What strange times we are living in. For so many people, the year 2020 has been a mixture of bad and good. For so many people, the year 2020 has meant feeling the gamut of emotions from awful to elated. Many people do not know what to do with those feelings.

So many of us these days are finding ourselves struggling because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So many of us these days are finding ourselves feeling things we never may have felt before. Depression, loneliness, anxiety, isolation on the negative end. Calmness, peace, happiness on the positive end. And everything in between. Many of the people I am working with cannot seem to determine exactly what they are feeling. Many are struggling to find a way to name their feelings. Still others cannot seem to allow themselves to feel at all, numbing their emotions with marijuana or alcohol or other substances.

What happens when we do not allow ourselves to feel? What happens when we work hard to “fix” our feelings? What happens when we do not allow ourselves to acknowledge our feelings, be they positive or negative? What happens when we forbid ourselves to sit with our feelings? More often than not, when we disregard our feelings for a long period of time, we become detached from ourselves, losing who we really are. More often than not, when we disregard our feelings, we become numb.

For many people, the very idea of allowing ourselves to feel emotions is at the very least challenging. We may have received messages when we were young that negative emotions were bad and needed to be changed to positive emotions. For instance, perhaps you grew up hearing that feeling angry or sad was not allowed in your family. Perhaps you were told or somehow came to the understanding that feeling anxiety or trepidation was not allowed in your family. You may have internalized the message that feeling any kind of negative emotion was bad and must be “fixed.” You may not have been allowed to feel anything but happy when you were a child. Internalizing the message that only positive emotions were allowed may have left you unable to sit with any kind of negative emotion and now, in the midst of a pandemic that has so many people feeling anxious, depressed, lonely and scared, you might not know what to do with those feelings.

Try to get at the root of why sitting with such feelings is so difficult. Naturally, sitting with such feelings can be uncomfortable. You may want to take steps to “fix” or change those feelings, to numb them. But when you numb the negative feelings, it is likely you will end up numbing the positive feelings, as well. This might leave you feeling flat or nothing at all.

As we continue to navigate this pandemic, you might find yourself overwhelmed by your feelings or overcome with emotion. I encourage you to take a few minutes to sit quietly with those feelings be they positive or negative. Allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling. Having negative emotions does not make you a bad person. We all experience sadness, anxiety and anger from time to time. This does not make you defective. This makes you human. And as a human being, you are entitled to your emotions, be they positive or negative.

If you are having trouble navigating this pandemic, if you find yourself overwhelmed with emotions you cannot seem to name, reach out to a trusted other or mental health professional. These are challenging times. It is okay to ask for help trying to determine exactly what you are feeling. It takes more courage to ask for help than it does to suffer in silence.