Making Space for All Your Emotions: Why Fighting Them Keeps You Stuck
We live in a culture obsessed with fixing ourselves. Feeling anxious? Here are ten tips to eliminate it. Feeling sad? Try these techniques to snap out of it. Angry? You need to work on your emotional management because you are not allowed to be mad.
The underlying message is clear: negative emotions are seen as problems that must be solved.
What if fighting against your emotions is what actually keeps you stuck?
The Cost of Emotional Warfare
When you resist your emotions, they often grow stronger. Anxiety can become physical tension, sadness may turn into exhaustion, and anger can surface unexpectedly.
Trying to shut down emotions creates a cycle: discomfort, self-judgment, effort to stop the feeling, and intensification of the emotion.
Fighting emotions cuts you off from yourself. Emotions aren't random or wrong—they're signals. Listening to them connects you to what matters most to you.
What Making Space Actually Means
Making space for emotions doesn't mean wallowing or letting feelings control your life. It means allowing yourself to experience what's actually happening inside you without immediately trying to change it.
This looks like noticing the knot in your stomach and saying "I'm feeling anxious" instead of "I need to stop feeling anxious." It means acknowledging the burden in your chest instead of piling on guilt about why you should feel grateful instead.
When you make space, emotions can ebb and change naturally. You can feel anxious, sad, or angry and still go about your day and make thoughtful choices.
The practice isn't about resignation or giving up. It's about treating yourself using the same compassion you'd offer someone you care about. When a friend tells you they're struggling, you don't immediately tell them to think positively or get over it. You listen. You validate. You make space for their experience.
You deserve the same from yourself.
Separating Feelings from the Stories
One of the hardest parts of experiencing difficult emotions is separating the feeling itself from the thoughts that come with it. Anxiety is able to bring thoughts like "Something terrible is going to happen." Sadness might whisper, "You'll always feel this way." Anger might insist, "This is unbearable."
These thoughts feel true when emotions are intense. They can spiral into harsh self-judgment or catastrophic predictions about your life.
Here's where tuning into your body helps. Anxiety lives in your chest as tightness. Sadness shows up as weightiness in your limbs. Anger creates heat in your face or tension in your jaw. These are physical sensations, temporary and manageable.
When you focus on the physical experience of emotion instead of the story your mind tells about it, something changes. The feeling is still there, uncomfortable as it may be. The difference is you're observing it instead of being consumed by it.
This takes time. Your mind will want to return to the story or fix the feeling. Gently direct your attention back to the sensation. Notice where it lives in your body. Breathe into that space.
Steps to Practice Making Space
Mindfulness: Start noticing your emotions throughout the day without trying to change them. What are you feeling right now? Where do you feel it in your body? Can you observe it with interest instead of judgment?
Acknowledgment: Name what you're experiencing out loud or in your mind. "I'm feeling overwhelmed right now." "I'm noticing anxiety constricting my chest like a band pulled too tight." Using description to acknowledge without the pressure to fix it can be surprisingly powerful.
Physical Awareness: Get specific about which emotions show up in your body. Does your stomach tighten? Do your shoulders rise? Does your breathing change? Connecting to these physical sensations keeps you grounded in the present moment instead of lost in your thoughts.
Breath Work: Use your breath to create space around difficult feelings. Slow, deliberate breathing sends signals to your nervous system. You're safe. You can handle this. The feeling will pass.
Self-Compassion: Speak to yourself the way you'd speak to someone you love. "This is really hard right now. Everyone struggles with difficult emotions sometimes. I'm doing the best I can." Recognizing that struggle is part of the shared human experience helps you feel less alone and less broken.
Understanding Your Values and What You Need
When you stop fighting your emotions and start listening to them, something interesting happens. You gain clarity about what matters to you. That anxiety about a forthcoming conversation might be telling you the relationship is important. The anger at a boundary violation might be showing you what you will and won't accept. The sadness about a loss may reveal how much you valued what's gone.
Emotions carry information about your values, beliefs, and needs. When you silence them, you lose connection to this internal compass. Self-discovery requires inquisitiveness and compassion for your full emotional experience, including the parts you've been taught to reject.
Knowing yourself requires making room for all feelings—joy and grief, confidence and doubt. Rejecting emotions prevents true self-understanding.
When to Seek Support
Sometimes, making space for emotions brings up feelings or memories too intense to handle alone. If you find yourself overwhelmed, stuck in patterns you can't shift, or struggling with emotions that interfere with your daily life, reaching out for support makes sense.
Working with a therapist trained in somatic approaches can help you develop skills to be with difficult emotions without being overtaken by them. Learn more about our somatic coaching services at https://www.healingartsvb.com or schedule your first session at https://www.vagaro.com/healingartscenter.
You don't have to figure this out alone. Support exists for this work.
A Different Way Forward
The goal isn't to eliminate negative emotions or achieve some state of constant positivity. The goal is to develop a relationship with your emotions in which they inform you rather than control you. Where you can feel deeply without being defined by those feelings. Where you trust yourself to handle whatever comes up.
This practice takes time. You won't do it perfectly. Some days you'll forget everything you know about making space and fall right back into the fight. When you see this happening, treat yourself with compassion. Come back to the practice. Notice what you're feeling. Make space for it.
Your emotions are reminders of your aliveness and your capacity to connect, grow, and heal. Trust this process—you're stronger for allowing yourself to feel.
Need support with this practice? Our practitioners at Healing Arts Center specialize in somatic compassion coaching to help you develop a healthier relationship with your emotions and reconnect with yourself.
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Healing Arts Center in Virginia Beach is a veteran-owned creative mindfulness and somatic coaching space serving individuals across Virginia through in-person and virtual sessions. Our practitioners specialize in nervous system regulation, emotional awareness, and sustainable stress reduction. We work with adults navigating anxiety, overwhelm, life transitions, and high-pressure roles, offering structured, relational support grounded in body-based mindfulness practices.
