EMOTIONAL ACCEPTANCE, BEING AWARE OF YOUR FEELINGS AND THOSE OF OTHERS, AND ACCEPTING THEM, ENABLES YOU TO STAND UP TO EMOTIONAL EXCHANGES AND TO HEAR UNPLEASANT THINGS WITHOUT BECOMING DEFENSIVE.
Letting ourselves to feel and accept our emotions fully and non-judgementally puts us in a position to tap into the dormant parts of our brain and secure to ourselves the mental resources that will enable us to keep growing our intelligence for life. Emotional acceptance, the willingness and ability to accept and feel our emotions, enhances our coping skills and enables us to experience more of life.
Long-term survivors exhibit a striking ability to be aware and accepting of their emotions and the ones they sense in others; they are not frightened, discouraged or intimidated by the intensity of the emotions. Their awareness and lack of resistance enables them to reach out to others and build solid relationships with them, despite their pain. Upon emotional acceptance, one minimises the terror of anticipating a dire experience and conserves creative energy in the process.
Being angry and pushing away the responsibility for your feelings to others through constant mental chatter: “It wasn’t my fault,” “No one ever gives me a chance,” numb you to the feelings. When one is unaware of her feelings and those of others, direct confrontations will always catch her off guard, irritable, defensive, and hurt. When you are aware of your strong feelings, you raise yourself to challenge, in a non-judgemental manner, any irrational thought pattern behind them and affirm the idea of your Wholeness. Emotional acceptance nurtures a state that gives the emotions permission to flow by, and freedom results. Hence, with emotional acceptance, we get to coping.
To continue along, with emotional acceptance, we buy into a state that helps us to build relationships and form alliances, crucial to effectiveness in life. Upon sensing the anger that one is trying hard to evade or suppress, people will elect not to hang around you. Obsessing endlessly about how unfairly you are being treated instead of feeling the pain of consistent rejection and its associated anger, perpetuates the oppressive cycle.
Being aware of your feelings and those of others enables you to stand up to emotional exchanges without being caught off guard, to hear unpleasant things without becoming defensive, and to feel hurt without expressing that hurt as hostility.
People who excessively value their intellectual or other transient material achievements and build their self-concept around them at the expense of cultivating their true inner sense of self, a fundamental sense of how they feel and therefore who they are, are often put to devastation by their first emotional setback, even one accompanying a minor failure. Without the intellectual achievements or the idolised material things, they are lost. Feeling our emotions through emotional acceptance stands us to focus our attention on what truly matters to us. A healthy self-concept centered on our true values gets us to behave in harmony to it and get in the harvest of fulfillment.
