Resisting Emotions

Cornelia
Oct 8, 2025
7 min read

Why does it sometimes feel so hard to turn to our emotions? In theory, we know that in order to move on, we need to give up the resistance and allow the emotions to move through our body. After all, it only takes 90 seconds for an emotion to run its course. So why do we shy away?

Naturally, our body wants to keep us in a pleasant state, and so we do not want uncomfortable feelings to arise. Every person has different strategies to deal with difficult emotions: we might distract ourselves (yes, our phones and social media are a big one), we numb our feelings by using alcohol, food, shopping, gambling… the list is endless.

In psychology, there is a distinction between five main strategies for dealing with emotions: acceptance, reappraisal, rumination, distraction, and suppression. We begin learning these strategies in childhood. Since young children don’t yet have the ability to regulate themselves, they rely on their parents for guidance and support. Through feedback and reactions from the people around us, we gradually learn how emotions are “supposed” to be handled. Parents not only guide us directly but also serve as role models—how they manage their own emotions strongly influences how we learn to manage ours.

Often, certain emotions aren’t welcomed at all. It’s natural that parents don’t want their children to feel pain. Watching a child struggle can be deeply uncomfortable and even heart-breaking for a parent, so they may try to protect their child by minimizing or dismissing the difficult feelings. I remember being told more than once, after getting hurt and expressing a whole wave of emotions: “Don’t worry, until you’re married it’ll be fine again.” Another common phrase was, “A Native American doesn’t know pain.” These sayings might have been meant to comfort or distract, but in reality, they often sent the message that emotions should be pushed aside rather than expressed and felt.

Through such messages, we not only learn which emotions are more or less acceptable, but also absorb gender-related expectations. For instance, girls are often discouraged from expressing anger, while boys are allowed to show anger but discouraged from expressing sadness, loneliness, or vulnerability. These patterns don’t just shape us as individuals—they also carry broader consequences for society.

What are emotions?

Maybe it’s time to take a step back and find out what emotions are and how they help us in life. Traditionally, emotions are viewed as something that is a response to a sensory aspect or a stimulus of some kind, and they help us navigate the world, make decisions, and express ourselves. Many scientists have a clear idea of what areas in the brain are involved in emotional activity and think that every emotion goes along with a specific arousal pattern in our body (tension, heart rate, blood pressure). However, psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a different perspective. According to her, emotions, such as anger or grief, don’t have unique biological “fingerprints.” Multiple emotions can share the same physical markers, like an increased heart rate. Instead, she argues that emotions are constructions of the brain.

The brain’s primary role isn’t to feel or think—it’s to regulate the body and predict how much energy we’ll need in any given situation. In a stressful meeting, for example, the brain allocates glucose and oxygen to prepare the body. It does this by making predictions based on past experiences. If the prediction is wrong, the brain usually corrects itself, learning from the error.

Emotions are a combination of our sensory present and our remembered past, so our brain automatically finds an experience from the past that resembles the current one and makes its predictions. That’s how we end up with more pleasant and sometimes unpleasant emotions. If we’ve had difficult or traumatic experiences in the past, our brain predicts that an unpleasant sensation is the most accurate one. However, Feldman Barrett points out that we are not victims of our emotions, but that we can actively influence this process of creating them because we are meaning-makers and can interfere in this process by using several strategies.

Managing Our “Body Budget”

One of Barrett’s main insights is the importance of caring for our body budget. Nourishing food, quality sleep, exercise, and healthy relationships all provide the resources the brain needs to regulate the body. She gives that high importance because if our body budget is in a deficit (especially over a long period of time), the brain will have difficulties allocating the energy needed because there might not be enough resources. So a negative emotion is often a signal that something is off with our body budget.

She also highlights the importance of opening ourselves up to new experiences, so that our brain has more positive resources to fall back on when the present situation gets matched with a past one. The more positive experiences we have in our tank, the more likely it is that the outcome of the matching will be a positive one.

Another powerful tool is developing emotional granularity—expanding our vocabulary for emotions. Instead of just saying, “I feel bad” or “I feel like shit,” we can be specific: overwhelmed, frustrated, disappointed, or lonely. The more precise we are, the more accurately the brain can predict and regulate our state. Barrett even suggests inventing personal concepts or borrowing from other languages. For example, her family uses the phrase “having an emotional flu day” to describe feeling weighed down by emotions and needing extra care.

Reappraisal and Curiosity

Another approach that I have also mentioned earlier as one of the more positive coping strategies is reappraisal. Feldman Barrett advises people to deconstruct their emotions and get back to the pure sensation in their bodies and then find a new concept for it and assign a new meaning. As we are meaning-makers, we can decide for ourselves how we interpret a physical state. When usually we would read an increased heart rate and a shortness of breath as anxiety before a presentation or lecture, we might as well reinterpret these physical symptoms as excitement and determination (because just the bodily experience would be very similar in both cases). And in moments or situations when that is not possible, she recommends cultivating a feeling of curiosity or awe for what is going on in our bodies—and we might have to practice that beforehand in the form of meditation, for example, so that we have this tool ready when we find ourselves in a challenging situation.

How is this connected to Tapping?

Looking at her research, her findings and conclusions, it gets clearer why tapping is so effective. When we tap on past events, it almost looks as if we were able to reverse the process—we start with the emotion, and because we calm the nervous system, we can release it and very often we even rewrite the meaning we assign to an event. (“I didn’t get bullied at school because I was worthless, but because the kids in my class had parents who beat them.”)

Also, we try to focus on what is going on in the body and how a certain emotion shows up in our physical system, and certainly that helps us to create a distance between us and our bodies/emotions and helps us not to identify with them and not get too sucked into our world of destructive beliefs. Very often we realize in the process of tapping that it is not so much the emotion itself that causes the suffering, but the story we have created around those emotions. “I am ashamed that I am still so heartbroken, I should have moved on by now.” All the judgment and our beliefs about what we should be feeling get in the way of actually releasing the emotion and allowing it move through us. Especially when we are faced with heavy emotions such as shame, grief, or loneliness, we tend to have a perception—a concept—of what it means to have those emotions, and these thoughts are usually negative and disapproving.

One reason for that is certainly that we are convinced the happy, shiny people in TV shows or on social media don’t experience those emotions, and therefore having those emotions must mean that there is something wrong with me. More and more, we are starting to talk about these darker emotions, but in general it’s still a long way to go to understand that we all experience them from time to time—because we are human, and it’s natural to experience them, and even to see them as guides and sources of information rather than something to push away.

Starting where we are

Especially when it comes to not wanting to feel our feelings, I think it is crucial to start where we are and express what we are thinking and feeling in this very moment—just being with it without wanting to change anything, simply allowing ourselves to feel the resistance. Very often it’s a very strong sense of not even wanting to go there, of not even wanting to be in the body when, as Feldman Barrett calls it, there is “a jumble of stress,” and we cannot even be specific about what we are exactly feeling. That’s when it is important to acknowledge all the resistance and maybe also the fear of feeling such heavy and intense emotions.

With practice, it gets easier to notice our signals and sit with them. None of this is instant. Most of these strategies—whether it’s tapping, reappraisal, or simply pausing to name what we feel—require practice and a willingness to explore. But over time, we get better at regulating ourselves, rebalancing our body budget, and working with emotions rather than against them.

Join the mailing list to stay updated on upcoming tapping sessions, new videos, and blog posts.

Sources/Resources: