How to Get Over Resentments

Resentments can poison a relationship slowly over time. For that reason it is very important to remove past resentments and to stop the process that is creating new ones. Maybe it will come as no surprise that dealing with resentments is a common problem that I help with in couples therapy. Because I do deal with this issue often, I’ve come up with some quick ways of getting to the root of this challenging problem. Here is one.

What is resentment?

Before I share the tool for handling resentments, I want to make sure that you are interpreting the word resentment the same way that I am. For me, resentments are different from grudges or holding onto past pains. For example, if you are still holding it against your partner for an affair, that may not be a resentment. It could be mistrust, self-protection, or just pain and hurt. To be sure, these can also challenge a relationship and I have tools for dealing with them. But to me “resentment” refers to a bitter response when you feel someone has treated you in a way you feel they shouldn’t. The bitterness is the key to destructive power of resentment in a relationship.

What I’ve learned in my practice is that when a member of a couple is experiencing resentment instead of anger or another protective impulse, it is because they feel violated by their partner but they don’t know how to stop the violation or to protect themselves from it in the future. In other words:

Resentment is the feeling when someone is or has violated your boundaries but when you aren’t defending those boundaries.

How does therapy resolve resentments?

The most common way that resentment becomes a focus of couples therapy sessions is when one member of a couple, often with a voice dripping with spite, accuses their partner of hurting them in the way they are resentful for. The accusation is usually an invitation for me to jump in and begin working with the offending partner. But I turn my attention instead to the person with the resentment.

Over the next few minutes, I ask a series of questions designed to help me understand the emotional needs and the ability of the resentful partner to get their needs met or to set boundaries about things that don’t meet their needs.

• How do you want to be treated?
• What is it about this behavior that doesn’t work for you?
• How do you share with your partner that this behavior doesn’t work for you? What happens next?
• If your partner repeats the violation how do you ensure that you are safe from this boundary violation?
• If you aren’t safe and if your partner keeps violating your boundary this way, why are you still with this partner?
• Why do you want to be with a partner who treats your boundaries with such disrespect?

Together, with their partner listening, we begin to devise strategies for helping the resentful partner to defend their relationship boundaries. I might ask questions like, “Since your partner never gives you orgasms, would you like to stop having sex with them?” or “Since your partner never thanks you for cooking would you like to stop cooking?” or “Since your partner just schedules time with their friends without consulting with you, would you like to begin saying ‘No, I don’t want you to go out’ the next time this happens?”

Somewhere in the development of the strategy to hold the boundaries, there almost inevitably comes a decision point. Am I willing to risk a conflict in order to try to get my needs met or not? When clients answer this question, No. That’s fine with me but then I point them back at their resentment as I invite them to change their inner narrative from a negative one about how their partner takes advantage of them to a positive one about how they are choosing this course to strengthen their relationship and to keep it peaceful. When the resentful partner answers, Yes, I’m willing to risk conflict to get my needs met then I try to help them do that skillfully and compassionately.

Why is this couples therapy?

What I have described so far is an asymmetric line of questioning about the resentments with one partner. So you might wonder why this is a couples therapy intervention.

Somewhere in that line of questioning and in devising the solutions, the offending partner usually begins squirming. It can be uncomfortable to hear how you are hurting your partner. This might be the first time they’ve heard in detail how their behavior has hurt their partner. Sometimes, they don’t want to face the consequences for their behavior if their partner defends their boundaries from now on.

So, even though it appears that I’m focused on one person during this line of questioning, both people begin to feel pressure to change. Once they both identify what they want to do differently, they actually have to try out those changes. So, at the end of the session, I write down their intentions for change at the bottom of my note. As we begin checking in at the beginning of the next session I ask how their change efforts went.

Empathy in Couples Therapy

One of the most common things that I teach in couples therapy is how to be empathic towards each other. Once I help a couple establish an empathic connection, most of the other challenges are relatively easy to solve because empathy makes solutions much easier to find and put into practice.

As a therapist in Silicon Valley, I work with a lot of high-drive, success-oriented people who have spent a lot of their lives developing a capacity for technical expertise. I end up helping many of my clients develop the softer skill of establishing an emotional connection through empathy. This post provides some reflections about my Empathy 101 Handout that I provide in couples therapy. The post will make the most sense if you print out the handout and follow along with it while you read the post. The handout also provides more examples of how to apply each skill.

