Can I Just Bottle up My Negative Emotions? 🍾

Hey guys, Natalie Moore, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist here. And today I'm answering the question, what happens when you bottle up negative emotions? This is something that I deal with a lot in my psychotherapy practice. What I find is that when people come into therapy, they're so overwhelmed by the unpleasant emotions that they're experiencing that they just wanna make 'em go away. And I totally understand that. Of course, if you're dealing with anxiety, depression, depression, bipolar disorder, you're so overwhelmed by what you're experiencing, you just want to make it all go away. I get that. But what I have to tell my clients is that actually my job is not to help them make their negative emotions go away. My job is to help them expand their tolerance for all the emotions, the entire range of human emotions. And so what I talk to them about is something called the window of tolerance. So think of it like an actual window like this where you can open and close it. And so usually when people come into therapy, they have what's called a pretty narrow window of tolerance. So in between my hands would be the amount of emotion that they can tolerate in their body at any given time and still feel calm, safe, and focused. And then anything above this hand would be feeling overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, mania, overstimulation, flooded with thoughts, so many thoughts but no action that you can take. And then below this hand would be kind of the more draining experiences like sadness, depression, feeling frozen or fatigued, even even being sick would fall under that category. And so people start with a pretty narrow range of tolerance, meaning that they can't tolerate a lot of discomfort in their body without kind of going up into the anxiety or down into the depression. So my job is actually to help people expand their window of tolerance, and slowly some of this anxiety starts to become more manageable, and some of this sadness or depression also becomes more manageable. And so it's like creating more space within your body to actually tolerate these emotions better. So you might ask, well, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to tolerate more? Well, think of it this way: the more emotion you can tolerate in your body, you become limitless. You can do anything. Nothing will hold you back because you're not held back by crippling fear or worry or depression that something's not going to go your way. If it doesn't go your way, you you can also tolerate the disappointment and sadness that comes from things not going your way. The other cool thing about this is that within this window of tolerance that you've now expanded, you've also now expanded your tolerance for the positive emotions like happiness, excitement, elation, fulfillment, creativity, freedom, expression, all of this stuff. So When it comes to emotions, we really cannot pick and choose. We cannot decide, okay, I don't ever wanna feel sad, I only wanna feel happy. Doesn't work that way. They're a package deal. If you can tolerate one better, you can tolerate the other one better too. So really, the goal is not to experience fewer negative emotions, it's about learning how to hold the space of those unpleasant emotions and knowing that by doing that, you're kinda exercising your mind and body towards being able to experience and express all of the more pleasant ones as well. So I hope that this video was helpful for you. Please leave a comment, subscribe, share, tell your friends. Also, if you have a video request— so I've been making these videos really intuitively, kind of just responding to things that come up in session and talking about topics I think would be helpful for people, things that kind of come up over and over and over again that I find myself talking about a lot. But also I want to hear from you. If you have a specific question you've always wanted to know the answer to, or have always wanted to get a therapist's take on, please ask in the comment section below. I love doing video replies. They're super fun for me. Okay, take care and see you next time. Bye!