Pure Pain vs. Dirty Pain: Why Suppressing Emotions Only Makes Things Worse

How to Feel Better

Our feelings are the true path to knowledge.
— Audre Lorde

Do you want to feel better, or do you want to get better at feeling? The first option is about wanting to experience only positive emotions. The second is about being willing to experience all emotions as they come and to fully feel life, flaws and all. Guess which one we’re going to talk about?

Resilience doesn’t mean running away from emotions, but it also doesn’t let them take over completely. It teaches you to be flexible and adaptable so you can act in ways that matter to you. Take a moment and imagine making space for all the emotions the world throws at you today—anxiety, sadness, guilt, happiness, joy, disappointment, impatience—while still being able to do what’s important to you. Keep reading to learn how to build your resilience and become more emotionally strong.

Emotions: Just the Facts

Emotions are complex physiological changes that originate in the midbrain. When something happens—whether it’s internal, like a memory or thought, or external, like an argument or bad news—your brain registers it as something worth paying attention to. Then it prepares you to react, and all of this happens so quickly you don’t even have time to say, “I’m fine! How about you?”

There’s debate about how many emotions humans have, but let’s focus on six basic ones:

• Fear
• Anger
• Disgust
• Sadness
• Surprise
• Joy

Which ones do you like? Joy? Me too. Surprise is okay, as long as it’s finding a diamond under the couch and not a scorpion in your shoe. The rest aren’t as pleasant, but evolution gave us the ability to feel them for a reason. There’s nothing wrong with them—they helped us survive.

Here’s the strange part: we all crave emotions. We seek out experiences that make us feel a certain way: we watch comedies to feel joy, horror movies to get scared, and “E.T.” to feel deeply moved and emptied out. Who hasn’t lounged around listening to Joy Division to become one with their sadness?

We naturally look for emotional satisfaction in music, art, and literature, but we only enjoy it when we can control the amount and the way we experience emotions. The real problems don’t come from the emotions themselves, but from trying to get rid of them when they show up unexpectedly.

Pure Pain vs. Dirty Pain

There’s a lot of misinformation about happiness. The most persistent myth is that happiness is the normal state for humans. Look at the list above again—it’s not exactly overflowing with pleasant feelings, is it? Over 30% of those emotions are what we’d call negative. We wouldn’t have survived if we spent all our time blissfully carefree.

Now, when we experience natural, normal negative emotions that are completely appropriate, we think we need to get rid of them. Imagine you lost your job or a relationship, or a parent is terminally ill—wouldn’t it make sense to feel sadness, anxiety, or fear? Let’s call this pure, normal emotional pain, which comes free with being human.

The problems start when we try to cage (change, avoid, get rid of, or suppress) pure pain without dealing with it effectively. That’s when you create a new kind of pain—dirty pain. Dirty pain happens when you try to numb pure pain, making your suffering worse: for example, avoiding relationships, drinking or eating too much to feel better, or shutting down so much that your life becomes limited.

Ironically, the actions you take to control pure pain start to control you, boxing your life in. You end up with the original pure pain—like sadness from a breakup—plus new dirty pain, like alcohol problems, which only makes your emotional state worse and keeps you from living the life you want.

Think of it this way: pure pain is inevitable if you care about anything in life. Dirty pain is optional if you have the skills to handle pure pain.

Emotions Are Like Beach Balls

Hear me out—this is a really helpful way to think about emotions. Have you ever tried to push a beach ball underwater in a pool? It takes a lot of energy to keep it down, and you can’t really do anything else while you’re at it. What happens when you let go? It shoots up and smacks you in the face with triple the force. Everyone around the pool laughs while you pretend that’s exactly what you meant to do.

If You Want to Miss Out on Your Life, Do This

If you push away emotions you don’t like, you will: a) get hit in the face with them again, like a beach ball, and b) miss out on everything else in your life because you’re spending all your energy trying to get rid of feelings you don’t want. This is called experiential avoidance.

It’s the unwillingness to stay in contact with unpleasant inner experiences, even if avoiding them causes more suffering in the long run.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that chronic avoidance of unwanted emotions is at the root of a lot of unnecessary suffering. Yes, avoidance strategies work in the short term, which is why we keep using them. But over time, they lower your quality of life and take you away from what you value.

No wonder we do this. Very few of us have learned effective skills for dealing with emotions. I doubt any school offers a class called “Emotional Openness” after double math on Mondays. It seems like you can either drown out tough emotions with pleasant experiences or try to get rid of them completely.

The Cage You Build for Yourself

Which of the following do you do to cage your feelings (to control, eliminate, avoid, or get rid of them)?

