To Manage Painful Feelings Follow These Steps

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Since my first book, Running On Empty, came out in 2012, I have been on a mission. My goal is to make everyone in the world aware of childhood emotional neglect. To help everyone know what it is, why it’s so common, how it happens, why it’s so invisible and unmemorable, how damaging it is, and how to prevent and heal it.

Growing up with emotional neglect is like growing up in an emotional vacuum. In emotionally neglectful homes, the parents are unaware that their children’s feelings are the deepest, most personal expression of who they are and must be addressed. Blind to the world of emotion, these parents may ignore, dismiss, judge, or even punish their children’s feelings. Most such parents grew up in this type of home themselves. Their parents were blind to their emotions and didn’t teach them what they needed to know. So, raising their own kids, they lack the knowledge and skills to respond to, validate, comfort, discuss, and teach their children about their feelings.

This is how emotional neglect travels silently, stealthily, through generations of a family. Often, it’s no one’s fault, yet it causes harm that can stay with the child through their entire adult life. Or at least until they recognize the problem and make a personal decision to treat their own feelings as valid, and fill their own emotional gaps.

Childhood Emotional Neglect in the Life of an Adult

When you push your feelings down as a child in order to cope with an environment that cannot tolerate them, you grow up lacking access to your emotions. Since our emotions are built into us to perform vital functions, to guide us, inform us, motivate and connect us, being disconnected from your feelings is a major handicap in your life.

If you dismiss, ignore, or judge your own feelings, you have little opportunity to manage or express them. And, since your feelings are the deepest expression of who you are, you are dismissing, ignoring, and judging your deepest self. And you have no chance to learn what to do when you have a painful emotion.

So, what happens if you lack the skills needed to cope with painful feelings because no one ever taught you?

You must learn them. And you can.

The 2 Levels of Feeling Management

Level 1: Coping with the feeling in the moment.

Level 2: Resolving the feeling over the long term.

Below is a “cheat sheet” for coping with a painful feeling in the moment you are feeling it.

How to Manage a Difficult Emotion: 8 Steps

1. Sit with the feeling. Fight the natural urge to escape the pain. Take a deep breath and resolve to sit with the feeling and process it instead.
2. Find the words to name the feeling(s). Try to identify what you are feeling while you're feeling it. Name it. This may require multiple feeling words. For example, you may identify a mix of the following: hurt, harmed, sad, and defensive.
3. Remind yourself that this feeling is only just that: a feeling. Every feeling you have is a message from your body. Consider what your body is trying to tell you, but since not all feelings are useful and helpful, don’t give that message too much power.
4. Let yourself cry if you need to. You may have learned as a child that tears are wrong or a sign of weakness. But tears are helpful in this process and should be allowed to flow naturally.
5. Know that all feelings are temporary. To get a strong emotion to pass, you must accept it. You didn’t choose this feeling, it chose you. So, don’t judge yourself for having it, don’t fight it, and don’t try to escape it. Accepting the feeling for what it is will take away its power over you.
6. Imagine that the feeling is a wave washing over you. Instead of running away from the wave or swimming into it, sit and wait for it to peak and fall, running its course.
7. Breathe through it. Focus your mind inward and concentrate on your breathing. Think about the feeling itself, its message, and what this feeling means.
8. Some intense emotions need to be felt more than once and processed before they go away. After you have sat with the emotion, when you feel it lessening, it’s okay to put it aside and distract yourself from it. But know that you may need to go through this process again until the feeling is fully resolved.

Always Remember

Each time you welcome, sit with and process an intense emotion, you are doing the exact opposite of what your parents taught you to do.

You are accepting, honoring, and owning this expression of your deepest self. By sitting with and listening to your feeling, you are sitting with and listening to yourself. You are giving yourself emotional acceptance and validation, the very things you needed, but were deprived of as a child.

That is both an expression of love toward yourself, and the very definition of courage.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.