Learning how to deal with difficult emotions

Everyone at some point in their life has to deal with negative emotions. For some people, these emotions come and go, often mixed with positive emotions, while for others, they seem to dominate their lives with little to no relief.

Common Negative Emotions

• Anger
• Inferiority
• Anxiety
• Fear
• Guilt
• Shame
• Sadness
• Confusion
• Irritability
• Grief
• Loneliness
• Jealousy
• Poor Self-Esteem

Not all negative emotions are bad and do serve a purpose

As human beings, we are designed to feel a whole range of emotions. Sometimes it is justified to feel angry, so we can set boundaries, but it is not healthy to be in a constant state of anger where we blow up at the smallest thing. We may feel fear when facing a genuine threat, giving us the option to fight or escape, but it is not healthy to be in a constant state of fear where it starts to affect the way we live our lives. We may feel deep sadness when we lose someone close to us, which is a natural response to grieving, but if we are constantly down for no particular reason, then there is a problem. 

As you can see, having some negative emotions is perfectly normal and can be a great indicator to encourage change; they only become problematic when they become persistent and affect how we live our lives and suck the enjoyment out of it. Each person knows when their emotional state has become too hard to bear and why people first reach out for help.

In this article, I will explain how these emotions can become persistent and how best to deal with them so that you can find more peace going forward.

Common Reasons for Negative Emotions

Believing unconscious beliefs to be true

As we grow up, we gather certain beliefs from our past that we believe to be true. A person who was mistreated in a relationship or shown little love by their parents may believe that they aren’t as worthy as other people. They may struggle with low self-esteem that carries with it feelings of inferiority, anxiety, anger or shame. Carrying this false belief of unworthiness around with them can have a significant impact on their emotional state and the thoughts their mind generates.

Suppressing emotions they felt were too difficult to face

To cope with difficult emotions, people may have resorted to suppressing them in various ways. This can be to distract themselves from them by endlessly scrolling on their phones or binge-watching TV, or overworking in an attempt not to face how they feel. They may try to deny these difficult feelings by putting a smiley face on top of them, telling everyone they are fine, when inside, they are struggling. They may try to numb themselves from them by drinking alcohol or using other substances. This approach never works, as it doesn’t allow you to experience these emotions as they are so that they can be released. The very act of suppression may bring temporary relief, but it is a terrible long-term strategy, as these feelings build up inside, making them harder to deal with going forward.

Fighting to be free of negative emotions

Another common reason for negative emotions is fighting the difficult emotions themselves, which leads to a vicious cycle of creating more negative feelings. Fighting emotions creates resistance within, which only leads to more suffering. Alongside that, people may spend a lot of their time trying to think their way out of how they feel, which requires immense mental energy, ultimately leading to feeling mentally burned out. They can become so preoccupied with their inner state that their focus becomes fixated on their inner world, resulting in a lack of focus on the outside world. Due to this, they may feel disconnected from their surroundings and others.

Lack of self-care

As people struggle with their emotions, they may begin to isolate themselves and turn to drugs, junk food or alcohol as a means to cope with how they feel. Exercise, fresh air, eating well, connecting with others and cutting down on alcohol can have a significant benefit on your overall well-being, and when neglected, can lead to more negative feelings, leading to a vicious cycle that the person finds hard to break.

Life circumstances

A person who has lost someone close to them, lost their job or has been through a bitter break-up may struggle with difficult emotions. Life can be tough at times and presents many challenges that can affect how we feel. Even dealing with the daily life of family and work can be draining for many. Someone who deals with juggling work and children may feel exhausted, but responsibilities prevent them from taking the much-needed break they require.

Another person may be overworking and has experienced a lot of stress recently in their life, which has built up, causing them to worry and overthink. This can then lead to them feeling constantly anxious and worn out as their nervous system and brain struggle with the extra burden that is being put on them.

