Why Fighting Your Feelings Is Exhausting You and How to Stop

Issue 167, May 15, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

There’s a phrase I heard years ago by the Buddhist teacher Cheri Huber that completely changed the way I relate to emotions:

“You are responsible for your feelings, not for your feelings.”

At the time, I understood it intellectually. But I don’t think I truly understood it emotionally until recovery. I get now that you don’t need to explain your feelings. You actually don’t even need to understand them. You just need to honor them (i.e., feel them). That’s what it means to be responsible TO your feelings.

For most of my life, I thought feelings were problems to solve, explain, justify, control or suppress. I believed that if I felt something intensely, there had to be a reason. And that there was some kind of fix or strategy to make it go away.

Especially if the feeling was inconvenient, made other people uncomfortable, and particularly if it made me uncomfortable. So instead of feeling my feelings, I analyzed them. Rationalized them. Judged them. I tried to out-think them (or ignored them completely while focusing on everyone else!).

That’s what so many people do when they’ve learned that emotions aren’t safe. Not physically safe, relationally safe, and especially not internally safe. Once you understand that, so much starts to make sense.

When Feelings Didn’t Feel Safe

I grew up in a family where feelings weren’t really welcome. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Some feelings were allowed: calmness, pleasantness, composure. But sadness, anger, overwhelm, grief or vulnerability? Nope!

One of the worst things my father used to say to me was:

“Do you want me to give you a reason to cry?!”

That sentence carries so much distortion inside it. It really fucked me up.

It taught me: My feelings weren’t real, my emotions were excessive and that I shouldn’t trust myself. I got the message, “You need to shut this down immediately.”

And for many people, that’s where self-abandonment began. That’s not because they consciously chose it, but because overriding themselves became necessary for emotional survival.

So they stopped asking: “What am I feeling?”

And started asking: “How do I make this go away?”

Or worse: “How do I make sure nobody else has to deal with it?”

That’s the moment many people stop being responsible to their feelings and start feeling responsible for them.

Responsible for whether others approve of them.
Responsible for whether emotions are inconvenient.
Responsible for whether anyone gets uncomfortable.
Responsible for managing the emotional atmosphere around them.

That’s exhausting.

Emotional Suppression Doesn’t Create Peace

One of the biggest misunderstandings people have about healing is believing that emotionally healthy people don’t have strong feelings. That’s simply not true.

Emotionally healthy people feel their feelings without abandoning themselves in the process. That’s very different.

For years, I cried constantly. Sadness, frustration, anger, disappointment, overwhelm, all of it came out as tears. But I did it in isolation. I didn’t let others know what was going on with me.

I remember being in my twenties, watching the movie “Terms of Endearment” with my brother and his girlfriend and trying desperately not to cry in front of them. But I just couldn’t hold it in. It was too much. The fact that I still remember that moment almost 40 years later tells you how unsafe it felt for me to be vulnerable back then.

Now I understand something I didn’t understand then: The problem wasn’t that I had feelings.
The problem was that I had no internal safety around having feelings. So every emotion felt overwhelming.

When people don’t feel internally safe, emotions don’t feel like experiences moving through them. They feel like threats. That’s why so many people either collapse emotionally or spend enormous energy trying to stay in control all the time.

Neither one creates peace.

Internal Safety Changes Everything

One of the biggest shifts in my life happened when I stopped trying to end my feelings and started learning how to stay with myself while I was having them. That’s a completely different process.

Instead of: “Why am I feeling this?” or “How do I stop this?”

The question became: “Can I stay with myself while this feeling moves through me?”

What Does It Mean to Stay with Yourself?

Staying with yourself means not abandoning your internal reality in response to discomfort.

It means not leaving yourself when discomfort shows up. It means not dissociating from your feelings, not overriding what matters to you, and not abandoning yourself by focusing entirely on managing someone else’s reactions.

It can look like:

• Not arguing yourself out of what you know: “I know I need rest, but maybe I’m overreacting.”

• Not gaslighting yourself: “Maybe it wasn’t that bad” or “Maybe I’m too sensitive.”

