I feel bad. Is that bad?
Our language has become the judge of our feelings. They are "bad" or "good". But is a bad feeling really negative and does it affect our wellbeing negatively?
Zoha
3/13/20265 min read
When we see a psychologist or healer or holistic practitioner, we sometimes do this because we do not feel "good" or simply feel not ourselves. This can mean many things specifically. But this article is about the judgement in our way of thinking. This is not meant to land on the conclusions of the movie Inside Out 2, but our way of treating uncomfortable feelings has become a vulnerable area exposed to money-making businesses promising you to feel "good" and delivering little on your personal growth. Before speaking more on the benefits of emotional discomfort, let's talk about the "bad" feelings.
What are they?
The ones I stumble upon the most in the Zohalogy Studio are feelings of stress, anxiety, numbness, being drained or tired, frustration, and sadness or even depression. They like to gather around each other and rarely come alone. Typically, they bring their friends along: negative thoughts.
Besides the above, I come across feelings of helplessness, overwhelment, tension, disgust, anger, irritation, being hurt, sensitivity, disappointment, loneliness, boredom, envy, embarrassment, shame, and guilt.
We can hardly say that there are few "negative" feelings. While feeling them, it is difficult to appreciate their existence, and depending on their intensity, they can impact our lives quite substantially.
The importance of the above feelings gets more obvious when we observe individuals who lack them. The more extreme the lack of the darker shades of the feelings spectrum is, the more the individual seems detached from their humanity. Think of known politicians who lack empathy, guilt, and shame. They have trouble relating to other human beings and make decisions for the collective that can have drastic consequences for entire generations. Entire dictatorships and empires could have been avoided if all people possessed the entire feelings spectrum.
This obviously doesn't mean that negative feelings can't have a negative impact on our wellbeing. It is fair to put a stop to them when they seem to take our life apart with no visible positive effect. How would that look in an individual's life?
Besides helping us to be more social in society (including our own social network), negative feelings can trigger a thought process that can impact our path. Feelings of isolation can help to revisit our lifestyle. We get to compare what we are and what we have to how it actually feels. Sometimes it is important to identify that something essential is missing in our lives. That's where help from a professional specifically can come in handy. These points in life are not always very clear. Additionally, we might not have full awareness of how our past ties into our current feelings. Trained coaches learn how to ask the right questions to explore what it is you are looking for (when your approach is preferably oriented towards the future). Psychologists can help you to analyse your past in a meaningful way to see if you might be able to process the past and reframe your current view on your life. Reiki healers can help you directly with channelled energy to feel lighter, more lively, and happier. And right here is where it gets tricky. Should we see professional help ONLY to feel better?
Frustrating but true answer: It depends.
If the discomfort of any negative feeling is too overwhelming, it can be too much to carry. It is helpful to use techniques (like Reiki, for example) to feel immediate relief. This helps to clear the mind and revisit what you are facing currently. It can create the needed break to be able to make a plan and create a framework of dos and don'ts.
However, if you start a game of 'What is my favourite plaster today?' with these techniques, it will not change your situation permanently, and whoever helps you with this becomes complicit in avoiding facing important life questions of yours. A genuine healer or helper will at least raise the question at some point: "What are we doing here and where is this leading?"
Otherwise, my suspicion will question if this provider is only after your money, which is highly unethical considering that another approach might help you to find and remove the root cause of your discomfort.
How could negative feelings change your life? What is the benefit of having them? What is the benefit to sitting with the discomfort they bring along?
If the discomfort does not impact all aspects of your life, if it is not of the nature that you need to address the level of discomfort first, it is a huge resilience factor to be able to sit with the discomfort. This does not mean that you sit motionless with the negative feeling. There are some actions to take.
The first thing to do is to allow it and grant it permission to exit in your consciousness. If you skip this step, the feeling might avoid showing itself in all its glory (due to your resistance), which is essential for the next step.
After this, you can observe the feeling in all shades. Observe without judgement and correct your thoughts when you find yourself judging your feelings.
Once you have gone through the first two steps, you can move on to gather data. When does this feeling come up? What patterns does it show? Is it related to certain situations or people? If it is related to people, what attributes do they show? See this as your personal safari through your own mind and stay as curious as a scientist.
What happens afterwards is almost automatic. Once you've identified the patterns and details, you almost already know where this comes from and why this is here. If it is not yet fully clear, it is time to have a direct conversation with your negative feeling. Here the help of a professional would be most helpful (either a trained coach or a psychologist or a counsellor, depending on your topic). In a professional context you might use the chair exercise (very popular in Gestalt Psychology) where you can place the feeling or sensation on the chair. As an externalised entity, you start communicating with it and the professional helps you to dig deeper into the question of what led this feeling to occur. A trainer in Empathetic Communication could do the Guardian Exercise to get to the bottom of this question.
Once it is clear what the feeling came for, you will know what to do. Sometimes a feeling wants to alert us that we are not aligned with our chosen purpose.
The fifth step above makes it clear why our negative feelings are so important to exist, besides making us better people and preventing us from being antisocial. If we learn to understand the discomfort, closely observe it, act upon its message by either making changes to our lives or reframing our thoughts, we are able to enter a much happier and fulfilled chapter of our lives instead of making unethical wellness providers' bank accounts happier. You deserve to be listened to properly. The way there doesn't always feel free from discomfort. But what waits on the other side of the work is a life aligned with what you truly desire.