How Accepting Emotions Can Improve Your Health (original) (raw)

It’s tough to deal with painful, extreme, and sometimes even scary emotions. However, accepting your feelings can help improve your emotion regulation, lead to fewer mood swings, and improve emotional balance.

People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and other psychiatric disorders that involve intense emotional experiences have trouble accepting emotions. They may engage in unhelpful behaviors to avoid experiencing those painful feelings.

This article discusses emotional acceptance and why it can be challenging for some people. It also explores why accepting emotions is so essential to mental well-being.

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Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast, featuring actor Skyh Black, shares how to embrace uncomfortable feelings, rather than suppress them. Click below to listen now.

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What Is Emotional Acceptance?

Often, when you have an uncomfortable feeling, such as sadness, fear, or shame, your first reaction is to reject it, hide from it, and avoid it at all costs. If it feels like a "bad" feeling, you might tell yourself that you don't want to experience it. As a result, you may then do something to get rid of the feeling. Negative ways of coping may include the use of escape mechanisms like using drugs or alcohol to feel better, impulse shopping, binge eating, or risky sexual behavior.

No one wants to walk around feeling emotional pain all the time, but when you reject or suppress your emotions, you may actually make things worse. Running from your emotions gives them even more power the next time you feel them.

Emotions serve various purposes, including providing helpful information about the world around you. They are clues to your state of mental health and well-being regarding your past and present experiences. This means that getting rid of or pushing away emotions is not the best idea because you are ignoring important information that will help you on your personal healing journey.

An alternative to pushing away or stifling your emotions is learning to accept your emotional experiences. This is known as emotional acceptance.

The Meaning of Acceptance

• Being aware of your emotions and accepting that these feelings exist without trying to suppress or push them away.
• Allowing your feelings to be what they are without judging or trying to change them.
• Letting go of attempts to control your emotions and learning that emotions themselves cannot harm you. The only thing that can hurt you is the methods you use to try to get rid of emotions.
• Being authentic in your full experience of emotions and not denying any part of yourself takes practice.

Accepting Emotions Is Not Resigning Yourself to Pain

It is essential to distinguish between acceptance and resignation. Accepting emotions does not mean resigning yourself to constantly feeling terrible or wallowing in pain. It also doesn't mean intentionally holding on to painful emotions or trying to push yourself to experience emotional distress.

Acceptance simply means being aware of your emotions and accepting them for what they are right now, knowing that they won't last.

As a metaphor for acceptance, imagine you are a soldier who has fought a long battle with your emotions ("the enemy"). Acceptance is the act of putting down your weapons and walking away from the fight. You are not resigning yourself to be beaten up by your feelings. Instead, you are exiting the battle and making peace because you realize your emotions are not your enemy.

Another Analogy

Imagine you are trying to stop a bad habit, like using swear words. Maybe you have young children and don't want them to learn bad words from you. But you find the more you try to stop swearing, the more you find yourself cussing, and even worse than before. It can be maddening.

This is the same way emotions become bigger and stronger the more you try to stop them. You have to identify what you are feeling and process your way through difficult emotions in order for them to abate.

In some ways, accepting emotions means also accepting that emotions will change. When you are happy, you have to accept that happiness is a short-term condition—you will not always be in a state of happiness. This goes for every emotion, from fear to anxiety to sadness. Feelings are fleeting and usually go away within seconds, minutes, or hours. If you find yourself feeling sad, it doesn't mean the whole day is ruined. You will move through many emotions throughout the day.

Why Do People With BPD Have Trouble Accepting Emotions?

There are a few reasons why people with BPD, in particular, have trouble accepting emotions, although it is important to note that everyone has trouble accepting emotions sometimes.

• Invalidated by caregivers. People with BPD are often raised in emotionally invalidating environments. These are usually homes where feelings are not accepted by parents or other caregivers. Sometimes, they were punished for expressing feelings or told that they were weak for having feelings. This can lead a person with BPD to have trouble accepting their own emotions in adult life.
• Intense negative emotions. People with BPD experience very intense emotions, making it even harder to accept or cope with these feelings. They often describe feeling that they are afraid their emotions will “overwhelm” or “destroy” them. As a result, many people with BPD feel very afraid of their emotions and are convinced they cannot tolerate their feelings.

Recap

Certain mental health conditions such as BPD can make emotional acceptance more difficult. When people experience emotional invalidation and intense emotions, they may be afraid of allowing themselves to experience these feelings.

Why Accepting Emotions Is Helpful

Why is accepting your emotions helpful? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply get rid of them? Well, no, it isn’t easy to get rid of emotions.

In fact, many people have tried to get rid of their emotions with little success. What they have learned, and what research supports, is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of an emotion.

You have emotions for a reason, so you shouldn't want to eliminate them entirely. Emotions are part of a complex system that helps you decide what you should stay away from and what you should approach. Emotions also help you end unhealthy relationships or maintain lasting relationships with other people.

Ignoring emotions leads to poor decision-making. Therefore, accepting emotions is helpful because listening to what you are feeling can reveal important information.

How to Practice Accepting Emotions

Fortunately, you can learn to get better at accepting your emotions. This doesn't mean that this process is always easy. Difficult or intense emotions don't feel very good, so your instincts may tell you to avoid them.

With persistent practice, though, you can learn how to be more accepting of your emotions. Strategies that can help you become better at understanding and accepting your emotions include:

• Mindfulness is a practice that focuses on becoming more aware of the present moment. A core component of mindfulness is learning to observe your thoughts and emotions completely and non-judgmentally.
• Meditation can also help build awareness and acceptance of emotional experiences. Mindfulness meditation, or the practice of being aware of both your internal and external experiences, can be tremendously useful as you learn to accept your emotions. You can try a sitting meditation and breathing exercises.
• Psychotherapy can also be helpful if you have trouble accepting emotions. Talk to your doctor or consult a mental health professional for further advice and treatment. Some types of therapy that can be particularly helpful include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).

Recap

Self-help techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can build your abilities to accept emotions. If you are still struggling, psychotherapy can also be beneficial.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Emotional intelligence refers to a person's ability to manage and understand both positive and negative emotions in themselves and others. It is a key aspect of overall mental health. Important aspects of emotional health include self-awareness and coping skills. When people are emotionally healthy, they are more resilient and better able to handle life's stresses.
• Emotional avoidance refers to behaviors designed to prevent or escape a difficult or uncomfortable emotion, such as anger, guilt, shame, or fear. Examples of emotional avoidance include using alcohol or drugs, dissociating, avoiding certain situations or settings, or withdrawing from people.
• Toxic positivity suggests that people should deny or hide difficult emotions in order to maintain a positive outlook. Positive vibes only. Instead of acknowledging and accepting emotions, even the difficult ones, toxic positivity tries to simply deny the impact of negative experiences. Although optimism and looking at the bright side can be a good thing, you should not deny your authentic experience of emotion when life gets tough. It is a harmful outlook that can cause feelings of shame and guilt while preventing you from getting the support that you need.

Final Thoughts

While you might feel tempted to simply avoid feeling negative emotions, doing so tends to make things worse in the long run. It can also lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms that can hurt your health and well-being.

When you learn how to accept emotions, you take away their power to hurt you. Building this skill can be challenging, but it can result in better emotional regulation over time. If you are struggling with emotional avoidance, talk to your healthcare provider or a mental health professional.