We don’t choose our emotions the way people think we do. They arise from context, experience, pattern, proximity, memory and it happens whether we like it or not. What we do with it is what we have control over but people get stuck arguing about whether the emotion is valid, real, if it makes sense, or if it’s appropriate instead of asking what might be the causes.
When people start feeling uncomfortable, they collapse the conversation
or pathologize or moralize or try to fix it or fight it instead of listening to it. We have to try to keep the conversation alive long enough. It’s necessary. Because no clarity, no transformation ever comes from bypassing the truth of how something feels. We don’t have to resolve things right away but we need to be able to hold it without shutting down.