Why You Should Name and Feel Even Negative Emotions

During my first year of being married, I woke up every day, swung my legs over our shared bed, and picked up a floral journal with a gratitude list scribbled inside of it. It was my homework assignment from a counselor: Anxiety made me self-centered and ungrateful, they told me. I needed to rehearse all the things I had to be grateful for to conquer my scarcity mindset and the anxiety it produced. 

 I rarely dealt with or named my emotions—at least not the “negative” ones. They had to be killed, banished, ignored, and stuffed. I learned this from both Christian circles (like the counselor above) and my own fears. I didn’t want others to see my emotions. Negative emotions always equated sin and weakness in my mind, a point for people to look down the bridge of their noses at me. So I tried to kill my negative feelings with kindness—or gratitude.

 But what if we don’t need to pound every negative emotion into the dirt? What if there’s goodness in every emotion—even in our negative emotions that we don’t like so much?

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