How one deals with trauma, disappointment, anger, and frustration is a part of everyone’s life experience. The emotions that naturally arrive with each of these events in life are often the cause of many problems we carry throughout our lives. Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to everyone’s further enjoyment of life. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, disappointment, and confusion.

Learning to express our emotional pain and distress positively and healthily can lead to robust life enjoyment. The inability to process emotions we feel healthily may lead to a lifetime of trauma, unhappiness, and poor health. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Emotions As Enemies

In my youth, I learned that feelings were enemies. Not overtly, but subtly through my life experience. My male role models taught me that you should keep your

Emotions in and not shown to the world. Since I never spoke of what I felt, I was left to guess for a reason, but as a young person, I believed it was because anger, sadness, shame, and frustration were terrible things that showed a person’s weakness. So I learned to put on a smile and keep my disappointments in life to myself. I was an expert at putting the uncomfortable things in a place where they couldn’t reach me, but I didn’t realize that they would always be a part of me until I learned to deal with them constructively.

Emotions are a natural result of life and work to help us determine what behaviors we resonate with through our actions. Painful emotions tell us something is wrong, but that “thing” was never us, just what happened to us. The lack of communication around our negative emotions and the events or thoughts that cause them leads to most of our problems in life.

Embracing all parts of ourselves, including the uncomfortable parts of emotions, is essential for health. Nobody lives without having a negative thought.

Learning to Deal with Emotions

Too often, it seems like people choose to either obsess over emotions or numb themselves through alcohol or drugs. The problem with these techniques is that the negative feeling is still.

Waiting to be dealt with becomes a destructive part of your life. Being happy is hard when you carry so much anger, frustration, or shame.

There are many resources out there that can help you deal with your emotional baggage healthily, and links at the end of this article to help you. Here are a few that I think are effective for me.

1. Journaling or creating something artistic to help you express what is happening inside. Emotions can be difficult to communicate, and images or other artistic creations can allow for a healthy expression of things that bother us.
2. Learning to recognize unhealthy or harmful thought patterns or practices, accept them, and learn how to let them go gently out of your life, relieves emotional pain.
3. Understand the role that pain has in a healthy life. It can be a catalyst for growth and teaches resilience. Minor health issues provide the experience to deal with more significant difficulties later in life.
4. Seek the help of others. Find someone who can guide your emotional health if you don’t know how to deal with what you are experiencing. Speak about your pain to someone, which will help you release it. A professional counselor or therapist is a great option. Never be afraid to ask for help; it isn’t a sign of weakness; it is a tool to allow you to live a fulfilling life.
5. Practice forgiveness- learn to forgive yourself and forgive others for anything they did that hurt you. Carrying around pain and anger will only weigh you down and, from my experience, stop you from becoming happy in life.
6. Talk about it. Tell someone you trust how you are feeling. It is a simple but effective way of dealing with things.

Suppose our challenges today stem from some emotional issues that haven’t been dealt with appropriately. Shouldn’t our educational system teach kids how to manage youth’s emotional roller coaster rides?

Learning to accept emotions and deal with emotional issues more healthily allows for many of the blocks in life to be eliminated, allowing a healthy expression of yourself and providing your gift to the world. That is a good thing.