In the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, we encounter a powerful symbol for emotional transformation. Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, descends into the underworld, a shadowy realm ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of Death. At each gate on her journey downward, Inanna relinquishes a piece of her royal identity: her crown, her jewels, her robes. By the time she reaches the depths, she has surrendered all protection and power. There, in complete vulnerability, she meets death. A hook suspends her body, her light extinguished. This ancient descent mirrors the modern experience of feeling numb and disconnected, when familiar parts of ourselves fall away and leave us exposed to emotions we’ve spent years trying to avoid. Here, the opportunity arises to begin embracing negative emotions.
Eventually, she returns. Her reemergence doesn’t restore her former self but reveals a different kind of strength, one shaped by what she endured. The myth tells no story of conquest, only one of inner transformation. The descent becomes the very condition through which something new emerges. This story, etched into clay tablets for thousands of years, reveals a truth many instinctively resist: healing often begins by turning inward, especially toward the parts of ourselves we learned to fear. In contemporary culture, messages encourage us to cling to optimism. We hear, “Think positive,” “Stay strong,” and “Choose gratitude.” Though comforting, these messages often obscure the deeper reality that growth includes struggle, loss, and uncertainty.
At Luceris, clients often express quiet shame about their emotional pain. They say, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” or, “Other people have it worse.” These words carry the assumption that difficult feelings mean failure or weakness. But emotional pain belongs to the human experience. Therapy offers a space where pain becomes something to understand, not suppress. It doesn’t erase the pain. Instead, it teaches you how to move through it with support, honesty, and courage.
Why Not Embracing Negative Emotions Becomes the Default
Modern society teaches us how to present ourselves, but rarely how to live with ourselves. From an early age, we learn to polish our image, maintain composure, and minimize discomfort. Social media, wellness trends, and productivity culture all reward the appearance of success and stability. The result is an unspoken equation: if you’re thriving, you must be happy. And if you’re struggling, something must be wrong with you.
This message begins early. Many of us grow up learning subtle rules about which emotions are acceptable and which are not. “Don’t cry.” “Calm down.” “Be grateful.” Though usually said with care, these messages teach us that emotional expression should be controlled rather than explored. Over time, we start translating emotional signals into surface-level explanations. Sadness becomes “I’m just tired.” Anger turns into silence. Disconnection takes the form of politeness.
As adults, emotional suppression often feels automatic. We stay busy, keep up appearances, and meet our obligations. Internally, something feels off, as if we are moving through life without truly inhabiting it. The emotions we push down do not disappear. Instead, they return as symptoms; persistent anxiety, unexplained fatigue, chronic tension, or a numbness we cannot shake.
What often gets overlooked is the importance of embracing negative emotions. This does not mean wallowing in suffering. It means reconnecting with the parts of ourselves we have learned to ignore. Without that willingness to feel, we lose touch with our inner life. The outcome is not just distress. It is a disconnection from who we truly are.
How Avoiding Emotions Leads to Feeling Numb and Disconnected
Imagine holding a beach ball underwater. You can keep it submerged for a time, but it requires constant effort. Eventually, it bursts to the surface. This is what happens with unprocessed emotions. They don’t disappear. They accumulate pressure and surface in ways we don’t expect, irritability in relationships, tension in the body, overthinking that won’t turn off.
Avoiding pain is a deeply human impulse. It makes sense that we try to distance ourselves from discomfort. But while avoidance may offer temporary relief, it gradually turns into a cycle that limits our emotional freedom. What begins as a way to cope can, over time, become a way we stay stuck. Avoidance also narrows our range of experience. We become careful not to step into situations that might evoke discomfort. We hold back from conversations, choices, or relationships that carry emotional risk. What we fear begins to shape the structure of our lives.
None of this is because we are flawed, it’s because we’re trying to feel safe. But eventually, the strategies we once used to survive become the very patterns that keep us from living fully. Healing asks us to respond differently. Not by forcing ourselves into pain, but by slowly building the capacity to be with what is already here.
The Neuroscience of Negativity Bias and Emotional Suppression
The human brain is designed with survival in mind. One of its key protective features is the negativity bias, a tendency to give more attention and memory space to negative experiences than positive ones. For early humans, this bias helped keep them alive. Noticing danger, remembering past threats, and anticipating harm were all critical for survival. This evolutionary tool is still active in our modern minds, but today, it often works against our emotional wellbeing.
Negative comments, disappointments, or painful memories tend to stay with us longer than affirmations or joys. A single criticism can outweigh a dozen compliments. This isn’t a personal flaw, it’s how the brain is wired. Unfortunately, it means we often dwell on distress long after the moment has passed. And when we try to suppress those feelings, telling ourselves to toughen up, stop crying, or just forget about it, the brain doesn’t register that as resolution. Instead, it perceives the suppression itself as a threat.
