Sitting with Feelings
“Learning to Bear, Not Just Manage, Our Emotions”
As a therapist, I often witness the confusion and hesitation on my clients' faces when I ask them to "sit with their feelings." For many, this concept feels both strange and uncomfortable, which isn’t surprising, as we naturally gravitate toward what feels safe and familiar. There's a natural pull to remain in our emotional comfort zone, to avoid the intensity of uncomfortable feelings. Yet, real emotional growth requires something counterintuitive: we need to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The very act of sitting with our emotions, allowing ourselves to fully experience them without immediate escape, helps us move beyond avoidance and into a deeper understanding of ourselves.
In this article, I want to explore what "sitting with your feelings" really means, why it’s crucial and how it helps us navigate our emotional landscape. It's a process that encourages us to stop running from our emotions and instead develop the capacity to bear them. The challenge is learning to hold space for our emotions without relying on familiar coping mechanisms that may provide temporary relief but ultimately keep us stuck in cycles of avoidance and disconnection from our authentic selves.
Bearing Feelings vs. Managing Feelings
When I talk about sitting with your feelings, I’m talking about developing the capacity to bear your emotions, not just manage them. There’s an important distinction between the two. To bear your emotions is to allow yourself to feel them fully, without trying to escape, suppress, or control them. This is an act of courage and vulnerability, as it involves embracing the discomfort that emotions, especially painful ones, often bring.
In contrast, managing feelings often involves strategies aimed at controlling or avoiding them. While it may seem like managing your emotions is a positive skill, it can easily become a way of not feeling your feelings at all. Managing feelings can look like coping mechanisms designed to keep emotions at bay, things like staying excessively busy, avoiding situations that trigger certain feelings, or using external distractions to numb or escape discomfort.
Coping Mechanisms: A Form of Self-Trickery
Many of the ways we “manage” our feelings involve what I call a form of self-trickery. Instead of sitting with our emotions and bearing them, we develop coping mechanisms to avoid the full weight of what we feel. These can take many forms, such as: avoidance, getting angry, withdrawing from people, overeating, undereating, bingeing on food, drinking too much alcohol, taking legal or illegal substances, gambling, excessive shopping, excessive partying, social media or device dependency. These behaviours serve as ways to "manage" feelings, but what’s really happening is that we’re finding ways to avoid the intensity of “bearing” those emotions.
This self-trickery convinces us that we are doing something about our feelings when, in reality, we’re acting them out rather than feeling them. For example, a person who lashes out in anger might believe they’re releasing their frustration, but they’re often using anger as a shield to avoid sitting with the deeper emotions beneath, such as sadness or fear. Similarly, someone who binge-eats or drinks to excess may be avoiding feelings of loneliness or anxiety by turning to food or drink for comfort, temporarily managing the emotions but never actually facing them.
While these coping mechanisms may provide temporary relief, they prevent us from fully processing our feelings. Instead of bearing the emotions and allowing them to pass, we become stuck in cycles of avoidance, which keeps the root of the emotional issue unresolved.
Emotional Fusion: When Feelings Become Identity
For many of us, emotions can feel overwhelming, so much so that they start to define who we are. As a result, we can become so fused with our feelings that they start to shape our identity. For instance, someone who frequently feels ‘not good enough’ may eventually believe, I am not good enough. What begins as a feeling becomes an internalised belief, woven into the fabric of their identity.
The problem with emotional fusion is that it turns temporary emotional states into permanent identities. Instead of recognising that feelings come and go, we start to believe that emotions like sadness, anger, or fear represent who we are. Over time, this fusion of emotion and identity limits our ability to see ourselves clearly. Rather than acknowledging that ‘I am experiencing sadness’, we internalise the message I am a sad person or I am a failure.
In therapy, part of the work is helping individuals disentangle themselves from their feelings, learning to see emotions as fleeting experiences rather than defining aspects of their identity.
Feeling Overwhelmed and Moving Away from Emotions
Often, when emotions feel too intense or overwhelming, we instinctively move away from them. The discomfort of emotions like sadness, anger, or fear can push us toward coping strategies that offer immediate relief, whether it's diving into work, shopping, eating, or even numbing ourselves with substances. But avoidance, while tempting, is only a temporary fix.
Sitting with your feelings, especially when they are overwhelming, is essential because it allows you to bear the emotions rather than run from them. Avoiding emotions may seem to provide relief, but it often keeps us trapped, unable to process and release what we’re feeling. When we sit with our feelings, we give ourselves the opportunity to understand and ‘own’ them, and more importantly, to move through them.