Being Human

Just by being human, our emotional state can change for no particular reason; some days we feel great, while on others we may feel down. No one should expect to feel great all the time; our body and mind go through cycles of sadness and happiness, days when we feel full of energy and days when we feel flat.

There is nothing wrong with this if we allow these states to come and go, without falling into behaviours that increase our suffering, which is what the article will address. As the trouble with any form of suffering is that the normal steps we take to deal with it can actually make things worse, in our attempt to escape or relieve suffering, we often exacerbate it.

Let me start with a recent interaction I had with someone who was dealing with anxiety for the first time.

This person came to me for help after he had exhausted every avenue for being free of his stressed and anxious state. His first words to me were “Paul, I run a successful business and have a lovely family who need me, I can’t feel like this, I have to get better”. As the conversation progressed, it became clear that he was trying to fight and struggle his way out of how he was feeling. He would spend all day in his head trying to find a solution to his predicament. He was trying to fight these feelings by trying to get rid of them; he was worrying daily about his current state and how much of an effect it was having on him, and he had turned to alcohol in an attempt to suppress them.

The list of things he was doing was only increasing his suffering, which in turn led to more fighting, more suppressing, more overthinking and more drinking. I looked on and could see clearly that his way of dealing with how he felt was only creating more suffering, and while in this mindset, he had no chance of doing anything but feeling more lost and dreadful.

Many people fall into this trap, and I did too, so I can relate to the story above as I went down a very similar path. It took me a long time to realise that I was the creator of so much of my own suffering, I was the reason I was staying in a loop of my own making and that a new approach was needed. To break any cycle, we first have to see that we are in one and then approach things differently.

My own struggle with depression

I remember a period in my life when I fell into depression. I was emotionally and mentally shot at the time and just gave up. I stayed in bed most of the day, began to isolate myself, and started eating crap and drinking alcohol as a way to cope. Deep down, my wish was that one day I would wake up and it would be over, or I could just read some article online and find out how to solve it. Then one day, I realised that my mind and body needed me more than ever. It wasn’t knowledge that could get me out of this; it was self-care. I had to get off my butt and begin to make positive changes and really start looking after myself.

The trouble is, when we feel at our worst, the last thing we want to do is take care of ourselves. We barely have the energy to move, never mind start looking for those gym shoes. This is why suffering often leads to the development of more bad habits and further suffering. But I knew this was down to me, and things needed to change if I wanted to see improvements. So even though it was challenging to begin with, I started re-engaging with life again, started eating well, began exercising and ditching the alcohol. I started to look after myself far better, and in time, the dark cloud began to lift, and I started to feel much better.

This wasn’t the end of my suffering, as I had a lot of emotional junk that I had suppressed and refused to face in the past. I still needed an emotional clear out so I could feel more peace inside, but at least I had stopped harming myself further and was now in a better place to move forward.

So, how do you learn to manage difficult emotions more effectively?

The turning point for me was when I went on a Buddhist retreat, where we began with meditation. After this had finished, someone said that it wasn’t working for him and that all this garbage had come up, and he was struggling to deal with it. The teacher said, “That’s brilliant and shows the meditation is working, you see all that stuff you are experiencing is exactly what you have been running away from for so long.

The reason it has come up in meditation is that you have nowhere to run and no way to distract yourself; you are now feeling what has been buried for a very long time”. The person agreed with this and admitted that he even came on the retreat to find a magic way to get rid of all this garbage within. The teacher said, “The only way to be free of it is to finally allow yourself to experience it. It won’t feel great facing this stuff, but now that you know it’s a positive process, you can loosen your grip and know that allowing yourself to experience this pain is freeing you from it.

Although I had heard this before, it had never sunk in to the degree it did this day; it hit me that hard that I could barely listen to the rest of the talk. I admitted to myself that this was why I was on this retreat: I wanted to find a way to bypass these negative feelings and not feel them. I thought back to my anxiety days and realised the way I overcame it was to finally allow myself to experience this anxious energy that I had built up inside. This emotional junk was no different. I had some serious inner work to do here; no book or retreat was going to bypass this. I could not hand this job to anyone else but myself, and this would not be the blissful process that I hoped it would be.

