I’ll never forget the day my client Sarah came to our session completely exhausted.
“I’ve tried everything,” she said, slumping in her chair. “When my boss criticizes me, I tell myself to think positive. When that doesn’t work, I just try to push the feelings down and get on with my day. And when I can’t do that anymore, I spend hours analyzing why I feel so terrible.”
She looked at me with tired eyes. “But I still feel awful every time it happens. What am I doing wrong?”
Sarah wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was doing what most of us have been taught to do when we feel upset: cope with our feelings.
But here’s what I’ve learned after helping thousands of people transform their emotional lives—coping with feelings often makes them worse, not better.
The three ways we try to cope (and why they fail)
Positive thinking: We try to find the silver lining in every unwanted experience. The problem? When we’re feeling bad and try to think positively, we still really believe the negative thoughts that caused our feelings in the first place. It’s like putting a happy-face sticker on a wound—it doesn’t heal what’s underneath.
Fighting feelings: We suppress emotions, ignore them, or push them down. Some of my clients could stay calm at work but would explode at home. They still got mad at work—they just suppressed it. But suppression is like holding a giant beach ball underwater. It takes enormous effort, and eventually, it gets away from you.
Processing feelings: This one seems to make the most sense. If we’re unhappy, we should think about why, right? But psychologist Ethan Kross challenges this conventional wisdom. In his research at the University of Michigan, he shows that endlessly analyzing emotions can trap us in cycles of rumination and actually amplify our distress rather than resolve it.
The hidden assumption that keeps us stuck
All three coping strategies share a hidden assumption: that you aren’t in control of your feelings—so you have to cope with them.
But what if that isn’t true?
What if instead of merely coping with your feelings, you could change them?
Let me show you what I mean. When Sarah’s boss said, “You did a poor job on this project,” here’s what was really happening:
Event: Boss said, “You did a poor job on this project.”
Meaning Sarah gave it: “I really suck at this work.”
Sarah thought her terrible feeling came from what her boss said. But it actually came from the meaning she gave to what her boss said.
Once Sarah learned to make a clear distinction between the event and the meaning she created, something amazing happened. She could hold both in her mind, pause for a moment, and watch the meaning simply drop away.
The event was still the same. Her boss still said those words. But the meaning—and the painful feeling that came with it—dissolved.
You are more powerful than you think
Here’s what most people don’t realize: You don’t have to change anything outside of you to feel better.
You don’t need your boss to be nicer. You don’t need your spouse to be more understanding. You don’t need your circumstances to be perfect.
You only need to learn one skill—dissolving meaning in the moment.
When you practice this skill in many different situations, it becomes a lifelong habit. Instead of spending hours processing, suppressing, or trying to think positively, you can change how you feel in minutes.
The power to change how you feel comes from something you alone can do.
And if that’s true, then you are immensely powerful.
P.S. There’s a huge barrier to putting this idea into practice. It has to do with an unspoken assumption that 99% of people make. I’ll tell you what it is and how to overcome it in the next goodie.
