In any situation where you are facing hardship and/or loss, it's a given that you will experience a mountain of emotions. Gut wrenching, heartbreaking, take you to your knees again and again, emotions. At any given moment, some emotions are strong enough to knock you off your feet and send you into a downward spiral of negativity. They have power; those emotions. They have energy, and if we let them, they will take us down.  

The thing I’ve learned about emotions is that they don’t last. You may feel like you will feel that way forever; that you will never recover from all the pain and all the hurt, and that you will live in a dark hole for always, being deprived of light, all good things, and life!!! (I’ve been there, I’ve felt that, time and time again!)  What a daunting thought! 

After my divorce I felt A LOT of emotions for a very long time. At least a good year.  There was always anger, hurt, sadness, and sometimes shame, guilt, and ‘I’m not good enough nor will I ever be good enough’. Powerful emotions. When we're being tossed around in an emotional shitstorm, it feels as if we will ALWAYS feel that way. It’s intense and it’s exhausting; mentally, emotionally, and physically. Especially, if you are also engaging in a little thing called: ADULTING. 

*Adulting- the act of being a responsible adult: Working. Parenting. Paying bills. Keeping up with laundry. Homework, and all the other things that suck the life right outta….well, life.   

Emotions are not everlasting. They aren’t burned into our being. They don’t make up who we are. I like to think of them as visitors. Visitors, who many times, wear out their welcome.  We have the choice to allow them to stay, get nice and comfy and settle in for a time; and we certainly have the prerogative to kick them the hell out!  But that takes time, and practice, and feeling ready. I honestly believe that we will hold on to an emotion until we are ready to let it go.  

I think we can learn a lot from our emotions, if we only allow ourselves to dive in to them; to meet them head on; to recognize and acknowledge them and let them work inside us. Allowing ourselves to feel what exactly we are feeling can be very cathartic and it can present a huge learning opportunity. A lot of times, this is when we are made aware of the parts of us that may need a little work, or the beliefs that need changing, or the thought patterns that need reprogramming. 

Processing, growing, gaining wisdom from emotions cannot happen if we are constantly running from or distracting ourselves from them (hello Facebook 80 times in 2 hours, that used to be me. ***Here’s a little side note, if you want to see just how much time you use your phone to distract yourself during the day download a little app called, Moments. I was mortified to say the least). 

Processing emotions is not a walk in the park, unfortunately.  In fact, there are probably a thousand other things I would rather do than sit down and have a tete a tete with fear. Or anger. Or heaven help me, despair. I’ve met up with despair a lot in the past couple of years. We’ve squabbled a time or two, but I’ve always managed to come out victorious.  

Regardless of whether I beat my own emotions, or they beat me, (which does happen from time to time) I always come out having gained a greater knowledge about who I am.  About what I am capable (or not capable) of achieving.  

Every time I give in and: 

A. Allow myself to acknowledge and feel the emotion

And then try to figure out: 

B.  Where the feeling is coming from 

C. Why it’s there

D.  What I can do to change it 

E.  How to let that shit go

I  grow just a little bit stronger. I gain just a little bit more wisdom. I sever, yet another chord binding me to the extremely heavy weight of resistance and non-progression.  

 This is not a quick process, by any means. Sometimes it takes days to give in and let myself feel, or to figure out the why, and mostly, days to let it go. Letting go is probably the hardest step for me. But it’s also the most rewarding.  

The next time you find yourself struggling with any kind of emotion, give yourself the gift of opening yourself up to your feelings. It hurts, and it can be quite intense, but in the end, it pushes you that much closer to recognizing your strengths, moving on from the past, and becoming your YOU.