Comprehension

There’s a secret step to empathy that isn’t on my handout, and you, blog reader, get the inside scoop. The first step in empathy is having someone with whom to empathize. Since I usually see people in couples therapy, this would seem like an easy step. But the person who needs empathy needs to be ready to receive it. If someone comes into my office and shares the names of their vulnerable emotions without expressing that emotion on their face, in their posture, or with their tone of voice, I become concerned that the person is not ready to receive empathy. Whatever the cause for the lack of readiness, when I see it I will pause the process and try to work with the person expressing emotions to try to make sure they aren’t just telling their emotions, but expressing them.

Once we have someone ready to receive empathy, the first step in empathy is developing Comprehension. That is, making sure that you and your partner know with which emotions you are empathizing. The Inquiry and Repeating Emotions sub-skills can help with this step. But from there, the person who is being empathized with will usually do one of three things: share more emotions, share an explanation about why the emotion exists, or repeat themselves. I’ve learned that a person who shares more emotions or who explains the emotions usually does so because they feel empathy with others. The additional emotions are a way of getting more empathy with more facets of the experience. The explanation is a way of helping the empathizing partner deepen the empathy by giving more information about the causes of the emotional experience. However, if the partner repeats themselves, this usually means that the person didn’t experience a feeling of empathy. Like other experiences of missed communication, when someone receiving empathy doesn’t really feel heard, they tend to repeat themselves.

Acknowledging reasons is another step in the process of empathy. It isn’t enough to understand that your partner is sad. If you don’t know why they are sad, and especially if you did something that triggered it but don’t understand what that is or why it is a trigger, then your empathy falls flat. This is because the reasons are a part of our internal emotional life. We only really feel understood when we know that people both understand the emotions inside of us, and the way that feeling developed.

Because this comprehension tool is a way of learning about the internal emotional experience of another person, it is a little bit like feeling your way around in a room with your eyes closed, but your spouse or partner has their eyes open. So, you say, “You feel sad when I didn’t come to your work event because coming to a work event is a sign of the closeness of our relationship. Is that right?” The question at the end indicates that you aren’t telling the other person what their emotions should be or that you think you know them better than they know themselves. The question indicates humility and an intention at once. With a question, you acknowledge that you don’t know everything about the person’s emotional experience. With the question, you demonstrate the intention to find out more about their emotional experience.

I have seen situations in couples therapy where the empathizing partner states the wrong emotion and the wrong reasons for it, but then ends with a question, the way I have described, and the conversation goes well. Empathy isn’t always about just getting the right answer; it is about demonstrating the intention to connect your emotional lives over time.

I have a final note on the empathy comprehension step. The skills listed above aren’t in any order. You can use them interchangeably as necessary until you and your lover feel that comprehension has been established.

Connection

If it is difficult to understand your lover’s emotions, it can be doubly difficult to do that at the same time as accessing your own vulnerable emotions. Yet, that is exactly what the next step, Connection, is all about. The steps in comprehension above can be done in any order, but the steps in the Connection step seem to work better in my therapeutic experience if offered in order.

Just as the comprehension skill includes questions that indicate intention, the connection skill also includes intention to connect with a slight difference. In this process, the intention is phrased a little more explicitly as in, “I want to be here with you so you aren’t alone in your sadness.” This more explicit statement of the intention leads well into some of the other aspects of the connection sub-skill.

Expressing tender feelings toward your partner requires finding your direct emotional reaction to your partner’s experience and not just to your reaction to the fact that their emotions happened. Let me explain the difference. Let’s say that you brought dinner home for your husband because he had covered for you while you stayed late at work, and you wanted to express appreciation, but instead of experiencing this gift the way you intended, he got hurt because he had been thinking that the two of you would get to bond while making dinner together. In this situation, a reaction might include a defense, “But I didn’t try to hurt you, I was doing something nice.” True. You are focusing on your emotional experience, though, and not empathizing. If you want to empathize, you have to consider the other person’s emotional experience, almost as if their emotional experience was caused by someone else. For example, “I’m really sad that I hurt you by bringing dinner home. I want you to feel close to me, not hurt. This acknowledgement of the chain of emotional events isn’t accepting fault; it is just acknowledging the truth of the other person’s emotional process. You may not have intended to hurt your husband by bringing dinner home, yet it happened. Now that it happened, despite your intentions otherwise, how do you feel about the existence of this pain in someone you love?

