Who lied to us and told us experiencing bad feelings means there’s something wrong with us?

“Bad feelings” are a part of being human. Anxiety, sadness, anger – they all have their role per example in keeping us safe, telling us when we’re in danger. Sadness is a perfectly normal feeling to experience when something or someone hurts us, when we lose someone, when we are disappointed. Anger tells us when we are being disrespected or treated unfairly.

Perhaps as children we were taught to stop expressing these emotions – calm down, don’t cry, don’t yell – and we end up thinking we should stop feeling them too.

Of course an exaggerated amount of these emotions, especially when nothing in particular is happening, can be a sign of a problem. But most of the times if you look attentively enough, the reasons for these feelings are going to reveal themselves.

Someone in your life is treating you unfairly: a boss, a partner, a family member. You are denying yourself something you really want, disappointing your own dreams. A relationship in your life, perhaps even with yourself, is unsafe.

And when you realise the reason that sparked the emotion, you realise 2 things: that the way you were feeling was perfectly normal and reasonable and valid, and that we have to be grateful we experience these difficult feelings, for they are the alarm bell that alerts us we need to take action, and the navigation tools that help us stir our lives from struggle to happiness.