How to Process Emotions: What Your Dark Feelings Are Telling You

How to Process Emotions: What Your Dark Feelings Are Telling You

If you are reading this because you typed how to process emotions into a search bar late at night, I have a guess about what happened right before that. Something showed up that you did not want. Boredom, in a life you actually chose and mostly love. Regret about a decision from fifteen years ago that you cannot stop turning over. A shame that arrives out of nowhere and tells you, flatly, that you are bad. And then a second thing landed on top of the first one, which is the sense that having the feeling at all means something has gone wrong with you.

Here is the direct answer, and it is not the one most articles give you. Processing an emotion does not mean getting rid of it. It means asking the feeling what it is trying to tell you, and then letting the answer change something about how you actually live. There is no technique and there is no finish line. What there is instead is a relationship you can change, and changing it is most of what we do in therapy and coaching for personal growth every day.

Before anything else: you do not have to feel good to be doing well. I want to say that early because most people carrying a hard feeling are also carrying a quiet belief that they are failing at being a person. You are not. The thing that exhausts people is rarely the boredom or the regret itself. It is the second layer, the feeling bad about feeling bad, and that layer is optional in a way the first one is not.

I also want to be straight with you about what an article can do. Most of the people who come to my team with this have already read the books. They have listened to the podcasts. They know, intellectually, that their feelings are supposed to mean something. The problem was never information. The problem is that your nervous system has been handling hard feelings the same way for thirty years, and a paragraph on a website is not going to override that on a Tuesday night when the feeling actually shows up in your kitchen. What I am about to give you is real, and it will give you language for what is happening inside you. The part where you do it differently, with somebody who knows your specific patterns and is paying close attention to your actual life, is the part my team does with people all day long.

This came out of a conversation I had with Daniel Smith, a psychotherapist in Brooklyn and the author of Hard Feelings, which Simon and Schuster published in March. His earlier memoir Monkey Mind was a New York Times bestseller and landed on Oprah’s list of forty books to read before turning forty. He is also one of the very few guests who has ever refused to hand me a three-step process, and he refused twice, on purpose. He told me he gets antsy when he hears even good-natured moves toward optimization, because what tends to be waiting on the other side of a fix is the belief that you have failed at feeling.

One note on language before we get into it. I never call these negative emotions. They are dark emotions. They are powerful, they are instructive, and they are illuminating, and Daniel agreed that negative is a loaded word because it automatically sets a feeling in opposition to the good. That one vocabulary change does more work than it looks like it does.

What Does It Actually Mean to Process an Emotion?

Processing an emotion means changing your relationship to it rather than eliminating it. In practice it is one question asked of the feeling instead of about it: what is this trying to tell me?

That is the whole method, and both of us landed there from different directions. I came at it as a psychologist watching our culture pathologize the ordinary range of human emotion into conditions to be eradicated. Daniel came at it as a clinician and a writer tracing where that pressure came from, which he thinks runs back through Western moral philosophy and got supercharged by a very American drive toward the practical. The cost of that inheritance is specific. It sets you, as he put it, in almost internal opposition to yourself. You end up with a feeling and a full-time job of fighting it, and the fight is what wears you down. This is the same ground I have covered before in how difficult emotions lead to growth, and Daniel’s version of it is the most useful I have heard.

So what does asking actually look like? It is not journaling until something happens. It is treating the feeling as though it has a point of view and you are curious about it. Boredom is telling you something about meaning. Regret is telling you something about what you care about and what you are still afraid of. Anger, which Daniel says he never had trouble seeing the value in, is usually pointing at an injustice you felt and a repair that has not happened yet. The information is specific, and it is about you rather than about the world.

Daniel does not think this ends, and neither do I. He said it plainly: “I don’t think there’s an endpoint. I think the point is the relationship.” That sounds like bad news until you sit with it for a second. It means you are not behind. There is no version of you who has finished, and every feeling you have between now and then is not evidence of failure. It is just the ongoing negotiation, which is also more or less how I think about your emotional guidance system.

Here is the honest part. Asking a feeling what it wants is easy to understand and genuinely hard to do alone, because the feelings that most need the question are the ones that make you least able to think clearly. That gap, between understanding the move and being able to make it at 10pm in your actual life, is where coaching becomes useful. Most of the people on my team spend their days sitting in exactly that gap with somebody, and it is much less lonely from the inside.

Why Am I Bored by the Things I Love Most?

Because boredom and meaning are often braided together rather than opposed. The activities that carry the most meaning in a life tend to carry a lot of repetition with them, and repetition is where boredom lives.