It would be no different than a drug addict who had to go through awful withdrawal symptoms as his body released the toxins. The process would be incredibly difficult for the person with the addiction, but it was the only way to be free of these toxins and their addiction. The reason so many addicts go back to taking drugs is not for the drug itself, but because they don’t want to go through the uncomfortable withdrawal process. My coming to this retreat was the same; I didn’t want to experience these negative feelings, I wanted someone or something to make them go away. Looking back now, it seems crazy that I thought this was possible, and why I was running from one thing to another in the hope of finding a way to get rid of them without experiencing them.

Another important factor is to realise that when you do stop suppressing or distracting yourself from these emotions, you have buried, through fear, a fear of facing them. You may then experience a surge of them alongside some negative thoughts. This surge is entirely normal and just an indication of how much you have suppressed in the past. Releasing this load is not a negative thing but a positive one, as you are clearing up what has been previously buried, leading you to feel better mentally and emotionally. Allowing yourself to experience these emotions is the only way to be free of them, instead of the usual tendency to ‘Get rid’ of them through some kind of struggle or technique. I understand this can be a difficult process, as the natural drive is to pull away or suppress what we deem uncomfortable, but when you know the process is a positive one in the long run, it can be much easier to navigate.

Uncomfortable emotions that would visit my consciousness often

Some of the emotions that would visit me often were feelings of inferiority that had come through years of dealing with anxiety. As I felt I had lost my sense of self and spent a lot of time isolating myself, I had lost a lot of confidence. I also had feelings of deep sadness arise, another thing I had always refused to feel. If anyone could put a smily face on top of feeling down and portray to the world I was fine, it was me. Another one that would pop up often was the feeling of rejection, as I had lost a relationship and a couple of friendships while dealing with anxiety. 

The first thing I had to do was to understand where all these feelings had come from initially, and no longer identify them as the truth of who I was, as none of these feelings were there before I had been through anxiety, so they were not a reflection of my true self. They were due to many faulty beliefs I had taken on about myself that I believed to be true. Suppressing these feelings and identifying with them as the truth had led to them intensifying; thus, even the most minor incident could trigger them. At times, they did not even need to be triggered; they were just there in the background, having an impact on my day.

When I began to see what was happening, it became clear to me that if I wanted to be free of these uncomfortable emotions, I had to finally face and allow these feelings without identifying with them as real. So when a feeling of inferiority would arise, I would not act on it by trying to find validation outside of myself; I would say, ‘Oh, there’s that feeling of inferiority arising’, rather than believing that I am not as good as others.

If I had feelings of deep sadness arise, I would say, ‘The feeling of sadness is arising inside, it is just coming up to free itself’ rather than ‘I feel sad and my life is awful’. If a feeling of rejection arose, then I would say, ‘Here is the feeling of rejection coming up, no problem, it is not a reflection of reality,’ rather than believing the people I cared about were going to leave me.

I went through this cleansing process with all these negative emotions that would rise within me; I no longer tried to distract myself from them or get rid of them. I did the opposite and welcomed them; if I wanted to be free of them, then their presence had to be a good thing. I no longer put a story around them as I no longer identified with them as the truth; they were just emotions coming up to free themselves. They held no truth. The truth was, I was the one who was behind them. On days when I did not feel these emotions, I could see clearly that they weren’t who I was; if they were, they would be with me all the time, but they weren’t; they would come and go.

Another positive change that emerged from this process was that I began to engage with life more freely. Previously, I would always hide away from these emotions being triggered. As the main feeling that arose was not feeling as good as others, social interactions were a massive trigger for me, and this is when ‘Mr Inferiority’ would show his face. The way I had dealt with this in the past was to socialise as little as possible, thinking this was the best approach, as less socialising meant fewer uncomfortable feelings. When in reality, I was building more walls, stopping me from living the life I wanted.

