This is Part 4 in the series “5 beliefs about emotions I gave up to truly heal”. You may want to check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first. Let’s dig in!

This belief is a predictable extrapolation of everything I’ve talked about so far (so many of these beliefs play off of and reinforce one another!). If “negative” emotions are lesser, undesirable, and a sign that something is wrong, then it follows that any situation that brings up these emotions must also be bad for us in some way. It must mean there’s either something we need to walk away from, or there’s something we need to fix. I’ve found that this belief can diminish our critical thinking, and cause us to be highly conflict avoidant and prone to ignoring major issues, both personal and systemic.

I think it’s easy to underestimate how much learning involves internal conflict. It often requires us to challenge our assumptions, face cognitive dissonance, and re-evaluate who we think we are and what we believe to be true. This involves risk-taking, surrender, and change – all of which tend to bring up discomfort and difficult emotions. When we don’t develop the capacity to sit with these emotions, they can overtake us and colour our understanding: we start to confuse “this feels bad” for “this IS bad” (I also wrote a whole post on the tendency to misread emotions as truth – you can read it here), and our critical thinking goes off the rails. For example, I recently saw someone post about how shifting scientific understanding of COVID and changes in recommendations are unacceptable to her: these changes don’t feel “right” to her, and she doesn’t trust things that can’t give her coherence and consistency. Of course this doesn’t feel right – change and uncertainty typically bring up fear and doubt, and during a pandemic this is magnified. Having restrictions and rules can also feel unfair, bringing up anger, frustration, and indignation. These are difficult, uncomfortable feelings, but what this person did was take her difficult emotions as proof that something was wrong and someone needed to be blamed. “I feel upset and change feels unsafe” became “scientists and science are unsafe and untrustworthy”. The urge to find someone to blame can be especially detrimental: conflating “I want someone to blame” with “there IS someone to blame” can lead people to see shadows, evil-doers and sinister intentions everywhere. This is how people spiral into conspiracy theories, forcing meaning and connections where there are none because it feels safer and more certain than not having answers. This low tolerance for discomfort and internal conflict weakens our critical thinking.

I’ve found that this low tolerance holds true for external conflict as well, pushing us to avoid disagreement and difference. I really don’t know many people who grew up having a healthy, secure relationship to conflict – I think very few of us were modeled healthy conflict skills by our caregivers. It’s not surprising that conflict often provokes a pretty gross emotional cocktail: guilt over letting someone down, fear of someone being upset with us, anger over someone crossing a boundary, pride and righteousness, etc. This overlaps with our attachment styles and how we learned to relate to others as a child, so conflict also tends to bring up old wounding and fears of abandonment or punishment.

Personally, for most of my life conflict brought up intense feelings of shame, guilt, and fear, and made me have an overwhelming sense that something bad was going to happen. This is what my ingrained perception of conflict was after growing up in a family with abusive and dysfunctional dynamics. Having these emotions flare every time I had to deal with conflict and boundary-setting made me try to either completely avoid conflict, or sometimes to be overly harsh in standing up for myself (I think this actually reflects a fear of conflict too – people go over the top because they’re afraid of not being listened to or respected).

I find this is pervasive in spiritual and wellness communities, and it’s become especially noticeable around conversations of politics, systemic inequality, and privilege. Discussions and conflict around these topics are framed as being “divisive” and “negative”, and we’re encouraged to gloss over everything by just loving and accepting everyone. But the fact that conflict can make us feel bad doesn’t mean that it actually is bad or should be avoided: it’s more so an indicator of how we just don’t have the proper tools to move through it. Bypassing does not resolve conflict, so over time this can become a loop where our unresolved feelings get more overwhelming and make us dread disputes even more.

Nowhere does this seem more prevalent than in conversations about harm and oppression. Dialogue like this is frequently branded as negative or “unevolved” – as if being evolved means you never have conflict or harm people – and, notably, “shaming”. Shame ironically gets a lot of shaming in the New Age world – it’s seen as a horrible, toxic feeling that is always imposed on us by others (either individuals or society), and it’s something we’re supposed to rid ourselves of to be free and happy. Shame is definitely one of the hardest and most overwhelming emotions to navigate, but even still, it’s not always an indicator that something is wrong – and not only that, feeling shame doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re being shamed. Shame can be a healthy indicator that we’re out of integrity with our own values. If someone thinks of themselves as a kind, empathetic, “good” person (which many spiritual people strive to be), being told they’re causing harm will conflict harshly with that self-image, and that will naturally evoke shame. Since shame is so hard to handle, fear, anger, and grief will likely surface too. This doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It can be an opportunity to think critically about ourselves, and to learn how to accept accountability without getting defensive and falling into fight, flight or freeze. I wonder what would happen if we sat with shame in these situations and explored it, instead of trying to stifle it and lash out. I realize this is a monumental task if we’ve never been taught these skills, but we won’t learn without doing, and we need to start tending to our own difficult emotions instead of expecting the people we’ve harmed to do it for us.

Overall, I can say that sitting with and getting curious about negative emotions hasn’t created more division or negativity in my life: in fact, it’s actually decreased conflict and upheaval. Always interpreting these feelings as a sign that something was wrong sometimes caused me to see conflict and trouble where there wasn’t any, which I then made worse through avoidance or confrontation. Taking these emotions as data points and not imposing meaning on them too quickly has allowed me to be more flexible and discerning, and not engage in conflict that’s really not necessary (not that I don’t still fail at this sometimes :D)

Coming up next is the final post in this series! I’ll explore the belief that transcending our emotional responses to the world is something to strive for and a sign of being evolved. I hope you’ll keep reading!