For years, I didn’t want to feel anything negative. I didn’t want to feel hopeless or angry. I didn’t want to feel despair. So my only solution, which is typical for many people, was to shut everything down emotionally. But when we shut down the bad, we also shut down the good.

But really, there’s no such thing as shutting off your emotions because they don’t go anywhere. When you resist them or try to push them away, they remain in your mind, heart, and body until you can acknowledge and allow them to do whatever they need to do to be fully processed and released.

Emotions are starting point for us to understand ourselves better, how we can evolve, and where we want to go emotionally.

It’s okay to feel negative emotions.

We often forget (or want to forget) that it’s okay to feel the more challenging emotions. It’s okay to feel grief, despair, hopelessness, anger, jealousy, rage–to name a few– because these emotions give us a starting point to move forward. We realize who we are and what we’re feeling at that moment.

I’ve heard a handful of people lately talk about how they know there are situations and emotions they need to process, but they’re afraid that it might break them if they start that process of feeling the negative emotions.

They are worried about the devastation that could come from letting themselves feel. It’s a fear I know deeply. I didn’t want to engage with my feelings for years because they were too hard.

But every feeling, good or bad, is a starting point to understand where we are on the emotional scale.

You can’t bypass emotions long term

We often want to jump straight to feeling joy or peace when we are, in reality, feeling anger or grief. (Or it might be hopelessness, despair, jealousy, envy, rage, etc.) Where we are emotionally is not where we want to be. So we try things that we think will bypass everything between rage and peace. However, if we don’t acknowledge and start where we are emotionally, we can’t figure out a path to get us where we want.

For example, if peace is your emotional destination, you have to know your starting point because otherwise, you’ll never end up processing all the emotions you need to arrive at peace.

Knowing where we are emotionally is scary because it isn’t always pleasant. It’s a place that feels dark and heavy, and to accept it, might be the most difficult thing to do. I wish I could tell you that if you are willing to process your emotions, it will be easy, but that’s not usually the case. You might fall apart. You might crumble. Your situations, feelings, and mental stability might get worse. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort.

Life hacks aren’t lifelong solutions.

As humans, we can’t jump from rage to happiness in 2.5 seconds. It’s not how we operate as humans. There are techniques and hacks to help you momentarily, but they don’t bring lasting personal evolution (which we are all about here.)

I’ve tried it all. I’ve been successful with some hacks and failed with others, but I know they don’t produce lasting change after lots of trial and error. I can go from feeling discouraged to hopeful simply by blasting some go-to songs that lift my mood. It changes my state, and it does help. However, it’s only a momentary fix to bypass whatever I feel. Eventually, I will have to process the emotion that I’m avoiding.

Climb the emotional ladder.

The only real way to achieve authentic peace or joy is to start where you are emotionally and work yourself towards the emotion you want. You can think of it almost like a ladder. At the bottom is grief (or whatever the darkest feeling is for you.) At the top of the ladder is peace, contentment, joy, etc. So how do you climb from the very bottom of the ladder to the very top? One rung at a time.

My hack of listening to music bypasses all the rungs in the middle but just momentarily. Eventually, I slide back down the ladder because I’ve never processed emotions rung by rung to get from grief to joy.

We always have to start our emotional journey from where we are on the emotional scale. As I have learned to allow, accept, and acknowledge my feelings and emotions, there have been awful days when it feels like the volcano erupted and everything is crumbling around me. But as I allowed grief, for example, it would process into anger, and the anger would process into disappointment. I could work my way up the ladder, processing and releasing each emotion as it surfaced. This keeps the emotion from getting stuck and causing other issues down the road.

I’m currently processing emotions from 15 years ago. I chose to stick my head in the sand and not feel anything back then. I thought I could bypass my feelings if I ignored them. It didn’t work. So, 15 years later, I am processing emotions and working my way through them all to arrive at peace and contentment.

As I’ve learned to start where I am emotionally and process each feeling, I now do it in real-time. I don’t want to end up 15 years down the road having to process something that I choose to ignore right now.

You’ll learn to climb the ladder faster.

Starting where you are emotional will probably be difficult initially, but over time it gets easier. This is because you learn to scale that ladder faster and process emotion more easily.

Start to engage your feelings. Learn where you’re starting emotionally and process through each emotion.

You can climb the ladder and move up the emotional scale towards contentment, hopefulness, and optimism if you know where you are starting from.

There’s a helpful tool by Abraham Hicks called the Emotional Guidance Scale. It lists all the common emotions and where they fall on the scale. It’s helped me immensely in processing from one emotion to the next and moving up the scale or ladder.

So, no more life hacks that attempt to bypass the human experience. Instead, start where you are emotionally and use it to figure out how to get to where you want to go.