4 Tips on Accepting Negative Emotions:

1. Are you feeling uncomfortable yet? : GOOD. Therapy is not supposed to be comfortable at all time, there will be sessions of laughter and joy. You have chosen to come to therapy with the idea of wanting to make a change occur. You have identified wanting something different out of your current life circumstances. Change is growth, growth is uncomfrotable.

2. Have you had a bad day yet?: When clients feel the negative emotion and feel old tendencies reoccurring, they come to session defeated. I celebrate the openness and vulnerability in these moments. You are Human. I need you to be open and feel the good and the bad. We are not robots, incapable of getting our feelings hurt, feeling guilt, shame or anger. We are humans, which mean we get it all, the bad and the good. My hope is that one day the good out weighs the heaviness of the bad you feel in your life.

3. Do not unpack inside your {negative} emotions: If you've met me in a professional setting of any form and asked for any type of guidance. I continue to remind people, it is okay to feel what you are feeling. If we push it away and bury it down, we are not healing nor growing. Feel the sadness, shed some tears, write some notes, turn the lights off and get in bed. Never feel shameful for feeling the emotion, just do not get stuck in it. Allow yourself sometime to process it, discover where it is coming from, and then move forward. To me that is the a healthy sign, to feel, accept and move forward. A lot of people get stuck in truly accepting the negative emotion, but accepting it does not give it control over you, it gives you the control over it.

4. Look for the little wins: Once you've had the bad day, and feel defeated, thats when I get to point out how far you really have not fallen in this time of dispair. When we are living it, we just see the black and white, pass or fail-with me I get to pull the gray out for you. We will shed light on the little wins you've had while allowing yourself to feel. It could be that you didn't lash at a partner, or that you only cried two times instead of the three times you did previously. We all get very caught up in the all or nothing and it can be hard to slow down and see our own positives within the "failures".

As always, I am here to answer questions, to dive deeper and if you are feeling ready to take the next step and begin therapy, please do not hesitate to reach out to me and we can take the first steps together to helping you create a more balanced life for your self.