The Freedom That Follows Emotional Discomfort

The Missing Link in Your New Year’s Resolution Strategy

Written by: Michael Tighe, PsyD Student

We’ve all been there: we want to eat more nutritious food, lose weight or gain muscle, nail that presentation, or get that promotion. Who doesn’t have an area of their life they wish they could further develop if they weren’t so reliant on entrenched patterns that make them feel stuck? How do we push through that stuck-ness to live up to our potential?

Certainly, to be human is to have physiological limitations. We can only expect so much of ourselves when we are consistently stressed, sleep-deprived, going through a divorce, or grieving the death of a loved one. These experiences have a concrete impact on our capacity. But without an ongoing connection to our emotions, it’s hard to measure what we’re capable of. Are we in fact too tired to try, or is the fear of failure so high that we find ourselves exhausted? Are we stressed about an upcoming deadline, or do we experience anxiety when there’s a chance we might fail?

When our physiological needs have been met, but we’re still finding ourselves stuck, another foundational variable affecting our capacity is our emotions. By turning our awareness toward them, we can begin to understand the role they’re playing in either draining or fuelling our ability to move through our stuck-ness.

Despite the foundational nature of emotions, working with them is quite a nuanced skill. When we’re well rested and fed, and our needs for safety and security are met, emotions are generally helpful. They tell us what’s important and give us hints about what is good or bad for us. The more we trust our emotions to accurately inform our experience, the more we begin to trust ourselves. When we trust ourselves, failure doesn’t breed deeper feelings of despair because we know we did our best. This trust allows us to immerse ourselves in our emotional experience deeply, at a depth that would be otherwise intimidating if we didn’t have that trust.

So, what gets in the way of us trusting in our emotions?

We all share the same core emotions, but each of us develops a unique relationship to them. We don’t consciously decide how we’ll relate to shame, guilt, pride, or love while we’re growing up. These patterns form gradually, shaped by our experiences and compounded over many years, long before we’re fully aware of them. As adults, we may notice a habitual gap between what we value and how we behave. We may start to notice patterns we don’t like about ourselves where logic and intention diverge from action. After a few trips around the sun with this awareness, we begin to realize there’s only so much we can control about ourselves, that our bandwidth for committed change is not limitless, and we learn to choose our battles and prioritize what’s important. What may start out as a judgment of complacency when we first become a fully developed human inevitably shifts to what’s seen as a more inevitable compromise when we begin to recognize our inevitable limitations.

But compromise doesn’t have to be a life sentence.

With the right support, you can learn how to use your limited capacity more efficiently. With an extra set of trained eyes, you can gain extra insight into your experience to build awareness around what typically feels unmovable and entrenched. With support, you can feel more secure in your capacity to pause in areas of typical discomfort and look more closely at what’s at the root of your emotional experiences.

To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, it’s within this pause that we build our freedom: the freedom to choose a different response. To run toward instead of away from. To stay curious rather than withdraw. To stop an old-seated pattern and begin cultivating a new one.

At CMBH, we work with people in precisely these moments, slowing them down frame by frame. Together, we examine what the old habit is doing for you, what emotional function it serves, and how to build something new that meets that need more intentionally. Freedom doesn’t come from eliminating discomfort. It comes from learning how to stay with it long enough to choose differently.