An Overlooked Aspect of What It Means to Love Ourselves
There is a growing emphasis on promoting wellness, personal growth, and positive psychology.
A key to well-being and self-love is accepting ourselves as we are without judgment.
There are benefits to viewing feelings as pleasant or unpleasant rather than positive or negative.
Until recently, Western psychology has explored psychopathology without including the positive aspects of being human. Psychotherapists are often called “shrinks” because they’re seen as reducing the vastness of our human existence into a neat set of itemized, problematic categories. But what if we viewed psychotherapy as a process intended to expand us rather than shrink us down?
Fortunately, promoting wellness, personal growth, and positive psychology has been a growing trend. Rather than focus on psychopathology, more attention is being given to the positive aspects of being human, including the cultivation of what is often called “positive emotions.”
In an attempt to highlight positive aspects of our human experience, a distinction has often been made between positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions are viewed as pleasant feelings such as joy, love, gratitude, or contentment. Negative emotions include anxiety, anger, sadness, loneliness, fear, or other uncomfortable or undesirable feelings.
While there is no consensus about how to define well-being, it is often explained as the presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative ones. This is an attempt to differentiate between what uplifts us and what unsettles us. But there’s something about this simplistic view that unsettles me.
Dividing emotions into positive and negative categories creates a dualistic view of our human experience. Believing that some emotions are negative, it’s almost impossible for our psyche to not want to eliminate these “negative” emotions and hold on to the “positive” ones. After all, we don’t want to be riddled with the shame of having ‘negative” emotions. Consequently, we set up a tension in our psyche. We cling to what’s pleasant and have an aversion toward what’s unpleasant. According to Buddhist Psychology, it is this very clinging and pushing away that creates suffering in our lives. This is not a formula that creates joy and well-being.
I invite you to consider that none of our human emotions are bad or negative. However, there are sometimes emotions that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, or difficult to face. If we want more uplifting emotions, we don’t get there by pushing away, denying, or bypassing the unpleasant ones. The path toward self-love and wholeness begins by creating a friendly space for the full range of our human emotions rather than trying to get rid of the ones we consider unsavory.
Befriending Our Feelings
Since we are wired with the fight, flight, freeze response, it’s no wonder that our tendency is to push away feelings that we experience as threatening to our well-being. Fortunately, we also have the capacity to relate to our experience in a more calm and measured way. We have the ability to bring mindfulness to whatever we’re experiencing, whether pleasant or unpleasant. A key to well-being and self-love is to accept and honor ourselves as we are—making room for our human experience just as it is without judging ourselves. Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing approach invites us to shift our inner landscape not by pushing away unpleasant feelings, but by relating to them in a gentle, caring way. Gendlin called this approach the “Focusing attitude.” This is an orientation of kindness and friendliness toward whatever we’re experiencing in our body.
The next time you experience feelings such as sadness, anxiety, shame, or hurt, notice how you relate to these feelings. Do you try to push them away because they're overwhelming or threatening? Before reacting or shutting down, take a moment to get grounded. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Feel your feet on the ground or look at something pleasant in your environment.
When you feel more connected with your body, see if you can bring some gentleness to what you’re noticing inside. If it’s a feeling that’s scary or overwhelming, see if you can keep that feeling at some distance from yourself—not too close or too far away. If it's still too overwhelming, maybe it’s OK to feel some part of the difficult feeling. If not, then just notice how scary or uncomfortable this feeling is. You don't have to go into it. Perhaps return to it later if you want, or work with a therapist who can help you explore it.
By viewing feelings as pleasant or unpleasant rather than positive or negative, you might be more inclined to welcome and explore them rather than cling to them or try to get rid of them. Unpleasant feelings tend to pass as we make room for them rather than viewing them as the enemy. Loving yourself means allowing your feelings to be just as they are. And we could all use a little more self-love.