Daniel picked boredom himself, unprompted, and said it is the emotion readers gravitate toward more than any other in his book. Then he did something I did not expect. He said the activities he finds most boring are the same ones he finds most deeply meaningful. Writing, which for him is mostly showing up, watching the clock, and producing sentences that feel like typing with oven mitts on. Sitting with clients, which is a great deal of waiting for meaning to arrive. And parenting, which he described as gum-receivingly boring, because your job for years is to teach a person to use a napkin and pick up their socks while they ask you to look at the same thing forty times.

Then he said the line that made me stop the interview. He said he loves his children dearly and resents them intensely for being there. I paused us on purpose, because most people do not say that out loud, and I have sat with hundreds of parents who feel exactly that and think it makes them monstrous. It does not. Somebody passed him an essay arguing that the signal experience of parenthood is interruption, and once you have that phrase you cannot unsee it. You cannot follow your own thought. You cannot finish imagining anything. That is not a character defect, it is the structure of the job.

The research here is more interesting than the internet lets on. Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou ran a series of studies showing that what makes boredom distinct from sadness, anger, or frustration is a very particular combination: you feel unchallenged while also perceiving your situation and your actions as meaningless (van Tilburg and Igou, 2012, Motivation and Emotion). So boredom really is a meaning signal. What Daniel adds, from the inside of a life, is that the signal is not always accurate about which direction the meaning is in. Sometimes the meaning is right there in the room with you and the boredom is simply the toll. He put it this way: there is a braiding together of boredom and meaning that is inextricable. Remembering that does not remove the boredom. It contextualizes it, which turns out to be enough. I wrote about the useful side of this a while back in how boredom and space help you understand yourself.

When Is Boredom Telling You to Change Something?

When you are using an activity to escape something real, or when the thing itself no longer connects to anything you actually value. The test is direction: is the boredom pointing you away from something true, or is it the ordinary cost of something worth doing?

I have my own answer to this one, and it is not a small one. When my husband and I had our first child, we were bored out of our minds. Bored in the way where you look around at a life you built on purpose and cannot find the thread. So we listened to it, and we took the show on the road. We traveled full time for years with a small child, because it was interesting and it brought the energy back. And here is the part that mattered: the kid did not care. You can build Legos in an RV or on the living room floor of a big house in the suburbs. She had no opinion. We did.

Daniel held the other side of it, and he was right to. He brought up a speech the poet Joseph Brodsky gave to graduating seniors in the eighties, where he told them they were going to be extremely bored, and that they would do what people always do about it. They would have affairs, they would take things, they would crowd their lives with novelty, and in doing all of that they would be escaping the deeper meaning of boredom, which is an attendance to the finite. Life contains repetition. Somewhere in there you have to make peace with that. He also pointed out that a great deal of the best thinking on boredom came from desert monastics who committed to a life of prayer and then wanted out, which is a very old version of a very current problem. This is really a question about meaning making, and the answer is different for every person who asks it.

So how do you tell? You ask the two questions honestly. Am I trying to get away from something that is true. Or is there meaning on the other side of this, and is this just what the meaning costs. The second one shows up in marriages constantly. If you want to be married until the end, you are signing up for repetition, for the same story you have heard fourteen times, and for stretches where the whole thing is less exciting than an affair would be. That is not a failure of the marriage. It is the price of the depth, and you chose it.

If you have read this far and you cannot tell which one yours is, that is not a personal failing. It is close to impossible to answer that question from inside your own life, which is exactly why people bring it to a coach. It is one of the more common things that lands in a first consultation with us, and it is a good use of an hour.

How Do You Deal With Regret About Something You Can’t Change?

You stop relitigating the past and start asking what the regret says about what you are still afraid of doing now. Regret is usually a statement about the present wearing the costume of the past.

Daniel told me regret was the emotion he had the hardest time seeing any value in at all, because on the surface it is nothing but a wish for a rewind button. Then he found the value, and it is not what you would expect. Regret is telling the truth about the human condition. You are forced to make decisions under pressure, without full access to your own motives, let alone anybody else’s, and you will always know more later than you know now. A person who has never felt regret has not been paying attention. I have covered the practical side of this before in how to deal with regret, and this conversation added the piece I had not heard articulated so clearly.

He gave me his own example, live, and got visibly scared doing it. In his early twenties he was working at a magazine and was offered an opportunity. He said no, in a way that felt logical at the time, and went off to write instead. He still goes back to it, decades later, imagining the editing career and the financial stability and the savings that might have followed. His wife has a line for what he does with that memory: your tongue goes to that canker sore. Which is exactly the quality of it. Not thinking. Returning.