This internal tension activates the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, and floods the body with stress hormones like cortisol. Ironically, the effort to avoid an emotion can intensify the emotional state. Instead of creating relief, suppression often increases distress.
What helps is not control, but contact. Neuroscience shows that simply naming an emotion, putting it into words, can calm the nervous system. Saying, “I feel overwhelmed” or “I feel lonely” engages brain areas responsible for emotional regulation. The act of naming makes the feeling more manageable. Our emotions are built to communicate, not to harm. They need to be acknowledged in order to settle.
Toxic Positivity and the Pressure to Be Okay
Positivity, when sincere, can offer encouragement and hope. But when it becomes a forced response to pain, it begins to cause harm. Toxic positivity is the cultural pressure to maintain a cheerful outlook regardless of your circumstances. It’s the insistence that everything must be framed in a good light, even when someone is suffering. Well-meaning phrases like “It could be worse” or “Just stay positive” may offer brief distraction, but they often leave people feeling unseen and invalidated.
This pressure to appear okay can become a private source of shame. When we feel sad, anxious, or heartbroken but believe we must present as fine, we begin to hide not just the emotion, but parts of ourselves. We start to associate struggle with failure. Seeking help becomes something to apologize for. Over time, the divide between how we feel and how we act can widen, creating disconnection both internally and in our relationships.
Real emotional health does not come from avoiding what hurts. It comes from making space for the full range of feelings without rushing them or assigning judgment. Sorrow can exist alongside meaning. Growth can happen even in the middle of inner conflict. At Luceris, we create space for emotional complexity. Pain does not mean something is wrong with you. It means something important is being felt.
Healing is not a matter of getting back to being cheerful. It begins when you’re allowed to be truthful. You don’t need to perform gratitude or optimism before you’ve processed grief. What matters is being able to show up authentically in the presence of someone who can help you hold what’s heavy, not dismiss it.
The Wisdom of Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Grief
Our culture often sorts emotions into categories like “positive” and “negative,” but this language obscures the value and intelligence behind feelings that are difficult to experience. Emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, and grief are not problems to be fixed, they are essential parts of our internal navigation system. They arise for a reason. They carry information about our boundaries, values, losses, and longings.
Anger, for example, is frequently mistaken for aggression. But anger’s core function is to highlight when something important has been violated. When acknowledged and understood, anger can clarify what we need and what we’re no longer willing to tolerate. It’s not about destruction, it’s about direction.
Sadness appears in the wake of loss, disconnection, or unmet needs. While it can be heavy and tender, sadness also draws us closer to what we care about. It brings stillness, reflection, and a sense of emotional truth. It shows us what mattered.
Fear is the body’s way of preparing for uncertainty or risk. It heightens attention and mobilizes energy. Fear can sometimes warn us of real danger, but it can also signal that we are facing something unfamiliar and significant. Rather than being a sign to stop, it can indicate that we are approaching a meaningful edge in our development.
Grief is the experience of love continuing after something is gone. Whether we are grieving a person, a role, a dream, or a version of ourselves, grief reflects how deeply something mattered. It is not a process to complete, it is a presence we learn to carry. Over time, it changes. It softens. It teaches us how to hold joy and sorrow at once.
When we learn to sit with these emotions rather than resist them, they begin to move. They shape us in ways that deepen empathy, self-awareness, and connection. Emotional pain is not an obstacle to healing, it’s part of the work. And when we begin to approach it with curiosity and care, we start to access the wisdom that lives inside it.
How Avoidance Becomes Habit, and How to Undo It
Avoidance doesn’t usually begin with conscious intention. It often starts as a necessary response to something overwhelming. When we’re young or unsupported, turning away from difficult emotions might be the only way to stay functional. Over time, these avoidance strategies become automatic. A moment of sadness arises and we instinctively reach for our phone. A wave of anger surfaces and we tighten up, deflecting it with logic or silence. The reflex becomes familiar, almost invisible.
Because it provides temporary relief, avoidance can feel like safety. But what brings comfort in the moment doesn’t always help us grow in the long term. These patterns, numbing, distracting, minimizing, can become hardwired, reinforced by repetition and the promise of escape. With each repetition, the space between feeling and reacting shrinks, and emotional presence becomes harder to access.
Undoing these patterns begins with awareness. This might mean noticing when you check out during a difficult conversation or catching yourself tensing up before a feeling even arrives. Recognizing these moments is not about blaming yourself. It’s about introducing the possibility of choice where habit used to live.
The next step is allowing. When an uncomfortable feeling emerges, practice pausing. You don’t have to dive into it or figure it out immediately. Just stay with it for a moment. Offer yourself a kind internal response, the kind you might give to a friend in pain. Over time, you begin to realize that feelings can be intense without being dangerous. That you can remain in contact with discomfort without being overtaken by it.