With my new understanding, I learnt to do the opposite; these interactions were not the problem, they were only triggering what was buried within me. A more effective way to be free of these feelings would be to approach these interactions and allow myself to get triggered, then let the emotions run their course and dissipate as they wish, while again not identifying with them as the truth. By doing this, I could also break out of the walls I had built and engage with life once again instead of hiding from it.

When I took this new approach, something unexpected happened. These feelings of inferiority still arose, but they meant little to me now; it just felt like an internal shift of energy. As I no longer identified with it, I had created some distance from it. I had stopped being the emotion and was now more the observer of it. The old narrative that had plagued me when interacting with others, such as ‘They think I’m boring’ and ‘They don’t like me,’ had pretty much ceased to exist, and if this voice did arrive on occasions, I would take no notice of it.

The reason for this voice is that it will always try to make sense of an emotion. This is why it is so hard not to identify with an emotion as reality, as the emotion creates the inner dialogue, and when this is taken to be true, it feeds the emotion. So you now have two sets of feedback, making it appear more real and more likely to drive your behaviour.

Today, I have no thoughts or feelings of being inferior, as the thoughts and accompanying emotions are not there. Does that mean that when they were that I was genuinely inferior? No, it means I took those thoughts and feelings on to be true. The shift happened when I stopped putting belief into this story; without this belief and investment in it, it began to collapse all by itself. No pep talks, no positive affirmations, no changing the outside or others, just seeing through the falseness of it and the pulling away of my investment and belief in it.

The old behaviours of wanting to escape or become a people pleaser in an attempt to gain their acceptance were also no longer there. It was then that I realised it was never about trying to get rid of this emotion or avoid triggering it, as I had previously done; it was about having a different relationship with it. One that took all its power away and allowed it to free itself from my inner space. Now, this was not easy, and I would sometimes get caught up in it. Old habits can take time to break, but with more understanding and practice, it became my default setting to allow and no longer identify with these emotions.

Starting to free myself of uncomfortable emotions

As I continued with this process, I started to feel a real emotional clearing; it was as if my inner world was getting a spring clean. Not only that, but my life really opened up; I could now go anywhere and do anything without the fear of uncomfortable emotions being triggered. Without me believing them or putting a story around them, the emotion rose and receded far quicker and came with much less force. I had gone from hiding away to being excited about where this was taking me.

This process was not just about dealing with feelings of inferiority; I continued this path with all my emotions. If I felt really down one day, I would allow myself to feel down that day rather than trying to find a way to feel happy. I wouldn’t wallow in it or tell a negative story about it; I would accept that’s how I was feeling that day. Again, without resistance towards this feeling or believing it to be who I was or a reflection of my life, the feeling took on a lighter tone and passed far quicker.

The inner battles I used to have with these negative emotions were over; it made no sense to fight or suppress these emotions anymore, and it made no sense to hide from them by restricting my life. Looking back, I can see how much extra suffering my old approach brought me and why I never had a shot at being free going down that path.

How developing a new relationship with my emotional state created change

Now that I was able to maintain a greater distance from these emotions, I found I had better friendships and relationships. Previously, when feeling down or irritable, I tended to take it out on others by being snappy and, on some occasions, blaming others for how I was feeling. I now understood that how I felt inside was a personal experience, and the outside world or others were not to blame for my inner state; they did not deserve me lashing out at them. 

Many people regret what they say and do when they are in the midst of a negative emotion. The person who feels insecure may blame their partner for not doing enough or become jealous of every female they talk to, which only leads to the destruction of the relationship and further insecurity in the next one. The person who has suppressed anger may constantly argue or blame those around them for how they feel, leading to frequent fallouts or others avoiding spending time with them, which can result in feelings of rejection and increased anger.

