Rejecting feelings disconnects you from essential information about yourself.

Accepting emotions does not mean acting on them or indulging them.

Unacknowledged feelings tend to grow stronger, not weaker.

Emotional acceptance allows your mind and body to work together.

If you are alive, you feel things.

People have feelings all the time. In fact, you are probably having a feeling far more often than you are not.

Feelings come and go, wax and wane, and ebb and flow throughout your day. Most cause barely a ruffle or ripple in your life, and that’s just fine.

But some feelings can take on extra power. They may have built themselves up over years of having the same experience over and over again. They may be a result of a one-time event that made a great impact, or they may be far out of your awareness so that it’s difficult for you to properly address them. These are only some of the ways that a feeling may become more intense.

The reality is that human beings are meant to have feelings, both positive and negative. This is why if you are alive, you feel things. Furthermore, if you are alive, you feel things you’d rather not feel.

Here are just a few feelings you would probably — I’m guessing — prefer not to feel:

So, given that many feelings are unpleasant, we all find ourselves in moments in which we do not want to feel what we are feeling. But some of us are more prone to go well beyond that — to literally rejecting our feelings when they make us uncomfortable.

If you grew up in a family that rejected and denied your feelings (an........

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