Healing Means Learning to Sit with Discomfort
Emotional avoidance. Do you find yourself automatically moving away from uncomfortable emotions? Perhaps you distract yourself when difficult feelings arise, quickly problem-solve to avoid sitting with uncertainty, or use food, screens, work, or other activities to escape emotional discomfort. Maybe you’ve noticed that despite your best efforts to avoid painful feelings, they keep returning in different forms, never quite resolving despite your attempts to escape them. If these patterns sound familiar, you’re encountering one of the most counterintuitive truths of emotional healing: that moving toward discomfort rather than away from it often creates the very resolution that avoidance prevents.
This automatic avoidance of emotional discomfort isn’t random or simply “weak willpower.” It typically develops through experiences where feeling difficult emotions seemed overwhelming, dangerous, or simply unnecessary. Perhaps you grew up in an environment where certain feelings were treated as problems to be solved rather than experiences to be felt, where emotional expression was discouraged or even punished, or where no one modeled healthy ways of being with discomfort. These experiences create neural pathways that automatically move away from emotional pain before it’s been fully processed—a pattern that makes perfect sense given your history yet ultimately extends suffering rather than resolving it.
Your body orchestrates this avoidance through specific physiological responses. You might notice characteristic tension patterns when difficult emotions arise—perhaps tightness in your chest, throat, or abdomen that literally contains and restricts feeling. Your breathing likely becomes shallow and limited, reducing the oxygen that would support fully experiencing and metabolizing emotional states. You might find your attention automatically shifting away from internal sensations toward external distractions or mental activity, your nervous system directing focus outward to avoid the discomfort within. These physical responses aren’t random stress reactions but precise mechanisms that prevent the complete processing that leads to integration and release.
The most painful paradox of emotional avoidance lies in how it extends the very suffering it attempts to prevent. When difficult feelings aren’t fully experienced and processed, they don’t simply disappear but remain stored in your body and psyche, continuing to influence your experience from beneath conscious awareness and often emerging in intensified or disguised forms later. This creates a situation where short-term avoidance of discomfort actually increases long-term suffering, while the willingness to temporarily experience greater discomfort often leads to genuine resolution and freedom.
What makes this pattern particularly challenging to change is how immediate and compelling avoidance feels in the moment. Moving away from emotional pain provides instant albeit temporary relief, while moving toward discomfort initially intensifies the very feeling you’re attempting to resolve. This timing asymmetry—where avoidance offers immediate but short-lived escape while presence creates temporary intensification before lasting relief—makes it difficult to choose the path that ultimately heals, especially when you lack experience with the resolution that follows fully processed emotion.
Healing Exercise #1: The Discomfort Sitting Practice
Begin building your capacity to be with difficult feelings through daily intentional practice: Set aside 5-10 minutes for this exercise. Bring to mind a mildly uncomfortable emotion—perhaps a low-level frustration, disappointment, or anxiety rather than your most intense feelings initially. Close your eyes and locate where this emotion lives in your body. Place a hand on this area and simply breathe into it, allowing the sensation to be exactly as it is without trying to change, analyze, or fix it. Notice any impulses to escape the discomfort—perhaps through distraction, intellectualizing, or physical movement—and gently return your attention to the sensation whenever it wanders. As your capacity increases, gradually practice with more challenging emotions, always moving at a pace that builds tolerance without overwhelming your developing ability to be with discomfort.
Healing Exercise #2: The Emotion Completion Process
Many avoided emotions persist precisely because they haven’t been fully processed to completion. When a difficult feeling arises that you’d typically avoid, try this approach instead: Create time and space to be with the emotion entirely, perhaps sitting quietly in a private location where you can express without censorship. Allow the feeling to move through you completely—this might involve tears, sounds, movement, or whatever form the emotion naturally takes when unrestricted. Continue this process until you notice a genuine shift or release—perhaps a deepening of your breath, a sense of spaciousness replacing constriction, or a natural transition to a different emotional state. This completion practice helps your system recognize that emotions, when fully experienced, naturally resolve rather than persisting indefinitely as avoidance leads you to fear.
Healing Exercise #3: The Discomfort Expansion Dialogue
Our relationship with difficult feelings significantly impacts their intensity and duration. Practice this internal dialogue when uncomfortable emotions arise: Place a hand on the area where you feel the emotion most strongly. Mentally or verbally say to the feeling: “I’m here with you. I can make space for you. You’re allowed to be exactly as you are right now.” Notice any resistance to this allowing stance and breathe into that resistance as well. Continue this dialogue, creating an internal environment of permission and presence rather than rejection or avoidance. This practice helps transform your relationship with discomfort from adversarial to accepting, significantly changing how emotions move through your system.
Healing through sitting with discomfort involves understanding the crucial difference between feeling emotions and being overwhelmed by them. Many people avoid difficult feelings because past experiences created the belief that emotions are dangerous, endless, or will completely overtake functioning if allowed expression. Developing the capacity to be with discomfort requires establishing both inner resources and external conditions that help emotions feel processable rather than overwhelming—creating circumstances where feelings can move through to completion rather than either being suppressed or flooding your capacity for regulation.
Your physical environment significantly impacts your ability to be with discomfort. Many people unconsciously create surroundings that reinforce avoidance—filling spaces with constant distraction through screens, noise, or activity that makes emotional presence difficult to maintain. Consider creating dedicated areas for emotional processing—perhaps a comfortable chair where you regularly practice being with feelings, a private space where expression can happen without censorship, or simply regular periods without digital distraction where emotions have space to emerge and be acknowledged. These environmental adjustments provide external support for the internal capacity for emotional presence you’re working to develop.
The timeline for emotional processing deserves particular attention and compassion. Our culture often implies that difficult feelings should be quickly resolved, creating unrealistic expectations about how rapidly emotional discomfort should dissipate. In reality, emotions process according to their own organic timing—some feelings move through in minutes when given full attention, while others, particularly those connected to significant experiences or longstanding patterns, may require multiple cycles of attendance over extended periods. Understanding this natural timing helps develop patience with the process, reducing the impulse to abandon emotional presence when immediate resolution doesn’t occur.
Remember that learning to sit with discomfort happens gradually through consistent practice and self-compassion. Your tendency to avoid difficult feelings likely developed for important protective purposes—helping you function in environments where emotional expression wasn’t safe, managing feelings that once exceeded your capacity for processing, or adapting to contexts where performance requirements left little space for emotional attendance. Honoring the intelligence of these adaptations while gradually building your capacity for being with discomfort creates a more integrated relationship with your emotional life—one that allows feelings to serve their natural function of providing information and energy for appropriate action rather than becoming either overwhelming floods or chronic, unresolved blockages in your system.
Keywords: emotional avoidance, polyvagal theory, gestalt therapy, psychotherapy, parents, parental trauma, somatic experiencing
Contact us: Feel and Heal Therapy Office