• Drink alcohol
• Use drugs
• Eat
• Have sex
• Exercise
• Watch TV
• Surf the internet
• Criticize yourself
• Blame others
• Avoid intimacy
• Repeat positive affirmations

This isn’t a complete list—add your own personal coping strategies. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing these things from time to time—I can’t stress that enough. I love stuffing my face with chocolate cookies in front of the TV as much as anyone. But problems arise when you do these things on autopilot, as a habitual reaction to your emotions. That’s when you start to abuse them. These methods work in the short term (which is why we keep coming back to them), but if you look closely, you’ll see some pretty unpleasant long-term consequences for your physical and mental health. Plus, these coping strategies take you far away from what truly matters to you.

The Story of Your Emotions

It’s helpful to ask yourself what you learned about emotions in your life, especially in childhood. Consider these questions:

• Which emotions were forbidden?
• Which emotions could be expressed openly?
• What did adults do or say when you were upset?
• What strategies did people around you use to deal with tough emotions?
• Are you still using the same strategies you learned years ago to handle difficult emotions?

There’s no such thing as perfect “emotional” upbringing, so don’t think there are people out there living ideal lives, sailing smoothly through emotional storms. We all learn both helpful and unhelpful skills. These questions are meant to help you understand your beliefs and see if they’re still serving you.

Ask Yourself This, Not That

The key question to ask yourself is:

“What am I willing to feel in order to live the life I want?”

instead of:

“What can I do to stop feeling this way?”

Neither you nor I have full control over our emotions. Sometimes we can influence or avoid them, but the only thing we can truly control is our actions in the moment an emotion arises.

Imagine you have two dials on your body. The first shows your level of emotional distress. The needle moves depending on what’s happening in your life. Didn’t get a promotion, your child is seriously ill, your dog died—the needle drops to 10 out of 10 on the distress scale. If you have people and things you care about, you’ll have emotional distress. Imagine this dial is on your back, right between your shoulder blades. You can’t reach it to change the needle, no matter how much you twist and turn.

Now imagine the second dial is on your forearm. This is your willingness dial. The needle shows how willing you are to feel whatever emotion comes up. You can easily reach this one and adjust it—you have full control over this dial.

Now you have a choice. When something happens that inevitably brings up unwanted emotions, you can either twist yourself into knots trying to reach the dial on your back (even if you manage to move it, you won’t be able to change your emotions for long), or you can turn up your willingness to experience and accept your feelings.

What Acceptance Is Not

Before you throw this article out the window, grumbling that I’m telling you to be miserable for the rest of your life, just hear me out.

Acceptance of emotions doesn’t mean you have to grit your teeth and put up with them. You don’t have to grovel before them, resign yourself, barely tolerate them, endure, surrender, or suppress them. All of that implies you need to change your inner experience somehow, and that’s not what acceptance is about.

Acceptance means making space for whatever comes up, even if you don’t want it, don’t like it, or don’t approve of it. Acceptance is the willingness to feel your emotions, to be open, flexible, curious, and to give any feeling a place. But why do this? So you can act in line with your values. Even if you’re feeling unpleasant emotions, you can still do what matters to you, instead of wasting energy building a cage for your emotions.

Here’s what acceptance is not: putting up with things like bullying, abuse, or injustice. Acceptance means making space for the emotions these situations bring up, so you can try to change things. Swallowing your anger and fear only puts you in a worse position. Walking around with a fake smile saying, “I’m great!” is hard when you’re hurting inside. You’re ignoring your pain’s message: “This situation isn’t right for you.” Make space for those emotions so you can try to do something about them and improve your life and others’. What would have happened if Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, or Emmeline Pankhurst had never listened to their emotional pain?

Wise Teachers

Instead of seeing emotions as annoying things to control, try viewing them as wise teachers showing you what truly matters to you. There’s wisdom in your painful experiences—they remind you of what’s important. You wouldn’t feel sad, angry, scared, or upset about something you didn’t care about.

Imagine I’m a skilled wizard, the best at Hogwarts, and I can cast an amazing spell that gets rid of sadness, fear, anxiety, disappointment, impatience, and any other feeling you don’t like (take that, Hermione Granger). But there’s a catch: you also lose the ability to feel joy, happiness, love, satisfaction, pleasure, and all the other emotions you enjoy. What would you choose? Most people, when they hear my terms, say they don’t want that strange spell. No one wants to live a life completely stripped of feelings. What we really need is to know how to handle our emotions so they don’t get in the way of living the life of our dreams.