Letting Go of Painful Emotions

Perhaps the most important emotion regulation skill, “learning to let go”, can be very difficult but is worth the effort you invest. Humans have a tendency to become stuck when attempting to process negative emotions. Instead of simply letting them go, we often hold even tighter to them, obsessing over every little bit of our emotional experience and wondering why it’s happening to us.
It sounds paradoxical, but the act of accepting that we are feeling emotions we would rather not feel can be the key to letting go of them. When we accept that we are suffering, we stop running from the difficult emotions and turn to face them – and when we do, we might see that it wasn’t the big bad monster we thought it was, but a smaller and more manageable beast.
Follow these steps to work on your ability to let go of negative emotions:

1. Observe your emotion. Acknowledge that it exists, stand back from it, and get yourself unstuck from it.
2. Try to experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going. You may find it helpful to concentrate on some part of the emotion, like how your body is feeling or some image about it.
3. Don’t try to push the emotion away. This makes it bigger and increases our suffering. Don’t reject the emotion. Don’t judge your emotion. It is not good or bad. It is just there. There are no bad emotions, just emotions. Anger, fear, sadness are all painful emotions, but they are not bad. Everyone has them, and they are just as valid as the happy emotions. 
4. At the same time, do not hang onto your emotion. Don’t rehearse it over and over to yourself. Don’t escalate it or make it bigger. Sometimes when we feel a very painful emotion, like anger or a deep grief, we hold onto it, or we intensify it, making it stronger and stronger, in our efforts to deal with it or to give it our full attention. Try not to do this. Just let it be however it is. This can result in a lessening of the pain.
5. You are not your emotion. Your emotion is part of you, but it is not all of you. You are more than your emotion.
6. Do not necessarily act on the emotion; having the emotion does not mean that you have to act. You may just need to sit with the emotion. Often, acting can intensify and prolong the emotion.
7. Practice LOVING your emotions. This can be a difficult concept. We can learn to love our emotions just the way we can learn to love (accept) anything else about ourselves or our experience that we cannot change – our age, our height, freckles, the birds that sing early in the morning and wake us up, the weather, the size of our feet, allergies, etc. Remember that acceptance and approval are two different things. You don’t have to like your freckles, but they are there and you can’t change that, so if you just accept or love them, you will feel a lot better than if you keep fighting the idea that they are there (Dietz, 2012).