The final step in this connection process is asking what you could do to help. Often, I see one member of a couple jump past all the other steps and, at best, get to this one. At worst, they simply assume what will fix their partner’s negative emotion (read: make it go away) and try to do what they think will fix it. That is, they apologize and try to do something if possible to “make it right”. Unfortunately, the apology without the empathy first won’t feel sincere to most people, and the attempts to fix the emotion aren’t actually the things that will help the wife feel better. So, imagine this time that a male in a heterosexual couple brought dinner home to his wife and hurt her because she had other hopes and expectations. He does all the other steps listed above and then says, “Is there anything I can do to soothe the hurt you feel?” Doing this, he establishes humility by indicating that he doesn’t know what she needs, he communicates an intention to connect by not running away from her emotions, and he expresses a desire to work with her to help her feel better, not just to make the emotion go away.

Conclusion

When I guide couples therapy through the empathy skill as described above, they often feel more comfortable when conflicts arise. When using empathy, conflicts are understood through the lens of emotions, not just through the points of argument. This means that more creative solutions can be found and offered. Resolution of arguments is more effective because they don’t just find a technical compromise but establish an emotional connection while finding the compromise.

In my last blog post, I presented 6 Essential Facts about emotions. These were intended to set the stage for this more advanced review of the role of emotions in relationships and how understanding emotions can help a relationship improve.

Emotions are created by our perceptions and interpretations

Most of our emotional reactions are significantly shaped by our experience of people in the past. A word that a parent used negatively might shape the way that word is heard when a lover uses that same word (even if the lover is using that word in a very different way). Similarly, if our unloving parent had a characteristic curl of a lip when angry, we may react very intensely to a lover who makes a similar lip-curl. This is true even if the lover’s lip curl means something entirely different.

Emotions are quick summaries, based on our experiences and our stories, that signal to us whether our emotional needs are or are not likely to be met (more on that later). The scolding word from the parent meant I would not receive praise. The curl of the lip meant I was not going to receive love. The emotion of pain or anger when we perceive these cues is a way of protecting us from the experiences that we have paired with the cue. The emotion comes with an action motivation (see previous post) that helps us to respond to what we expect will happen when we perceive that first cue. The challenge is that our partners probably aren’t using the same script that our parents were. Our bosses aren’t likely to be using the exact script that our elementary school teacher was using. Yet because our emotional experience to the stimulus is the same, we might be inclined to respond to these current relationships with the script we learned in those early relationships.

In fact, our perceptions so thoroughly incline us to actions out of those old scripts that we’re likely to think that our experience is real. We tell stories about ourselves and other people that help us make sense of our emotional experience and our responsive behaviors. For example, we might say, “You’re trying to control me!” or “It’s all my fault that you don’t love me.” As other people respond to these spoken or unspoken scripts, it is so easy for us to get into a very problematic dance. The other person denies our script, “No, I don’t want to control you”, or tries to defuse it, “I’m not saying it’s all your fault, I’m saying that I need something from you because I love you.” But ultimately, if the script is very reflexive and fixed, we will hear these rebuttals as confirmation of our original script.

The pattern is that early emotional experiences lead to perceptual inclinations and interpersonal scripts, which we then use to interpret our current interpersonal relationships, and once interpreted, we act out of our role in the script.

I have found that it is important to help clients learn two things. First, the message of the emotion, “Your needs aren’t getting met,” is true. That is, the emotion is valid. Second, the emotionally laden perception and stories may not be accurate. Once the client can learn that the emotional message is both true and not true in this way, they can usually begin to behave in a way more in line with their aspirations.

Emotions are physiological summaries

Let’s imagine that in a romantic relationship, physical affection like hugs and kisses is important for you. Now, if your partner forgets to hug and kiss you goodbye one morning, this experience might leave a sinking feeling in your stomach when you first notice it. You might also have a change in posture, like a downturned face, or a lower back that is slumped outward. In assessing your emotional experience, you might say that you are “disappointed”. The word “disappointed” isn’t written somewhere except as a summary of how your body feels in that moment.

