Why Fighting Your Feelings Is Making Everything Worse
The Problem: We Suppress, Not Feel We are programmed to make feelings go away instead of feeling them. We look for distraction—easy to find today—and suppress our emotions. We think our emotions are our enemy. We like to be together with happy people, with no drama. And so we consume a lot of drugs, or we become addicted to social media and our mobile phones. Look at today's health reports: 60% of children are chronically ill. 10% are autistic. Suicide rates are at an all-time high. Depression has never been at such a high level. Wars are raging like crazy. The suicide rate of U.S. Army servicemen is five times higher than the death rate on the battlefield. Isn't this evidence enough to question a society that supports the suppression of emotions? How Does It Start? We send our five-year-old child to kindergarten. It comes back depressed. We politely ask what happened, and then we say: "Don't see it that way. Don't be emotionally affected. Don't go into your ...