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EP 0094 – Sitting With Uncomfortable Feelings

It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfelt Childhood Terror

In the quiet moments when distraction finally fades, a familiar tightness returns to the chest or knot in the belly—an old energy that has waited decades to be acknowledged. What if the very feelings being outrun are the precise ones that hold the key to finally feeling safe in one’s own body and with other people?

The Cost of Constant Avoidance
Avoiding uncomfortable sensations in the body leads to an ever-shrinking life. People stay busy, numb with substances or endless mental chatter, and hyper-analyze every social interaction to stay one step ahead of potential pain. This constant vigilance disconnects someone from actually living in their body, replacing presence with self-watching and post-event rumination. The more these feelings are pushed away, the more fear grows and the smaller the world becomes.

Why Feelings Were Buried in Childhood
When abuse, neglect or chaos occurred early in life, there was no safe adult to help process intense emotions. Children learned that their feelings were unwelcome or unsafe, so they dissociated, tucked the sensations deep inside, and adapted by staying hyper-alert to the environment instead of connected to themselves. As adults, those same survival pathways remain, making it terrifying to turn attention inward. The episode explains that healing requires returning to those abandoned emotional ages as a grown-up and slowly allowing the buried energy to surface.

Building Tolerance Through Exposure
Sitting with uncomfortable feelings is compared to starting at the gym with an empty barbell—beginning with just a few minutes of quiet, eyes closed, breathing into the discomfort in the belly or chest, and gently increasing the time as tolerance grows. The mind will try to escape into rumination; the task is to keep returning to bodily sensation rather than thought. Over time, this exposure reduces the fear of the feelings themselves, creates space for grief, anger, and sadness to move through, and allows insight into what the original pain was protecting against.

Three Important Takeaways

• Avoiding uncomfortable feelings in the body shrinks life and increases fear, while numbing and addiction offer only temporary relief that eventually fails.
• Healing requires going back emotionally to the age when feelings were abandoned, sitting quietly, locating the physical sensation, and breathing into it instead of escaping into thought.
• Building tolerance is gradual, like weight training—start with short sessions of feeling the discomfort, increase duration over time, and allow the stored emotional energy to release through sadness, grief, and tears rather than suppression.

Conclusion
The path out of chronic fear, shame, and disconnection is not through more avoidance or mental figuring, but through courageous, repeated contact with the very sensations that were once too dangerous to feel. By meeting the terrified inner child with patient attention rather than running, it becomes possible to reclaim presence, spontaneity, and the capacity for real connection—transforming stored pain into emotional freedom, one tolerated moment at a time.