Are You Feeling Your Emotions… or Fighting Them?

My husband and daughter recently started their drive from Wisconsin back to Arizona for her final semester of college. Like every parent who has watched their child drive away, I felt that familiar ache. The house seemed quieter before they were even out of the driveway.

My first instinct was to distract myself by staying busy. Clean the house. Straighten her room. Wash the bathroom. Keep moving. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I also knew a part of me wanted to stay busy so I didn’t have to feel how sad I was.

This time, I decided to do something different.

As I cleaned, waves of sadness would wash over me. Instead of pushing them away or trying to “stay positive,” I cried. Sometimes I sobbed. I kept cleaning and picking up while the waves came and went.

Later that evening, I noticed something surprising. The sadness hadn’t disappeared, but I felt more peaceful. I had actually experienced the important difference between feeling our emotions and fighting them.

Maybe you’re like me and have become an expert at resisting uncomfortable feelings. We distract ourselves, stay busy, suppress our tears, or convince ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way. But emotions don’t necessarily disappear just because we avoid them. Sometimes they simply wait or go sideways inside.

What if, instead, we made room for them? Not by getting lost in them or ruminating on them, but by allowing ourselves to experience them with kindness. Sometimes that means crying. Sometimes it means yelling into a pillow, journaling, going for a walk, or simply sitting quietly with the heaviness in our chest. The goal isn’t to get rid of the emotion. It’s to let it move through us.

This week, if a difficult emotion shows up, instead of asking, “How do I make this go away?” try asking, “What would it look like to make room for this?”

I’ve found that peace doesn’t always come from feeling less. Sometimes it comes from resisting less.