I don’t want to feel “bad.”  I don’t want to feel depressed or anxious or small or insecure or overwhelmed.  I doubt you want to feel those emotions, either.    Clients come in all the time looking to feel better, to not feel those difficult emotions.  Earlier in my career, my goal was to help clients in that pursuit.  Now, that’s still A goal in my work.  But it’s not THE goal.  Now, another goal is to get better at feeling bad.

People struggle with feeling pain.  We try to fix it, run from it, deny it; anything we can do to avoid having to experience it.  That fear and avoidance drives addiction.  It creates additional (delayed-onset) pain when we engage in unhealthy behaviors and thought patterns in order to avoid the feelings that we fear.  This creates a cycle of pain, fear, and avoidance that gains momentum the more often we engage in it.

The driver of this self-perpetuating cycle isn’t the hard emotion.  It’s the fear that the emotion will be unbearable.  I frequently tell clients that I don’t believe in the concept of boredom.  I think “boredom” is the name we give to empty space and time in which we start to feel difficult emotions.  When a client says, “I’m not good at being bored” I ask, “what do you start to think about and feel when you’re bored?”

Many people will avoid “boredom” because they’re afraid of what they might have to think about and feel.  They’re afraid of how painful it might be.  The problem, then, isn’t the pain; it’s the fear of pain.  The more we avoid pain, the more our psyche sees it as something worth avoiding.

We’ve got to get better at feeling bad.  We’ve got to stop seeing it as an end point in which we’ll be stuck.  Pain is a part of life.  Pain is a transient experience.  It’s not the enemy.  If we see it as those things, we can remove some of its power.  With that mindset we can know that it doesn’t have to be something we’ll be willing to avoid at all costs. 

I’ve been told that the difference between cows and buffalo is this: when a storm is approaching, cows will try to run away from it, getting caught in the rain for a longer period of time.  Buffalo will head into the storm, allowing them to be rained on for a shorter period of time.  Be a buffalo.  Get better at feeling bad by allowing yourself to feel bad.