Then he named the thing underneath, and this is the part worth reading twice. He said that in reproaching himself for a decision he made at twenty-three, he may be avoiding a fear he still has right now, about being bold, about acting without permission from some authority. The old closed door is a more comfortable place to put that fear than the open one in front of him. So the question stops being what should I have done, and becomes what am I afraid of doing this week.

The research lines up with this in a way I find genuinely useful. Neal Roese and Amy Summerville analyzed eleven regret ranking studies and found that the intensity of a regret tracks how much opportunity a person perceives in that domain, with education, career, and romance topping the list precisely because they still feel open (Roese and Summerville, 2005, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin). Read that again through Daniel’s lens. The regrets that hurt most are the ones where something is still possible. The pain is a signal about the future, not a verdict on the past.

My own version of the work is two questions, and I use them with clients constantly. What does this regret tell you that you care about? And if that is true, what does it mean about how you need to live now? That second question is where regret turns into something usable. Without it you are just grieving in a loop, and there is a real difference between regret and grief that is worth naming out loud, because grief needs to be mourned and regret needs to be answered.

The last piece is forgiveness, and Daniel framed it as a practice rather than an event. Regret can be the canker sore you keep returning to, or it can be the reminder to forgive yourself, the way that when you notice you have drifted in meditation you simply return to the breath. You are not going to stop having the thought. You are going to get better at what you do next. That is what mindful self-compassion actually is in practice, and it is much less soft than it sounds.

Here is what I notice about regret in real life. People almost always figure out that the loop is costing them long before they figure out what to do instead. That gap is where coaching earns its keep, because the whole point of the second question is that somebody has to ask it, and it is very hard to ask it of yourself while your tongue is finding the canker sore.

What Is the Difference Between Shame and Guilt?

Guilt is about something you did, it is usually reality-based, and it can be worked with and repaired. Shame makes a flat, total claim about who you are, it is usually not reality-based, and it has to be identified as shame before anything else can happen.

Daniel calls shame the master emotion and the one he has the most complicated thoughts about, because unlike envy or regret you cannot negotiate with it. He described it as totalizing and flat. Shame says there is something wrong with me, I am bad, I am wrong. And then it wants the conversation over, which is why he calls it authoritarian. I said the thing that makes it workable: shame is usually not reality-based, and guilt is. Guilt says I did that, and I did not like doing it, and here is what I might do about it. That is a conversation. Shame is a verdict. I have written about the flat, totalizing version at length in healing toxic shame, and I stand by all of it.

This distinction is not just a nice framing, it is one of the better established findings in the field. June Tangney and colleagues reviewed decades of research on the self-conscious emotions and found that guilt, which focuses on a specific behavior, is consistently associated with repair, apology, and constructive action, while shame, which indicts the whole self, is associated with hiding, defensiveness, and externalized blame (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek, 2007, Annual Review of Psychology). So when I tell you guilt is the more useful of the two, that is not optimism. That is the literature. And it is why I have a whole episode on the difference between the healthy version and the corrosive version in unhealthy feelings of guilt.

So what do you actually do when shame arrives? Not sternness. Daniel was clear that getting hard on yourself about shame tends to reify it and double it, which anybody who has tried it already knows. What works is naming. Constant, patient, unglamorous naming. That is shame. That is shame again. Not so that you argue with it, but so that you stop mistaking its blanket statement for information about reality. You are labeling the weather instead of believing the forecast.

I will be honest that this is the piece people find hardest to do alone, because shame is specifically designed to keep you from talking about it. That is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism. Naming it out loud to somebody who does not flinch is most of the intervention, and it is a very ordinary thing to bring to a first conversation with one of our therapists or coaches. You do not need a diagnosis or a crisis to say the sentence out loud.

How Do You Sit With a Difficult Emotion Without Being Ruled by It?

Two things make the difference. First, know roughly where you are on the continuum between a feeling that is informative and a feeling that has gotten loud enough to need quieting before any deeper work is possible. Second, stay curious rather than normative, both about your own feelings and about the people around you who handle theirs differently. This is the practical heart of how to feel your feelings without being run by them.

Daniel had the best image for the first one. Sometimes the weeds take over the garden. When that happens you work on the weeds first, with patience, and the deeper cultivation comes after. That is not a defeat and it is not a diagnosis. It is a sequencing decision, and most people can feel the difference between a hard feeling that is telling them something and a hard feeling that has crowded out their capacity to think about anything at all. If you are in the second situation, the work is turning the volume down first. Everything in this article still applies. It just applies later.

