Why do I avoid dealing with emotional issues?
Naturally, avoiding feeling pain is what each one of us strives for every day. Humans are creatures of habit and adapting to new situations comes quickly for most of us. For example, avoiding going to the mailbox to get the mail because my knee hurts or avoiding to think about something hurtful to prevent tears from entering into our eyes is the thing we do. The problem with this type of thinking is that it might give us immediate results, but later in life, we pay the price for our avoidance. To continue illustrating this concept, let’s go back to the example previously used. Becoming a couch potato and not exercising the painful knee will weaken your hurt need further until your leg is disabled. Similarly, avoiding negative feelings will eventually expand to people, situations, experiences, places to continue avoiding stirring up negative feelings.
A better way of dealing with Negative Feelings
Being humans implies living and feeling everything life has to offer to us. Therefore, emotional acceptance, in the long run, will prove to be beneficial and human-like. We were all created in the Image and Likeness of God, and as we all know God suffered immensely. Hence, if our creator and maker sustained suffering why we should try to live lives without pain? A better alternative would be to accept and experience negative emotions for what it is. Learn from the experience and use it as a teaching moment. Often this gives us the opportunity to understand that it wasn’t as bad as we thought, losing its destructive power and allowing us to move forward. I leave you today with this analogy: Avoidance is like floating against the current; tiring, exhausting, and painful. Whereas, Acceptance is more like floating along the current; it will run along the way while you have the opportunity to experience it.
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