What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?

In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people close to me tell me that they didn’t want to talk about painful experiences that they have had. They said things like “I don’t want to dwell on it” or “I really want a cigarette”, rather than talking about something that made them feel bad.

We’re not always in an appropriate social context to heal emotional pain and it’s wise to be discerning about when and with whom we choose to share vulnerable feelings. Nobody really wants to feel bad; we all naturally want to feel happy and generally speaking we tend to get more of whatever we focus on in life.

However we live in a society which tends to glorify intellect over feelings. Many of us have been taught to suppress emotions while growing up; especially those that our family and friends were uncomfortable with. Few people really understand what emotional trauma is, how it operates or how to heal it.

Emotional trauma comes in all shapes and sizes. There are “big T” traumas like childhood abuse, domestic violence, parental neglect, and spiritual or religious abuse. Emotional abandonment caused by having an emotionally unavailable, critical, controlling or narcissistic mother or father can also be hugely traumatic.

The emotional wounds these experiences cause can go deep and often require some serious healing work to really free ourselves from. It’s understandable that we can end up thinking that if we open the can of worms the pain will never end, or that we’ll need medication to control it for the rest of our lives.

Then there are the “little T” traumas like being rejected by a seemingly promising new love interest. These can tap into deeper feelings of unworthiness leaving us with strong unpleasant feelings seemingly out of proportion to the situation at hand. If we don’t release the sadness around these little traumas as we progress through life, the stress can accumulate in our nervous system until they add up to be like a “big T” trauma.

Our nervous systems are wired to heal emotional trauma primarily through crying. When we feel the pain, we heal the pain. Getting empathy from a supportive, emotionally non-judgemental person accelerates the healing process.  It also helps us heal any shame we may have about how we feel.

Sharing vulnerable feelings with other people in the appropriate context also deepens our relationships and sense of connection with others, which is ultimately what makes life meaningful.

If we find ourselves stuck in sadness for a long period it could simply be that the pain goes deep, or perhaps what we are really feeling is another emotion such as anger that we have been socialised to suppress. In order to really heal the pain, we need to accurately express the emotion attached to it. Again it can help to connect with an emotionally aware witness who can help us identify and validate feelings that we might otherwise overlook, avoid or repress.

The problem with habitually avoiding emotional pain is that it accumulates in our nervous system leaving us vulnerable to being triggered by similar situations in the future. When this happens we can end up experiencing overwhelming emotions that leave us feeling powerless in relatively benign situations thus compromising our ability to act in the ways that we would really like.

The irony of not wanting to dwell on or talk about painful experiences is that we can end up ultimately experiencing stronger unpleasant emotions, in circumstances that are outside our control. To avoid being triggered like this we need to express and heal our emotional pain progressively as life inevitably brings it our way.

This allows our nervous system to settle into the state where we are most relaxed and open to experiencing more of the pleasant emotions that we all seek.