How Accepting Difficult Emotions Can Improve Emotional Health

It’s tough to deal with painful, extreme, and sometimes even scary emotions. However, accepting your feelings can help improve your emotion regulation, lead to fewer mood swings, and improve emotional balance.

People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and other psychiatric disorders that involve intense emotional experiences have trouble accepting emotions. They may engage in unhelpful behaviors to avoid experiencing those painful feelings.

This article discusses emotional acceptance and why it can be challenging for some people. It also explores why accepting emotions is so essential to mental well-being.

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What Is Emotional Acceptance?

Often, when you have an uncomfortable feeling, such as sadness, fear, or shame, your first reaction is to reject it, hide from it, and avoid it at all costs. If it feels like a "bad" feeling, you might tell yourself that you don't want to experience it. As a result, you may then do something to get rid of the feeling. Negative ways of coping may include the use of escape mechanisms like using drugs or alcohol to feel better, impulse shopping, binge eating, or risky sexual behavior.

No one wants to walk around feeling emotional pain all the time, but when you reject or suppress your emotions, you may actually make things worse. Running from your emotions gives them even more power the next time you feel them.

Emotions serve various purposes, including providing helpful information about the world around you. They are clues to your state of mental health and well-being regarding your past and present experiences. This means that getting rid of or pushing away emotions is not the best idea because you are ignoring important information that will help you on your personal healing journey.

An alternative to pushing away or stifling your emotions is learning to accept your emotional experiences. This is known as emotional acceptance.

Accepting Emotions Is Not Resigning Yourself to Pain

It is essential to distinguish between acceptance and resignation. Accepting emotions does not mean resigning yourself to constantly feeling terrible or wallowing in pain. It also doesn't mean intentionally holding on to painful emotions or trying to push yourself to experience emotional distress.

As a metaphor for acceptance, imagine you are a soldier who has fought a long battle with your emotions ("the enemy"). Acceptance is the act of putting down your weapons and walking away from the fight. You are not resigning yourself to be beaten up by your feelings. Instead, you are exiting the battle and making peace because you realize your emotions are not your enemy.

In some ways, accepting emotions means also accepting that emotions will change. When you are happy, you have to accept that happiness is a short-term condition—you will not always be in a state of happiness. This goes for every emotion, from fear to anxiety to sadness. Feelings are fleeting and usually go away within seconds, minutes, or hours. If you find yourself feeling sad, it doesn't mean the whole day is ruined. You will move through many emotions throughout the day.

Why Do People With BPD Have Trouble Accepting Emotions?

There are a few reasons why people with BPD, in particular, have trouble accepting emotions, although it is important to note that everyone has trouble accepting emotions sometimes.

• Invalidated by caregivers. People with BPD are often raised in emotionally invalidating environments. These are usually homes where feelings are not accepted by parents or other caregivers. Sometimes, they were punished for expressing feelings or told that they were weak for having feelings. This can lead a person with BPD to have trouble accepting their own emotions in adult life.
• Intense negative emotions. People with BPD experience very intense emotions, making it even harder to accept or cope with these feelings. They often describe feeling that they are afraid their emotions will “overwhelm” or “destroy” them. As a result, many people with BPD feel very afraid of their emotions and are convinced they cannot tolerate their feelings.

Why Accepting Emotions Is Helpful

Why is accepting your emotions helpful? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply get rid of them? Well, no, it isn’t easy to get rid of emotions.

You have emotions for a reason, so you shouldn't want to eliminate them entirely. Emotions are part of a complex system that helps you decide what you should stay away from and what you should approach. Emotions also help you end unhealthy relationships or maintain lasting relationships with other people.

Ignoring emotions leads to poor decision-making. Therefore, accepting emotions is helpful because listening to what you are feeling can reveal important information.

How to Practice Accepting Emotions

Fortunately, you can learn to get better at accepting your emotions. This doesn't mean that this process is always easy. Difficult or intense emotions don't feel very good, so your instincts may tell you to avoid them.

With persistent practice, though, you can learn how to be more accepting of your emotions. Strategies that can help you become better at understanding and accepting your emotions include:

• Mindfulness is a practice that focuses on becoming more aware of the present moment. A core component of mindfulness is learning to observe your thoughts and emotions completely and non-judgmentally.
• Meditation can also help build awareness and acceptance of emotional experiences. Mindfulness meditation, or the practice of being aware of both your internal and external experiences, can be tremendously useful as you learn to accept your emotions. You can try a sitting meditation and breathing exercises.
• Psychotherapy can also be helpful if you have trouble accepting emotions. Talk to your doctor or consult a mental health professional for further advice and treatment. Some types of therapy that can be particularly helpful include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).

Final Thoughts

While you might feel tempted to simply avoid feeling negative emotions, doing so tends to make things worse in the long run. It can also lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms that can hurt your health and well-being.

When you learn how to accept emotions, you take away their power to hurt you. Building this skill can be challenging, but it can result in better emotional regulation over time. If you are struggling with emotional avoidance, talk to your healthcare provider or a mental health professional.