Emotions Are Not Problems to Solve
Learn to love your seasons.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have divided emotions into two groups.
The ones we want.
And the ones we don't.
Happiness, excitement, love, confidence. Come in! Stay as long as you like!
Sadness, anger, anxiety, jealousy, shame. What are you doing here? How do I get rid of you?
We don't usually say it quite like that. But listen to the language we use around emotions.
Don't be angry.
Why are you sad?
Don't cry.
Calm down.
Cheer up.
Even when said with love, there can be a quiet message underneath:
The way you are feeling right now is not the way you should be feeling.
And so, very early in life, many of us begin learning not only how to feel emotions, but how to judge ourselves for having them.
When did sadness become a problem?
If somebody tells us they are sad, our instinct is often to ask what we can do to make them feel better.
It is a caring instinct.
But I sometimes wonder whether, in our urgency to make somebody feel better, we accidentally communicate that feeling bad is itself a problem.
Sadness arrives and immediately we begin looking for the exit.
Anxiety arrives and we want it gone.
Anger arrives and we tell ourselves we shouldn't be angry.
Then something interesting happens.
We are no longer simply sad.
We are sad about being sad.
We are anxious about feeling anxious.
We are angry, and then ashamed of ourselves for being angry.
The original emotion now has company.
Emotions are not problems. Problems are solvable.
I once wrote this sentence down:
“Emotions are not problems, they are not solvable. Problems are solvable.”
The grammar wasn't perfect.
I kept it anyway.
Because I knew what I meant.
If my car breaks down, I have a problem. I can investigate what happened and perhaps fix it.
If I have an unpaid bill, I have a problem. There may be something I can do about it.
If I am cold, perhaps I can put on a jumper.
But sadness isn't a broken car.
Anger isn't an unpaid bill.
Anxiety isn't an administrative error that has somehow occurred inside the nervous system.
An emotion is an experience.
Of course, there may be problems around an emotion that require action. If I am miserable at work every day, perhaps something needs to change. If somebody repeatedly crosses my boundaries, my anger may be telling me something important. If anxiety has gradually made my world smaller, perhaps I need to begin approaching some of the things I have learned to avoid.
But that is different from treating the feeling itself as the problem.
Sometimes there is something to solve.
Sometimes there is something to feel.
And knowing the difference matters.
You can feel anger without becoming anger
Perhaps part of our fear of emotions comes from confusing emotions with behaviour.
If I allow myself to be angry, does that mean I will shout?
If I acknowledge jealousy, does that make me a jealous person?
If I feel hatred for a moment, does that say something terrible about who I am?
If I let sadness in, will I collapse into it?
But feeling something and doing something are not the same thing.
I can be angry and choose not to attack you.
I can feel jealous and still behave generously.
I can feel afraid and walk forward.
I can love somebody and be furious with them.
Human beings contain contradictions.
Maybe emotional maturity isn't reaching a point where we only experience the correct emotions.
Maybe it is becoming increasingly capable of saying:
Ah. This is what is here today.
And then deciding what we want to do with it.
We don't shout at winter for being winter
I like thinking about emotions as seasons.
Imagine waking up in the middle of January, looking outside and becoming furious because it is cold.
This again?
Why can't it be warm?
What am I doing wrong?
How do I make January become July?
It sounds ridiculous because we understand something very basic about seasons:
they change.
We don't require winter to become summer before we continue living.
We dress differently.
We turn the heating on.
We change what we do.
We accommodate the season we are in.
And, importantly, we don't interpret the existence of winter as evidence that summer has permanently disappeared.
Yet emotionally, we often do exactly that.
A difficult week arrives and suddenly:
I'm back here again.
Nothing has changed.
Why am I still feeling like this?
I thought I was better.
Perhaps we could learn to relate to our emotional seasons a little differently.
Not passively. Not by pretending suffering doesn't matter. And certainly not by remaining in harmful situations because we should simply “accept our emotions”.
But by stopping the additional fight with the fact that this is what I happen to feel right now.
There is a difference between pain and resistance to pain
When an uncomfortable emotion arrives, many of us immediately tense against it.
We analyse it.
We argue with it.
We try to distract ourselves from it.
We reassure ourselves.
We search online.
We ask somebody else whether we should be feeling this way.
Sometimes we organise entire parts of our lives around making sure a particular feeling never comes back.
And ironically, the more unacceptable an emotion becomes, the more attention we give it.
Is it still there?
What about now?
Why hasn't it gone?
We stand at the emotional window checking whether winter has ended yet.
Perhaps there is another possibility.
To notice the feeling.
To make some space around it.
To become curious about what happens in our body when it is there.
To recognise the thoughts that arrive with it without automatically treating every one of them as a fact.
And to allow the wave to move.
Not because we have discovered a clever new technique for making the emotion disappear.
But because it is allowed to be there even before it disappears.
That distinction is important.
Acceptance cannot simply become another secret strategy for control:
Fine, anxiety. I accept you. Now please leave.
What if sensitivity isn't the problem either?
I have also wondered about the way we talk about sensitivity.
People often describe sensitivity almost as a design fault.
Too sensitive.
Too emotional.
Feels everything too deeply.
Of course, intense emotions can be exhausting. Learning how to regulate them matters.
But sensitivity also means something is being detected.
The person who feels deeply may hurt deeply.
They may also love deeply.
Notice deeply.
Be moved deeply.
Pick up something in a room that somebody else walks straight past.
I don't think the aim should always be to become less sensitive. In fact, many of us should be more.
We talk a lot about people being “too sensitive”, but considerably less about the possibility of not being sensitive enough.
Sometimes the work is learning how to carry sensitivity without being carried away by it.
There is a difference.
Learn to love your seasons
I don't mean that we need to enjoy every emotional state.
I don't particularly want to be anxious.
I don't wake up hoping for grief.
Some experiences hurt enormously, and there are times when we need support, treatment, protection or change.
But perhaps we don't have to turn every painful feeling into evidence that something has gone wrong.
There will be periods of energy and periods of exhaustion.
Times when we feel close to people and times when we want to disappear for a while.
Confidence and doubt.
Joy and grief.
Calm and fear.
Perhaps a psychologically rich life isn't one endless emotional summer.
Maybe it has weather.
Maybe it has seasons.
And perhaps the aim isn't to control the climate so perfectly that it never rains.
Perhaps it is to know ourselves well enough that when the rain comes, we don't immediately conclude that the sun is gone forever.
Learn to love your seasons.
Not because every season feels good.
But because the seasons were here before us.
Read next
About the author
Anita Toze is a Clinical Psychologist (HCPC registered in the UK) with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy. She works online and in person with adults and young people aged 11 and over.
Cover photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash
