one of the greatest challenges we all face in this life, I think, but one that it is possible to overcome with the right tools and a lot of hard work.

*Note: For some people, the right tools may include medication and/or therapy, and that is totally fine. Whatever works best for you for handling the difficult emotions you struggle with (what those emotions are and what triggers them is different for everyone) in a positive, healthy way is great. No judgement here.