Bottling Up Your Feelings And Thinking Positive Thoughts Isn’t Going To Help You Feel Better
Updated: Aug 25, 2022
Written by: Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Bottling up your feelings and thinking positive thoughts isn’t going to help you feel better. In fact, it will actually make you feel worse. Look, I get why you would think pushing away heavy feelings with positive thinking would help. Our culture of “don’t worry, be happy” stresses constant striving for happiness and teaches us that heavy emotions are bad and to be controlled or managed. Even well-meaning teachers, trainers, and coaches in the wellness space talk about thinking "happy thoughts”, not sweating
the small stuff, and focusing on the positive.
The problem is, when we push down our heavy feelings in this way, they have a way of resurfacing. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a while, but it’s a lot of work and eventually, it breaches the surface ‒ usually in an explosive way.
The same is true with our feelings. If we don't attend to them and push them down, they resurface in the form of snapping at people, angry outbursts, depression, and even physical pain and illness (if we hold them in long enough).
So what do we do instead?
What do emotionally grounded people do?
We see our emotions as information or data about our deeper experiences of what's happening, recognize the importance of the data, and lean in and get curious about it.
How do we do this?
It involves:
Noticing and naming the feelings
Working to understand the message your feelings are trying to convey
Genuinely validating that it makes sense, you feel this way
Working with and through these feelings.
Sometimes, this means sitting with the feeling and feeling it in your body through body sensations and even tears. Sometimes it could be writing about it in a journal. And sometimes, it might mean taking action to meet the underlying need fueling this feeling. Sometimes it's a combination of these.
Because this isn’t taught to most of us growing up, it takes practice. So the question is, do you want to continue feeling irritable and heavy, perhaps seeing these suppressed feelings negatively impact your relationships and even your own health and well-being? Or, are you ready to feel better, feel more grounded, and show up with greater levels of compassion towards yourself and others?
If you're ready to make a change and start feeling better than you've likely felt in years, then click here to join me for a one-time workshop guiding you through this process so you can embrace your feelings instead of hiding from them and start feeling better now.
Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jen Barnes is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Minneapolis, MN. She specializes in complex trauma, PTSD, stress, and grief. The daughter and sister of nurses she has a passion for empowering nurses to build resilience. She has worked with nurses 1:1 hoping to expand her reaching to a broader audience. In 2021 she completed the Dare to Lead certificate program in order to more effectively address organizational challenges in healthcare. Most recently she spoke at the American Association of Critical Care Nurses’s 2022 NTI conference on Building Resilience in Nursing.