This is where beliefs come into it. The person who feels insecure may have had someone walk out on them in the past. The person who feels constant anger may have been treated poorly as a child, and thus carries a false belief that they are not good enough or a belief that others don’t treat them fairly throughout their adult life. The plus side of this is that you can forgive people more easily and are less reactive when they act out of emotion; you see, it is not truly them, and they are just dealing with these emotions in the only way they know how. They want peace as much as you do; they don’t know yet how to find it and are still in reactive mode. 

This is why we must always look within, rather than looking to the outside to fix ourselves. If someone’s outer world seems to be full of drama and conflict, and their behaviour is unpredictable, it is a clear sign that their inner world needs attention. As without exception, the outside world is a reflection of how we feel inside.

The person with a lot of anger sees the world as a hostile place, where others are always trying to exploit them or get under their skin. Someone cutting them off in traffic can send them into a rage, and they truly believe the person doing so is the cause of it; they aren’t; they just triggered the buried anger within them. 

The person who feels insecure often fears that others will abandon them, leading to real trouble with relationships and a constant need for validation outside of themselves. They may fall into people-pleasing behaviours to get people to like them, which often has the opposite effect, as others may see them as needy and inauthentic.

The person who has fearful/anxious energy within sees the world as a scary place with dangers around every corner, so they may start to isolate themselves and not live the life they want, leading to more negative feelings. Yet in reality, everyday life is just triggering the fearful/anxious energy stored within.

On the other hand, the person who primarily feels positive emotions views the world as a lovely place; they wake up eager to engage with others and pursue their passions.

Yet the one key factor here is that the world spins the same for everyone. People don’t see the world as it is; they perceive the world through their emotional state and the beliefs they have about themselves. Change that, and your whole experience of the world changes. My experience of life is entirely different from what it was when I was suffering, and yet nothing on the outside has changed. I could say I’ve changed, but a clearer explanation is that now all the garbage has been cleared out inside, and the false beliefs about myself are no longer present; I am back to my authentic self. The best way to describe it would be to say I have arrived back home. 

When people talk about awakening in spiritual circles, all they mean is that you have awakened to who you truly are. True spiritual practice is not about kneeling on a cushion and placing a few Buddhist statues around the house; it is a serious inner work to clear out the inner garbage and let go of old belief patterns, so that you can find your true self once again. It’s like cleaning the mud off a diamond so you can see its true beauty.

Why do we find it so difficult to allow emotions?

Now that I have discussed the benefits of allowing your emotions, I will explain why people often find it so difficult.

The main reason people find it difficult is that the mind always wants to reject or distract itself from anything it deems to be uncomfortable. Rather than allowing, it would prefer a technique; it wants an ABC plan of how to feel good and not feel bad. Even the word ‘allowing’ can be transformed into another technique by the mind. When someone feels some difficult emotion arising, they may say, ‘Right, I’m allowing, but it’s still there; this isn’t working, I need to try something else,’ which isn’t allowing the emotion to be present at all and is a trap that keeps people stuck. 

As I mentioned earlier, I am a strong advocate of self-care and its benefits to overall well-being. Still, even this can be another way of trying to escape difficult emotions. I know because I fell into this trap myself. I was taking lavender baths, meditating, running, and taking weekly massages, all in an attempt to feel good all the time. Then, when I felt any uncomfortable emotion arising, I thought I had failed, so I would meditate more, run further, and book another massage. I was still in the mindset that I must do everything to avoid experiencing these emotions. I was still trying to escape or manipulate my inner world, instead of allowing what needed to arise to do so.

The truth is, difficult emotions aren’t pleasant to feel, so the instinct to get rid of them or distract yourself from them is a strong one. But if you look at how much extra suffering this creates while doing nothing at all to ease the discomfort, you eventually begin to look in another direction. My years of fighting and suppressing finally led me to surrender. I was just done; I couldn’t do it anymore and realised it was getting me nowhere. I finally realised I wasn’t in control and there was nothing I could do. If these emotions were buried within, then they were going to come up regardless; my attempt to deny them was just creating more suffering and going absolutely nowhere in addressing the problem. 