The second one surprised me by becoming the best part of the conversation. I raised temperament, because I do not think we talk about it honestly enough. Some people are wired to register dark emotions far more vividly than others. The orchid and dandelion framing gets at it, and so does the Enneagram, and so does Big Five research on trait neuroticism and openness. It is a little like colors on a spectrum. Some people see more of them. Daniel is one of those people. So is my husband.

Which creates real friction, and I said so, including in my own marriage. My instinct is to move: I do not like this, let us do something different. My husband would rather stay in the feeling and understand it. Neither of us is doing it wrong, and for years each of us quietly thought the other one was. Daniel declined to make it normative and told me straight out that he has no easy answer, which I appreciated more than an answer. Then he offered the thing that does work. Stay in a place of curiosity. If you can manage that, you cannot help thinking more compassionately about where the other person is coming from, and a surprising amount of the strain goes away on its own. This is emotional intelligence in the most practical sense of the phrase, and it is learnable.

Daniel corrected me on the vocabulary, and he was right to. He thinks about this in terms of temperament rather than personality, which is a more honest word for something that sits this deep in the wiring. Then he said, without being asked, that on the Big Five nobody would be surprised to learn he scores high in neuroticism. Notice what that is. A working psychotherapist naming his own trait profile out loud, in public, with no defensiveness anywhere in it. That is what it looks like when somebody has actually changed their relationship to a hard thing instead of managing it. And I will own my side, because I said it on the recording too: my instinct to move on is its own vulnerability to optimization. I am not above the thing I have spent this whole article warning you about.

I said something in the closing of that episode that I want to repeat here, because it is the actual point. For a lot of us, and I put myself in this group, feeling our feelings is not the natural move. If you are intellectual or action-oriented, and I check both boxes, you can do so much thinking and so much doing that you lose contact with what is going on inside you. What helps is not more effort. It is a dedicated space, and somebody asking questions you would not have thought to ask yourself. If you have ever wondered what to talk about in therapy, that is the honest answer for people like us. You talk about the thing you have been efficiently avoiding, and someone helps you stay there long enough to hear it.

That is not only a therapy thing, by the way. It is one of the active ingredients in good coaching too, and it is what the therapists and coaches on my team at Growing Self do all day long with people who are, on paper, doing fine. Nobody in that chair is in crisis. They are just done doing this part alone.

Why Reading This Article Probably Isn’t Enough

I want to be honest with you about something. Everything above is real. The question works. The distinction between shame and guilt is one of the most useful things you will learn about your own mind this year. People’s lives change on the back of it. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this tab thinking that reading it was the work.

Here is what usually happens instead. You read something like this, something clicks, you feel a little hopeful. You make a mental note to ask the question next time the feeling shows up. And then Thursday happens. The boredom arrives at 6pm in the middle of the bedtime routine, or the regret finds you in the car, or the shame turns up after a conversation at work, and your nervous system does exactly what it has done for thirty years, and a week later you notice nothing changed and quietly conclude that you are the problem.

You are not the problem, and you are not unmotivated. You are trying to run new behavior in the exact moment the old pattern is most active, by yourself, with no outside perspective. That is the hardest possible conditions for change. It is not a willpower issue. It is a design issue.

What works is having somebody in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can debrief with after a hard week, and who will ask you the second question when you have only asked the first. That is what working with a coach or therapist on my team actually is. Not lectures, not generic advice, and not a diagnosis. An ongoing relationship with someone paying close attention to your life. If you are wondering which one you need, we have a whole piece on the difference between coaching and counseling, and honestly, the first conversation sorts it out faster than reading about it will.

On the practical side: we do free first consultations, and there are a few ways in at different price points. One-to-one therapy or coaching is the deepest version. There is also a group coaching program for people who would rather work on this alongside others going through something similar, and the next group starts in September. Our practicum program, where you work with a supervised clinician in training, is the most affordable option on the list. None of that is a pitch. It is just the menu, so you know what exists before you decide anything. If you want the wider view of where this all goes, I put it in how to transform bad feelings into authentic happiness.

And if something in this article landed somewhere specific, that is the signal. Not that you are in trouble. That there is something here worth saying out loud to a person. You can schedule a free consultation with someone on my team, or go to GrowingSelf.com and tap the Get Connected button, answer a few quick questions, and we will help you find the right person. No pressure and no commitment. Just a real conversation about what is actually going on, and whether what we do here would help.

Because the goal was never to stop feeling bad. The goal is to understand how you feel, especially the hard parts, and then to use that to build the staircase toward what you actually want. Not in spite of your feelings. Because of them.

xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby