Honoring Our Negative Emotions

PLEASE stop invalidating negative emotions. We literally need to feel and express our "bad" feelings in order to learn, grow, and survive. Fear, anxiety, and any other fight or flight emotion is a biological response to when we feel threatened. It heightens our awareness and allows us to see things through a narrower scope to be able to identify dangerous situations that we may need to avoid or get ourselves out of.

STOP setting yourself up for unrealistic emotional failure by believing you should never be sad or feel any sort of negativity. We need our negative emotions to teach us how to protect ourselves, learn, to regulate and release the tension we feel within.

Life is legitimately not rainbows and butterflies so why on earth should you pretend that it is? Why is everyone so hard-pressed to delete the emotions that make us human? It’s okay to feel. We’re not robots.

Positive moments or good things would not feel nearly as incredible as they do without the negative to balance everything out. The sweet will never taste as sweet without the sour. It’s science.

Honoring our negative emotions, what causes them, how to process them, how we can heal from them, how to not project them onto others, and how they can actually teach us more about ourselves as well as others is very important.

You are not a bad person if you feel negative emotions. They are not invalid. You do not need to quit feeling real things; just don’t set up shop and live in those bad moments, thoughts, patterns of thinking, etc. forever. If you feel as though you are chronically negative and it is actually affecting the quality of your life, then absolutely ask for help. But--do NOT feel ashamed. And do not convince yourself something is WRONG with you for feeling these things. We all go through this at some point or other.

These feelings are just as important as your positive emotions, just in an extremely different manner. Sometimes we just may need help or support regulating them, and that’s okay. Don’t we do the same when we are overwhelmingly happy? We call on friends and family to share in the extreme excitement. Normalize reaching out when nothing feels right and we need a hand to hold.

Sometimes life is hard. Sometimes life gets you down. Sometimes you feel like total hot garbage. Sometimes it’s completely fine to feel this way, and sometimes it’s best to just sit in it so it can be properly addressed and moved through.

You are human. Congrats. Stop pretending you are not. We are all on this freaky, funky, wild ride together. Nobody is immune to the human condition. Not. Even. You.