Trust Yourself Rather than Control Your Feelings
One of the common misconceptions about emotional health is the belief that we need to control our anxiety or discomfort. In reality, the answer isn’t about controlling your anxiety, but about trusting yourself. Trust that you have the tools, resilience and capacity to live through difficult moments and experiences despite your anxiety or fear. Developing self-trust allows you to give yourself permission to experience these feelings without judgment, knowing that you have the strength to endure them. When feelings become too overwhelming, as they often do, it's important to create a safe space for yourself. If the emotional “temperature” has risen too high and simply talking yourself out of it isn’t working, that’s a signal to step back. This doesn’t mean avoiding your emotions altogether, but taking a step away, either physically or mentally, from the source of your anxiety, so you can reassess the reality of the situation with a clearer mind.
In these moments, it’s essential to create a safe space to reflect on the reality of your situation. Yes, it’s important to challenge yourself, but you need to ensure that your anxious, uncertain mind is on the same page before pushing forward. Bringing down the emotional intensity helps create the emotional safety needed to ‘bear’, rather than ‘manage’, your feelings.
The Three-Step Process of Sitting with Feelings
To break free from this cycle of emotional fusion and self-trickery, we need to sit with our feelings, not act them out or avoid them. A three-step approach I often recommend is: feel, reflect, and respond.
1. Feel: The first step is simply allowing yourself to fully experience the emotion without judgment or the need to immediately fix it. This can be difficult because many of us are conditioned to avoid or suppress uncomfortable feelings. However, giving yourself permission to feel sadness, fear, or anger can be a liberating experience. It helps you recognise that emotions are part of your human experience, but they do not define you.
2. Reflect: Once the emotion has surfaced, take time to reflect on it. Ask yourself, What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this way? Instead of reacting impulsively, observe your emotions with curiosity. What triggered this feeling? Is there a pattern? Perhaps feeling this way is a natural response to what just happened, and we can trust in our reaction by normalizing it. Reflection helps create a buffer between you and the emotion, allowing you to see it for what it is, a temporary state, not a permanent identity.
3. Respond: After reflecting, you can choose how to respond in a thoughtful, informed way. When we’re emotionally reactive, we often turn to coping mechanisms or avoidance strategies, but when we respond mindfully, we’re able to address the situation in a healthier, more productive and authentic way.
The Difficulty of Letting Go of Coping Mechanisms
One of the challenges in therapy is that coping mechanisms, while ultimately unhelpful, often develop as necessary survival strategies during difficult moments in life. Whether it was bingeing on food, turning to alcohol, or becoming emotionally distant, these strategies may have helped someone get through overwhelming situations. Because of this, letting go of these behaviours can feel terrifying.
However, while these coping mechanisms might have worked in the past, they often become barriers to living a more genuine, truthful and authentic life. They prevent us from facing our emotions head-on and developing the resilience needed to bear them. When we continually reach for external distractions to "manage" our feelings, we lose the opportunity to understand what’s truly driving our emotions. As a result, the underlying issues remain unaddressed, keeping us stuck in old patterns.
In therapy, the work involves helping people to understand why their coping mechanisms are no longer serving them and guiding them toward healthier ways of bearing and processing their emotions. Letting go of these coping strategies can feel like stepping into the unknown, but it also opens up the possibility of living a life that is more aligned with who you really are, rather than being defined by the emotions you’ve tried to escape from.
Why Bearing Your Feelings is Essential
Bearing your feelings, truly sitting with them, requires patience, trust and a willingness to experience discomfort. While it’s tempting to manage or avoid feelings, doing so only keeps us trapped in cycles of emotional reactivity and avoidance. By learning to sit with your feelings, you develop a deeper understanding of yourself and your emotional world.
Sitting with feelings helps break the fusion between emotions and identity. It reminds us that our feelings are temporary, not defining and that they can be observed, reflected upon and responded to from a place of awareness. More importantly, it allows us to live in alignment with our true selves, rather than being driven by the need to escape uncomfortable emotions.
Conclusion: Moving Toward Emotional Freedom
Sitting with your feelings is not about finding ways to control or manage them, it’s about learning to bear them. It’s about developing the capacity to experience emotions fully, without reaching for coping mechanisms that ultimately keep us disconnected from ourselves.
When you sit with your feelings, you open the door to deeper self-awareness and emotional growth. It may be uncomfortable at times, but by allowing your emotions to flow and embracing them without judgment, you begin to live a more authentic, connected life. This process not only helps you build a healthier relationship with yourself and others, but it also frees you from the patterns that have held you back, enabling you to rediscover your sense of self and emotional resilience.