Some people also believe that if they allow themselves to feel uncomfortable emotions, then they will grow and take over them. This is a total myth. When you allow yourself to experience them, then you are allowing them to free themselves. The best quote I came across was, ‘We believe we are seeking liberation from these uncomfortable feelings, when the truth is they are seeking liberation from us.’

That quote means these feelings are not coming up, so they can be pushed back down or got rid of; they are coming up because they are trying to leave our inner space. No different than steam arising from a kettle that needs an outlet. If you attempt to stop the steam from coming up, then the pressure will build so much that the kettle will explode. I have seen many people explode over seemingly nothing, and it’s a clear sign that they have been suppressing their feelings for a while until eventually the dam bursts.

Allowing yourself to finally experience your emotions rather than suppressing them or distracting yourself

When dealing with difficult emotions, your only job is to allow them to manifest as they wish and experience them fully as they are. The feelings are buried within, and so their emergence to the surface is entirely natural; this is something you have no control over. You can’t make them go away, but you can make them worse if you get into a battle with them, and you can keep them buried within if you keep trying to suppress them. Also, avoid the temptation to be reactive to these emotions or throw them out towards others. Remember, they are not a reflection of reality, but rather an emotion coming up to be released. 

When I allowed myself to feel how I truly felt, whether good or bad, happy or sad, it created numerous benefits. I was no longer fighting an inner war to try to manipulate any state, which reduced my suffering immensely. I was no longer living in my head, trying to figure out how to escape from my feelings, which allowed me to be far more present towards life and with others.

I stopped overthinking about how I was feeling, which saved a considerable amount of mental energy, allowing me to feel far more clarity. I no longer hid away from life or any triggers, so I was able to engage with life and follow what was important to me. I stopped blaming life or others for them, which led to better relationships. By no longer suppressing them, I was able to release these emotions that had built up inside; in doing so, these emotions were able to free themselves from my inner space.

As you can see, I had no control over what came up, but I did have control over how I responded to them. This was the key thing I was missing all along. My whole day was driven by the need to get rid of them, to avoid experiencing them, and why nothing changed and, for the most part, why things got worse.

It took me a while to see what I did and finally go down a different path, but when I did, my suffering began to reduce dramatically, which was a clear sign I was on the right path. I realised now that my suffering was trying to guide me all along. It was telling me that my previous approach was not the way forward and that I was missing something. I did not need a new way of coping; I did not need a new technique to manage or manipulate how I was feeling; I just needed to see something.

To conclude, we are still human, and everyone, like me, still feels a range of emotions, which is perfectly normal and fine. However, when negative emotions become overwhelming and dominate your day, or you constantly feel exhausted while trying to cope with them, it is time to address the problem and adopt a new approach.

I am not saying that change is easy, as when you finally open yourself up to experiencing these emotions, you may initially feel them more intensely than ever. However, although this will be uncomfortable, it is a positive process in the long run. This process also takes time; depending on the emotional load you are carrying, you may have days when you feel fine and days when everything seems to come up at once. This is because the body cannot release all this stuff at once, and so it tends to come in waves. Nothing has gone wrong, and you are not regressing.

To finish, it can take time to change behaviours, to develop a new understanding and a way of being. I have found that when I write, people are at different stages of understanding, and things resonate more with some than with others. For some, it clicks straight away, and for others, they are unsure of what is being asked of them.

So even if you struggle at first not to identify with your emotional state in the moment, then don’t think you have failed. For now, simply practice being more open to your feelings and less reactive; learn to allow your emotional states to come and go without trying to control them. Try not to fall into destructive behaviours as a way of dealing with how you feel, look after your mind and body the best you can, and it will thank you for it. Finally, learn to be kind to yourself, forgive yourself for how you may have acted in the past; you were just doing the best you could in the moment.

My book At Last a Life has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide and tells the story of how I recovered from 10 years of anxiety and panic.

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