I often use an analogy with my clients that our emotions are like gauges on a dashboard. The emotional summary tells us what is happening in other parts of the car. An important aspect of this analogy is that each person can only accurately see their own dashboard. This helps me eliminate conversations where one partner is telling the other that she or he “shouldn’t” feel that way. Since we each only see our own emotional dashboard, it doesn’t much matter whether we “should” be feeling some way; if the dial on the dashboard reads “disappointed,” then that’s the real experience, the real summary.

But what does “disappointed” mean? What is it saying about the person who is experiencing it? Or what is it saying about the partner? This gets really tricky because people are very quick to go from “I feel disappointed” to “You disappointed me”. Or from “I’m in pain” to “You hurt me”. But these are very different statements. That’s why it can be really important to recognize that emotions are physiological summaries and that the physiological experience is telling us whether our needs are being met or whether we anticipate that they will be met in the future. But they don’t tell us whether our partners are trying to meet our needs or whether they will in the future.

Emotions are valid, even if the reasons for the emotions are illogical

A common theme that I see among my couples is that they begin arguing about the content of the conflict. “You left me standing there for 45 minutes.” “No, I didn’t. You were only there for 15 minutes, because you told me to pick you up a half-hour later than you think you did”. This kind of arguing has no winner, is not productive, and doesn’t help the relationship.

So, in a therapy session, I will turn to the person who was upset about being left behind and ask, “How did you feel when your spouse wasn’t there to pick you up?” Feeling scared, lonely, or angry might be very common. The facts of the situation are irrelevant. The emotions are shaping the different perceptions of the facts, so it is the emotions that need to be dealt with in the interaction, or we end up attending only to symptoms and not to the problem.

While the first section of this post identifies that perceptions shape emotions, once emotions are present, they (and not the perception) must be attended to. It is the emotion that begins shaping the person’s behavior. Acknowledgement of the emotion, empathy for the experience of the emotion, connection to value the person underneath the experience, and a review to identify the causes of the emotion (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) are what allow for the resolution of the emotional experience.

Sometimes clients object here, “But the facts matter!” To a degree, I understand. The client who says this is having their own emotional reaction to being accused of something that they feel is untrue. So, again, I turn to the person who wants the facts to matter, “How do you feel when, despite your efforts to demonstrate love to your partner, they experience a different set of facts, and their emotional experience is pain?” Following this course, the same healing is available to both. The person who wants the “facts” acknowledged will feel better when they can talk through the hurt and pain they feel when, despite their love, their actions (sometimes through no fault of their own) have resulted in pain in their partner.

Another perspective on the validity of emotions can be found in my prior blog post, “Of Mountain and Mole Hills”.

Conclusion

In my next post, I’m going to add two more advanced emotional concepts and summarize how all of these advanced concepts connect into one view of the importance of emotions in relationships and couples therapy.

People have emotions. Yet we receive very little education about our emotions, how they work, or how to manage them in this culture. So, as I work with clients I’m often conducting a certain about of education about the nature of emotions. This is especially true when I’m working with a couple because the currency of the relationship is emotional. Therefore, I’m writing a couple of blog posts dedicated to emotions to try to make them more understandable. In this post I identify 6 basic facts about emotions that people need for understanding and changing of their experiences.

There are seven basic emotional facial expressions

I have seen emotion word lists in English that run hundreds of words long. Yet, emotion research documents that there are seven basic emotions expressed by facial expression: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. For a bit more information you might check out this page at the American Psychological Association.

This list of seven emotions is important in therapy for three reasons. First, if you have alexithymia (a fancy word that just means you don’t have a strong ability to identify and name your emotions) you might want to start discerning your emotions by asking which of the seven basic emotions is closest to your experience. This would be a good way of beginning to develop your emotional vocabulary.

Second, what these seven expressions tell us is that while there might be a lot of subjective nuance within each category, the face may not reveal that nuance. For example, the emotions frustrated and enraged might both go in the anger family, and might look similar on a person’s face, but there is a vast difference between the subjective experience of these two emotions. I think this difference is the reason that I sometimes hear a couple in my office have a dialogue like this, “Why are you angry?”, “I’m not angry?”, “Yes you are, I can see it on your face.” When we unpack the process, the person accused of anger will often identify frustration, annoyance, irritation, or sometimes even just confusion. But the subjective nuance doesn’t get communicated in their facial expression and what gets read by the partner is most likely one of the seven basic emotions.

