Decompressing Emotions With Radical Acceptance

A common way in which we deal with unpleasant emotions is to suppress or ignore them. These are normal coping mechanisms our minds use to handle situations we don’t particularly want to deal with in the present moment. When strong emotions come into our consciousness, there is often something inside of us which says, “This is going to ruin my happiness right now and I don’t like that, so I’ll just deal with it later.” The problem with this approach is that ‘later’ never comes and these emotions get pushed further down, out of our conscious awareness.

It is a basic law of the universe that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form. The same law applies to our consciousness. We can suppress emotions for a very long time, and although they leave our conscious awareness, it doesn’t mean they are completely gone. This repressed emotional energy gets buried deep within the basement of our subconscious, where it sits gathering ‘emotional dust’.