What emotion are you rejecting and what do you think it’s trying to teach you?

Getting curious with this question has resulted in incredible personal growth. This has helped me learn to sit with the emotion I most commonly reject.

I don’t know about you, but anger is a tough emotion for me. I often feel anger rise up, but there has always been something about it that has felt unsafe. For most of my life, all other emotions have been fine. I don’t fight against them, but anger rises up and I will do everything I can to reject it. I perceive my anger to be wrong. I perceive I am blowing things out of proportion. Anger is uninvited to the party. Or, scratch that, anger can’t be uninvited because that would suggest it was at some point given an invitation. Spoiler alert…it wasn’t and never was invited to my party.

Did you know all emotions are okay to feel? Emotions are not inherently problematic, but behavior stemming from our emotions certainly can be. Emotions, rather, are all allowed and acceptable, and are there to point us to something our body needs us to know.

The root word of emotion is motion, which means our feelings are meant to move through us. When an emotion comes up we don’t feel comfortable with we suppress it so we don’t have to feel it. But if the body is pointing us to something we need to know and emotions are meant to move through us, what do you think happens when we don’t allow our body to feel those emotions when they rise up?

Eventually, our debts come due and we have to pay up. When this happens, we find ourselves confronted with even stronger emotions that seemingly come out of nowhere and we’re then forced to contend with them and sadly end up making regrettable decisions.

Rather than allow future me to suffer the brunt of suppressed and delayed emotion, I started to get curious and ask what anger had to teach me. Do you know what it eventually showed me? It showed me the youngest version of myself who felt unsafe around adults who didn’t do the best job of modeling a healthy expression of anger. It showed me adults who bullied me and others at a time when I didn’t have the ability to stick up for myself. It showed me that anger is a tool we use to take advantage of and manipulate others into bending to my whims.

Now, as an adult, I am fully capable of taking care of myself and the youngest, most vulnerable version of myself doesn’t have to hide. That version of myself who didn’t feel safe, can now be protected by this version of myself. So when anger rises up, it tells me I’m threatened in some way and I can talk back to my anger to remind my youngest self we’ll be okay.

When this happens, it’s amazing how quickly I can get to the other side of anger to rationally process through what I need to do next and in a way I won’t eventually regret or cause more problems for my future self.

Emotions must be dealt with and either we can choose to deal with them or they will deal with us.