Third it is just as important to notice what the seven basic facial expressions for emotions are as it is to notice what isn’t on that list. Other emotions that are very important for relationships like love, concern, tenderness, curiosity, openness, receptivity, and more are not on the list. That means that while you might feel those feelings very strongly, it might be hard for your partner to detect that you are feeling it. So, at a certain point in relationship therapy I often find myself helping the members of the couple learn to express their feelings more explicitly so that the inner experience is conveyed more clearly.

Emotions aren’t stories

When I ask you, “How do you feel?” and you reply with, “I feel like. . . ” or “I feel that. . .” I know that only very rarely you follow-up with an actual emotion word. This is one of the most common errors that I see from clients when we start talking about emotions.

Emotion words point to subjective experiences, that is, to internal states. They do not accuse someone else of a behavior or an intention. So, to help clients stay focused on their emotional experiences, I often pull out my 4-page handout on Nonviolent Communication. You can find the feelings lists that I have incorporated into my handout at the Center for Nonviolent Communication.

Admittedly, there are some tricky in between words that I sometimes have to check-in with clients about. For example, if the client says, “I feel abandoned” I might ask, “When you say that are you saying that your partner is abandoning you? Or are you saying that you have a pit of fear, loneliness, and emptiness in your gut that you recognize as the feeling that arises when you perceive abandonment?” In the first case, the word was a story. In the second, it is an emotion word.

The reason this distinction is so important was alluded to in my last blog entry where I wrote, “I’m in pain, but you didn’t hurt me.” If you can make the distinction between the internal state of your feeling and the story that you are telling yourself about how that feeling got there, you have gone a long way toward halting the negative cycles that can occur when one person’s hurt feeling triggers an unfortunate feedback loop for the relationship.

Emotions take place in the body

Sometimes I’ve had a client say, “I don’t know how I feel. How can I tell?” This happens much more commonly with men because in American culture, men are not often socialized to develop an emotional vocabulary or comfort with detecting, communicating, and expressing their emotions (men are therefore more likely than women to experience alexithymia referred to above). While feeling word lists can be helpful, they sometimes don’t do the trick. Sometimes, the client needs help actually noticing what an emotion is.

Emotions are bodily experiences. The body doesn’t just express the emotions, the bodily changes and the emotions are the same thing. You can try this at home. Lift your chin a little, spread your mouth wide with lips closed, open your eyes, raise your eyebrows, push your shoulders back, chest out, soften your abdominal muscles, breath into your belly, and sit up straight. Feeling better? You changed your physical state and most likely your emotional state changed too.

So, when a client wants to know how to detect their emotions, I direct their attention to their body. Is your face pointed up, down, or neutral? Is your breathing fast or slow? Shallow or deep? What is happening with your eyebrows? How do your gut, chest, back, or shoulders feel? These physiological states are the specific components of emotions. If a client still doesn’t recognize an emotion, then we might have to do a little more work to help them link the emotionally relevant content (e.g., the event in session that might have triggered an emotion) with the present moment but that could be a whole blog entry of its own.

Emotions incline you to actions

Emotions aren’t random events that happens to your body. Emotions are evolutionary adaptations that prepare for actions to will help you respond to your environment. Fear prepares you to run away. Anger prepares you to fight. However, sometimes the action motivation is out of sync with what is actually called for in the complex social world we live in. For example, if you are afraid while preparing for an interview, the action motivation to run away or freeze is not helpful or adaptive. Or if you are angry because your wife hurt you emotionally in an argument, a physical fight is not ever appropriate.

The action motivations arise to help prepare us for behaviors, but the consequences of the behaviors that emotions prepare us for aren’t always the consequences we want. This is why we have to figure out how to cope with our emotional states, why we need to be aware of our feelings, and why we need to be able to slow our reactions and responses down so that we don’t act or speak in ways that damage our relationships and that we will regret later.

Despite your emotions, you have choices about how you will act

With the exception of situations of physical threat or a crisis of safety, we don’t need to act on pure emotional assessments of the environment. There is time for us to pause, think, speak, and ask questions in most situations of our lives. Yet our thought processes move more slowly than our emotions. Our emotions are constantly and unconsciously responding to our assessment of our environment (physical and interpersonal). So, though it is true that our emotions incline us to certain actions, we have choices about how we will or won’t express those emotions in our behavior.