These small shifts are where emotional resilience grows. They create space for something new to happen, space to stay, to feel, and eventually, to heal.
Therapy for Embracing Negative Emotions
In daily life, there’s often subtle pressure to keep ourselves contained. We choose our words carefully, offer polite smiles even when we’re hurting, and find ways to circle around pain instead of speaking directly to it. The world doesn’t always know what to do with unfiltered emotion, and so we adapt, sometimes at the cost of our own truth.
Therapy offers a different kind of space. It’s one of the few places where the deeper layers of experience can be spoken aloud without needing to be fixed or justified. You can bring the sadness that never had a witness. The anger that feels too big to share elsewhere. The confusion, the guilt, the ache you’ve been carrying for years but never named.
What begins to shift in therapy isn’t always dramatic. It’s often quiet. A word that’s never been said out loud. A feeling met without recoil. A thought that no longer needs to be hidden. In these moments, something essential happens: you begin to recognize that what you’ve kept inside does not make you unlovable. It makes you human.
Therapy invites you to examine emotional rules you may have inherited rather than chosen. Perhaps you learned that sadness should stay hidden, that anger posed a threat, or that needing support made you weak. In therapy, you do not confront these beliefs with force. Instead, you explore them gently through reflection, safety, and time. This process opens space for greater emotional range and reduces internal pressure. It also creates a pathway toward embracing negative emotions with compassion rather than avoidance.
Self-Compassion, Connection, and Emotional Fluency
The act of treating yourself with care, especially when you’re hurting, is often more transformative than it first appears. Self-compassion doesn’t mean lowering your standards or excusing harmful behavior. It means including yourself in the circle of empathy you so freely extend to others. Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with me?” you begin to ask, “What’s happening for me right now?”
This shift softens the internal environment. With less judgment, embracing negative emotions becomes an easier to approach. You begin to see feelings not as threats to manage, but as signals to understand. And as this internal space opens, so do your relationships. You find yourself less reactive, more grounded, and better able to stay present with other people’s emotions, even when they’re difficult or unfamiliar.
This capacity to stay in contact with feeling, your own and others’, is what we mean by emotional fluency. It doesn’t mean you never get overwhelmed. It means you know how to return. To check in. To ask for what you need or offer it to someone else with clarity and warmth.
Over time, this fluency becomes a stabilizing force. It creates a sense of coherence, between what you feel, what you express, and how you relate. It allows emotions to flow instead of accumulate. And it makes connection feel safer, because you’re not hiding behind regulation. You’re learning to be real in a way that strengthens rather than threatens your relationships.
Myth Revisited: Descent and Return as a Human Cycle
The story of Inanna is more than an ancient tale. It reflects a rhythm that many people experience when they enter therapy. Inanna’s descent into the underworld is not a failure, it is a crossing. She does not return as the same person who entered. Her transformation is shaped by what she endured.
In a similar way, therapy often begins during a period of emotional descent. Clients arrive not because things are going well, but because something familiar has begun to fall apart. It might be grief, loss of meaning, anxiety, shame, or internal confusion. In these moments, identity can feel fragile. The roles we once held onto no longer anchor us, and clarity is hard to find.
But with time, support, and a willingness to begin embracing negative emotions, a different kind of change begins to take shape. Honesty becomes easier. Presence becomes possible, even in the midst of discomfort. And the parts of you that once felt too painful to face begin to soften, shift, and move. They begin to move, and you move with them.
The process of return does not restore the version of you that existed before the pain. Instead, it allows for a fuller version of yourself to emerge, one that includes what you’ve learned and who you’ve become. This is not a return to what was. It is a continuation of your becoming, informed by the depths you’ve traveled through.
The Light We Find in the Dark when Embracing Negative Emotions
Many people believe that feeling deeply means something is broken inside them, or that emotional pain somehow disqualifies them from joy. This belief misses the truth. Emotional depth reflects the way we are designed to connect, to care, and to search for meaning.
At Luceris, we see therapy not as a tool for erasing emotion, but as a practice for staying present with it in ways that lead to greater clarity and wholeness. The work is not linear. It moves in spirals, through grief, through healing, through rediscovery. It asks not for perfection, but for presence.
When you are accompanied in this process, the descent feels less isolating. You begin to see that what you feared might undo you is also what can lead you home to yourself. The dark places are not empty, they are rich with insight and possibility.
If you’re feeling numb and disconnected, and you’re ready to begin the return to yourself, we invite you to book a session or contact us. Therapy can be the space where light is rediscovered.
And so the light that guides you forward is not separate from you. It is already within you, waiting to be reclaimed, not in spite of the pain you’ve felt, but through it, through embracing negative emotions.
