Tag Archives: emotions

What to do with a difficult feeling

Posted on by
Reply

Most of us react to difficult feelings without thinking. We push them away, act on them impulsively, or get lost in them. But there’s a more useful question to ask yourself first:

How do I want to be with this feeling?

As an integrative therapist, I draw on a range of approaches to help people work with their emotions rather than against them. Over time I’ve been mapping out the most valuable options — and I want to share the framework here.

Don’t react. Respond.

The starting point is always to make a conscious choice about what to do with what you’re feeling, rather than letting the feeling drive your behaviour automatically. That’s easier said than done. But it becomes more possible with practice and when you have a repertoire of strategies to draw on.

If the feeling is recurring, it’s worth getting curious about it before deciding how to respond. Ask yourself: What is this feeling, exactly? When does it tend to show up? Why now?

Uncomfortable feelings can be a signal that something genuinely needs your attention. But they can also be triggered by misperception or confused thinking — and it’s not always obvious which is which.

8 ways to be with a feeling

Whatever the wider context, here are eight options for how you can respond:

  1. Ignore it — sometimes a feeling passes on its own if you don’t engage with it. This is rarely the best option, but occasionally it’s the right one.
  2. Use distraction — consciously redirect your attention to something else. A short-term strategy, but sometimes a useful one while you find steadier ground.
  3. Name it — simply identifying what you’re feeling (“this is anxiety,” “this is grief”) can reduce its intensity. Naming creates a little distance between you and the feeling.
  4. Turn it up — use Physical Intelligence — rather than suppressing the feeling, deliberately intensify the physical sensation associated with it.
  5. Turn it down — use Physical Intelligence — use body-based techniques to reduce the physical intensity of what you’re feeling. Read more about The Power of Physical Intelligence.
  6. Dialogue with it — use Focusing — engage with the feeling as if it has something to tell you. This draws on Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing method, which involves attending to the felt sense of a feeling in the body.
  7. Accept it — use mindfulness — rather than trying to change the feeling, practise observing it with openness and without judgement. Mindfulness doesn’t make feelings disappear; it changes your relationship to them.
  8. Reframe or reinterpret it — examine the thinking behind the feeling. Is the feeling based on an accurate reading of the situation? Sometimes a shift in perspective is all that’s needed.

No single answer

All eight of these can be helpful — even, occasionally, simply ignoring the feeling. They all have potential downsides too. The point isn’t to find the one correct response. It’s to have a wider range of choices available, so that your feelings don’t end up choosing for you.

Beyond Overwhelm: Attention and Awareness in Emotional Experience

Posted on by
Reply

Instead of identifying with your emotions, which often means they overwhelm you, attention and awareness offer powerful ways to be with your feelings.

Identification
In a state of identification, we are caught up in our experience. Imagine, for example, someone said something that upset you. If I asked you how you felt about it, you might say: “I feel really angry about what she said.”

We tend to identify ourselves with an emotion, sometimes becoming completely overwhelmed by it. This kind of identification can be with pain, an emotion, an opinion, an ideology, etc. We can become ‘identified’ with a thought in the same way. A thought carries us away into the past, the future, or somewhere else that’s not here and now.

Imagine this like someone sitting in a dimly lit room with a box on their head.

Instead of getting caught up in our experience, we can choose to be present in the moment and in relationship with whatever is happening. We can choose to pay attention.

Attention
This involves stepping away from identification by intentionally focusing on one aspect of our experience. Instead of “I feel really angry about what she said,” we notice that there’s a part of me that’s feeling anger. Working with attention is often associated with mindfulness practice, but there’s a related approach in therapy called emotion labelling. Bringing our attention to difficult or intense emotions and gently naming them can be helpful. There are also crossovers with Gendlin’s Focusing approach, which is foundational to my work.

If identification is like being in a dimly lit room with a box on our head, attention is taking off the box and exploring with a powerful torch.

Stones balanced on top of one another. The sea in the background.

Awareness
Awareness isn’t better than attention, but it offers a complementary practice. However, in mindfulness, attention practice typically precedes awareness practice, which is why I’ve placed it here.

Awareness is wider than attention. A range of mental and sensory experiences are held in awareness without focusing on any one of them. What’s my overall experience at this moment? What sounds are around me? Where does my body contact the ground? What is my breathing like? What areas of tension am I aware of? All these aspects of experience – and more – are simply witnessed, gently held in awareness without specifically attending to any of them.

Going back to the example above, I might say: “I am aware that there is anger. I am aware of heightened tension in my chest. I am aware of an elevated heart rate.”

It’s now as if the lights have been turned on in the room, and you are aware of everything around you.

Attention and awareness are two fundamentals of mindfulness practice. Both are valuable, and you might switch between them.

Psychological research has shown that attention enhances perceptual sensitivity and neural responses, while awareness is linked to widespread neural integration. The ramifications of those findings are profound.

This framework is fundamental to mindfulness, and I’ve already noted that it’s related to Focusing. It’s also relevant to metacognition and the work of Viktor Frankl. It’s probably elsewhere too, as it is a core practice for managing human experience.