• Not immediately escaping discomfort through action: Overexplaining, rescuing, fixing, people-pleasing, compulsive productivity, scrolling, eating, caretaking or trying to manage everyone else.

• Not turning against yourself internally: Shaming yourself for having needs, limits or feelings.

• Not handing your center of gravity over to someone else: Becoming entirely emotionally organized around their approval, disappointment or mood.

Staying with yourself means remaining connected to your feelings, your values and your truth, even when discomfort, guilt or someone else’s reaction makes you want to abandon yourself.

That’s internal safety.

And honestly, this is one of the reasons so many boundary conversations fall short. People think the hard part is saying the boundary.

Usually it’s not.

The hard part is handling the guilt, fear, discomfort, grief, disappointment or pushback that comes afterward without abandoning yourself. That’s why someone can know exactly what boundary they need to set and still feel unable to follow through.

Because the issue often isn’t knowledge. It’s nervous system safety.

If your body learned that conflict, disappointment, disapproval or emotional intensity are dangerous, then of course you’ll override yourself to avoid them. That isn’t weakness. It’s conditioning.

And conditioning can change.

You Don’t Need a Reason to Feel What You Feel

This is something I wish more people understood:

You don’t need to justify a feeling in order to feel it. That’s what Cheri Huber was getting at when she said, “You’re responsible to your feelings, not for your feelings.”

You can feel sad without knowing or proving why you’re sad. You’re just sad. Be sad.
You can feel angry without building a case for your anger. You’re angry. Be angry.
You can feel hurt without deciding whether your pain is “valid enough.” You’re hurt.
You can feel overwhelmed without earning the right to rest. Just rest.

Feelings are information, not moral failures.

And ironically, the more we resist feelings, the more stuck they tend to become. I’ve learned this lesson over and over again. What I realized in time was that it was my resistance to my feelings that was my problem, not the feelings themselves!

I used to try to understand my feelings instead of feeling them. That was my escape hatch. If I could intellectualize the emotion quickly enough, maybe I wouldn’t have to actually experience it. But that doesn’t work long term.

Now I’ve learned that feelings tend to move much more cleanly when I let them move through me instead of fighting them. Not indulging them forever, or building an identity around them. And not spiraling into catastrophe. Just allowing them.

Sometimes that means crying. Sometimes it means resting. Sometimes it means journaling.
Sometimes it means sitting quietly and noticing what’s happening in my body instead of immediately distracting myself. Sometimes it means splaying myself out on the floor in a position of surrender. Sometimes it means doing that until I dry heave. And guess what? The feelings typically last 7-15 seconds. That’s seconds, not hours or days. That was a revelation to me. 7-15 seconds. WOW!

All that is self-care, too – feeling your feelings as they arise instead of suppressing or ignoring them. 

Self-care is not just bubble baths, candles, and massages. Real self-care is learning how to stay present with yourself without immediately escaping, numbing, fixing, rescuing, or overriding.

Why This Matters So Much

So many people are walking around emotionally exhausted, not because they feel too much, but because they spend all day fighting what they feel.

• Suppressing.
• Managing.
• Performing happiness.
• Pretending they’re fine.
• Trying not to inconvenience anyone.
• Trying not to disappoint anyone.
• Trying not to seem “too emotional.”

That takes an incredible amount of energy. And over time, it disconnects people from themselves.

But when you start building internal safety, something shifts.

• You stop panicking about emotions.
• You stop treating feelings like internal emergencies.
• You stop believing discomfort automatically means danger.
• You become more grounded inside yourself.

And that changes your relationships too. Because when you’re no longer terrified of your own emotions, you also become less reactive to everyone else’s.

You don’t have to fix everything, control everything or manage everyone else’s emotional experience. You can stay connected to yourself and others without disappearing.

That’s freedom.

And honestly, I think that’s what most people are truly looking for underneath all the self-help language:

To finally feel at peace inside themselves.

Not perfect.
Not emotionless.
Not endlessly positive.

Just safe enough internally to stay with themselves no matter what they feel.