Almost all of my clients recognize that at work, as parents of children, or owners of pets, we are required to identify and regulate our emotional expression. Yet fairly often when it comes to an intimate relationship with a spouse or partner, people rarely ask for help regulating their behavior, but almost always ask for help changing their partner’s behavior.

The key to making a choice to act according to your aspiration is noticing what your emotion is.  By becoming aware of the old pattern, the triggering events, and new situations where it is taking place, the person can begin to develop the awareness of the behavior and can work to get to the point where they are aware in the moment of their capacity to make the decision and then the person can enact their aspiration. This is almost always a turning point in couples therapy.

Emotions pass

Especially when a client is learning to change their response to a particular emotion, there may be moments when the client is aware of the emotion, still inclined to follow the old action motivation, and not yet able to act in the new intended way. There is very good news for people in that part of the change process, emotions pass. Sometimes, emotions are strong, sometimes weak but the feeling as an emotion moves through your body and changes your physiology at the same time, will pass. Sometimes a client says, “But I stay angry with my partner for days” (usually the partner is nodding agreement here). However if I inquire about this, there are almost always breaks in this emotional process. The client might have laughed at a sitcom, or concentrated at work. Almost certainly in those moments, the client wasn’t angry at the same time. What the client usually means is that whenever they talk to their partner or think about their partner over those days that they become angry again.

This is important information for me as the therapist. First it tells me that the couple likely has a pattern of conflicts reigniting after the initial argument (otherwise the person who stays angry for days wouldn’t need to maintain their defense system for that long). Second it tells me that the person who stays angry for days, while maybe capable of distraction, may not be very skilled at self-soothing and resolving their emotion processes. I have emotions for both of those challenges.

In the meantime, telling clients that emotions pass can often help them begin their journey to new (hopefully improved) relationship patterns. Knowing that emotions pass can help you ride out the action motivation that comes with the emotion. In couples, the action motivation (especially when you’ve been hurt by your partner) is a part of the old pattern that the couple comes to me to resolve. So, telling clients to wait while the emotion passes before they try the new skills learned in therapy, creates a stronger possibility that something new will happen.

Some people seem to be always angry or always happy and this might seem to be counter evidence. But if you observe the happy person closely you will see that as they evaluate their interactions and environment they are interpreting events in ways that reestablish their characteristically happy emotion. So, I maintain that emotions pass, but happy people are experts at travelling the path from neutral to that characteristic happy emotion. Anger people are experts at travelling to their anger. This is what we’re referring to when we’re talking about mood. It isn’t an emotion, but an inclination toward an emotion.

The distinction between an emotion and a mood becomes important in treating depression because if we can make the link between the fact that emotions pass, but that regularly reinforced emotions become moods, then a person with depression can begin to imagine a way out of that mood. The way out of that mood is to change the emotional state one moment at a time, and then repeatedly until the mood shifts with it.

Conclusion

This entry has covered a lot of ground. In my opinion though, this information is so vital, it is user manual level information about living a human life. So, the points in this entry could bear repeating.

• Given that there are seven universal emotional facial expressions, if you want to start learning about your emotions, start learning the feeling when you have those faces. And since there only seven that means that there’s a lot of subjective emotional nuance that can get lost from expression or interpretation between two people.
• Emotions aren’t stories. Emotion words are summaries for an internal experience. Your stories and interpretations can confuse you into thinking that others made you feel a certain way. Learning the difference between emotions and stories gives you a chance to change interactions.
• Emotions take place in the body. Emotion words are summaries that suggest bodily experiences. Knowing this can allow you to both evoke emotions by changing your body and to recognize how emotions change your bodily experience.
• Emotions incline you to actions. Emotions are states that prepare you to do something. If what you want to do is incongruent with your emotional state, then you may want to figure out how to bring the emotion and the action into alignment.
• Despite your emotions, you have choices about how you will act. By becoming aware of the emotional triggers, associated action motivation, and how you aspire to act (often different from the action motivation) you can change your behavior by acting in accordance with the aspiration.
• Emotions pass. Knowing that they pass can help you wait out problematic action motivations until a new emotion takes its place. Knowing that emotions pass can also help you tolerate the experience of negative emotions. You can reassure yourself that you won’t always feel this way.