You Have to Feel to Heal: Embracing Your Emotions
Have you ever pushed down, ignored, or suppressed emotions like sadness, anger, or anxiety—telling yourself to "relax" or "just get over it"—only to feel even more anxious, irritable, or exhausted later?
Many of us try to avoid emotions through distraction: keeping our schedules packed, binge-watching TV, using substances, or overworking. Research shows that emotional suppression is a common strategy people use to regulate or manage difficult emotions (Srivastava et al., 2009). However, despite our best efforts, emotions tend to resurface and show up even stronger than before.
What Happens When We Ignore Our Emotions?
Emotions do not disappear when we suppress or ignore them; instead, they build up in the mind and body. Emotions serve as important signals, helping us respond to our experiences and understand our needs (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 2006). Just as hunger signals when we need to eat, emotions provide valuable information. For instance, anxiety warns of potential danger and helps us prepare for safety, while sadness may indicate a loss and a need for support.
When we ignore or suppress these signals, we are not resolving the emotions, we are merely delaying their expression. It can be helpful to think of emotions like ocean waves: they naturally rise and fall. But when we resist them, it is like trying to hold back a rising tide—it will continue to build in strength until it eventually crashes down even harder. In real life, this might look like bottling up stress at work, to later snap at a loved one over something trivial.
Research by Laws (2018) found that individuals who habitually suppress emotions may experience a “boomerang” effect, where suppressed emotions reappear as aggression toward others or themselves. Additionally, emotional suppression can lead to physical discomfort, including muscle tension (e.g., tight shoulders), headaches, increased heart rate, and nausea (Patel & Patel, 2019). Suppressing emotions does not make them go away, rather they accumulate, and when we finally react, it is often not just about that moment but all the emotions we have been holding in.
Why Do We Suppress Emotions?
Although emotional suppression has negative consequences, it’s a common way people cope (Srivastava et al., 2009). In the short term, pushing our emotions away can help us manage overwhelming situations (Srivastava et al., 2009). Additionally, societal expectations often encourage emotional suppression. For example, even when someone is grieving, they may still be expected to perform well at work without visibly showing their sadness.
Emotional suppression can also serve as a protective mechanism following trauma, helping the brain avoid emotional overload and protecting individuals from re-experiencing distressing memories. Unfortunately, society rarely provides space to learn how to properly process emotions, leading many people to push down their feelings to conform and cope (Elsig, 2022).
So, how can we build a healthier relationship with our emotions? And how can therapy help?
Listening to Your Emotions: A Guide to Inner Healing
Emotional processing involves learning to approach, accept, symbolize, tolerate, regulate, make meaning of, and utilize emotions (Greenberg Institute of Emotion-Focused Therapy, n.d.). In therapy, one of the first steps toward emotional processing is learning to approach emotions rather than avoid them.
Approaching and Accepting Emotions
What does it mean to approach and accept your emotions? Think of emotions as a friend rather than something to fear or suppress. Just as you would listen to a friend with curiosity and compassion, you can do the same with your feelings.
Approaching emotions means acknowledging that they exist rather than pushing them away. Instead of ignoring stress and hoping it will disappear, you can recognize its presence. Some people even find it helpful to greet the emotion, for example saying “Hello anxiety.”
The next step is acceptance which involves allowing emotions to exist without judgment, just as you would listen to a friend without dismissing their feelings. Emotions arise for a reason, for example, sadness signals a need for comfort, anger highlights a crossed boundary, and stress may indicate excessive demands. Accepting emotions means recognizing that all feelings, even difficult ones, are a natural part of being human.
Symbolizing Emotions
Symbolizing emotions involves putting our feelings into words, which helps us better understand and process them. Dr. Dan Siegel describes this as “name it to tame it”—naming an emotion can reduce its intensity and make it feel more manageable (Siegel, 2014).
For example, instead of feeling a vague sense of sadness, naming it as “I feel heartbroken in my relationship” can provide clarity (Siegel, 2014). Without this process of labelling our emotions they can feel more abstract and harder to manage. Thus, labelling or symbolizing our emotions helps us recognize what we need and what action we would like to take.
Tolerating and Regulating Emotions
The next step is learning to tolerate and regulate emotions.
Tolerating emotions means allowing ourselves to fully feel them. This might involve noticing the physical sensations accompanying emotions, such as a tight chest when anxious or simply allowing ourselves to cry when feeling sad. Instead of distracting or numbing ourselves, tolerating emotions means sitting with them and acknowledging their presence.
Regulating emotions, on the other hand, involves finding ways to support ourselves while feeling an emotion. This can include techniques like deep breathing or mindfulness (Jerath & Beveridge, 2020). For example, if you’re feeling anxious before a first date, your first instinct might be to cancel. Instead, regulating your anxiety might involve taking a few deep breaths and reminding yourself that nervousness is normal and temporary.
Making Meaning of and Utilizing Emotions
Making meaning of emotions involves reflecting on why we feel a certain way and what the emotion is trying to communicate. For instance, anger may signal that a boundary has been crossed. When we take time to reflect, we gain valuable insights into our needs and desires.
One way to explore and make meaning of our emotions is by asking, “What is my anger trying to tell me? Do I need to set a boundary?” This process of exploring the meaning of our emotions can help us reflect on what we are feeling and can help us uncover valuable insights into our needs, boundaries and desires.
Finally, we can use the insights gained from reflecting on our emotions to take meaningful action. For example, if you are feeling guilty about something you regret saying to a family member, you can use that guilt as a potential signal to apologize and strengthen your relationship.
Emotions as Inner Guides
Rather than viewing emotions as obstacles to be avoided or controlled, we can begin to see them as inner guides or signals that offer insight into our needs, boundaries, and experiences. When we allow ourselves to move toward our emotions rather than suppress or ignore them, we become better able to recognize what they are trying to communicate. In turn, we can make choices that align more closely with our needs. Therapy provides a supportive space to explore, process, and make meaning of emotions, helping us shift from avoidance to understanding. In other words:
You have to feel to heal.
Meet Cheyenne Ling
Cheyenne, is a registered clinical counsellor with a trauma-informed, person-centred approach. She helps clients navigate emotions with curiosity and self-compassion, using evidence-based therapies like CBT, emotion-focused therapy, and internal family systems to foster self-awareness and healing.
