When Feelings Hurt

When your feelings hurt, the question usually comes quickly: How do I make this stop?

I want to offer you a different first step. Let it hurt.

Let the emotion be there long enough to feel it, understand it, and process it through. When your goal is to avoid pain altogether, you end up avoiding much of your life.

In Episode 379, I shared why allowing emotional pain is one of the most powerful skills I teach. The goal isn't a life without negative feelings. The goal is the capacity to experience them without giving up on the life you want.

What a feeling is

At The Life Coach School, I define a feeling as a vibration in your body caused by a thought in your mind.

That is different from how we define a sensation. A sensation originates in your body and travels to your brain: feeling hot or cold, a pinprick, or physical hunger. A feeling begins with a sentence in your mind and is experienced in your body.

Think about something wonderful and notice the feeling. Think about something upsetting and notice the difference. Your body is experiencing your thinking.

Thoughts create feelings, which drive actions and results. Understanding that doesn't mean you need to change every painful thought immediately.

Pain is part of being human

I teach that life is a 50/50 experience of positive and negative emotion. The contrast is part of being alive.

We say we want to be happy all the time, but there are things we don't want to be happy about. We want to feel grief when someone we love dies. We want our lives and relationships to matter to us.

Sometimes emotional pain feels mildly uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels excruciating. The first response doesn't have to be retracting from it or making it disappear as fast as possible.

You can move toward it. You can allow the vibration to be there without reacting, resisting, or buffering.

A life organized around never having your feelings hurt becomes very small. You avoid the goals, relationships, and risks that could bring pain. You also miss the experience of showing up fully.

Don't add pain about your pain

There is the thought creating the emotion. Then there are your thoughts about having that emotion.

You may feel insecure and think you shouldn't. You may feel heartbroken and criticize yourself for still hurting. You may buffer, then attack yourself for buffering.

That additional judgment creates unnecessary suffering.

In the Model, your thought belongs in the T-line and creates the feeling in the F-line. You can also put the fact that you are experiencing a feeling in the circumstance line and examine what you're thinking about it.

Are you allowing the pain, or telling yourself it's evidence that something is wrong with you?

Dropping the shoulds doesn't require you to like the feeling. It allows you to experience it as part of being a human.

Don't turn this into another reason to judge yourself for resisting or buffering. Notice what you're doing and return to allowing.

Describe the vibration without judgment

Become the observer of the feeling. Where is it? What does it feel like?

Does it feel like weight on your shoulder? A sinking heaviness in your stomach? Buzzing anxiety? Burning shame in your face?

Describe the experience in words without making it wrong. Let it be there for as long as it needs to be there.

You can breathe while the vibration moves through your body. You can notice it instead of eating or drinking to escape it.

If you continue thinking the thought that creates the feeling, the emotion may return in waves. That doesn't mean you failed to feel it. A thought can create another wave, and you can allow that one too.

I recently let myself cry all the way through an experience of pain. I felt exhausted afterward, but I also felt a clean release. I hadn't talked myself out of it. I had allowed it.

Allow first, then examine the thought

When people understand that their thoughts create emotional pain, they sometimes want to skip directly to changing the thought.

Let step one be step one. Feel the emotion. Then access the thought causing it. Then, if you want to change it and can change it, do that work.

Sometimes you don't want to change the thought yet. You want to grieve or feel the pain of something that matters. You can process it without requiring yourself to think differently right away.

For me, there has been a progression from arguing that something shouldn't be happening, to acknowledging that it is happening and that's okay, to believing it is happening for me.

I couldn't jump to the last thought before allowing the grief of reality being different from what I wanted.

The aim isn't to eliminate negative thinking. Bigger goals and a bigger life will bring more of it. Build your ability to allow the resulting emotion and then work with your mind.

Be willing to stay in the game

I have watched my son hit golf balls into the water and walk off a course disappointed. I have watched him cry after tournaments. I have also watched him qualify for his first professional tournament.

I would do it all again. Even without the win, the possibility of winning is enough to show up and enjoy the game.

When you can't process disappointment, you may react to it by quitting. When you can feel it, you don't have to walk away from everything that could hurt.

The same is true in business and relationships. The risk of heartbreak is part of what makes love feel so full. The possibility of failure is part of pursuing something meaningful.

Ask yourself what feelings you haven't allowed. Where are you holding doubt, frustration, anger, or pain instead of processing it?

Each time you let an emotion move through, you practice the capacity to do it again. You become more willing to participate in your life.

The goal isn't freedom from pain. It is the ability to feel it and keep living.