How To Actually 'Sit With' Difficult Emotions

A grounded guide to moving beyond thinking and truly feeling what’s inside

When you’re on a healing journey, there’s a phrase you hear over and over: you need to sit with your emotions.

But no one really teaches us how. And so, most of us fumble in the dark, unsure if we’re doing it right or even what it truly means.

What’s more, there’s a common trap that’s very easy to fall into: thinking you’re sitting with your emotions when, in reality, you’re rationalizing them.

You think you’re facing them because you’re spending hours turning them over in your mind—linking them to old memories, replaying the past, piecing together the “why” behind your patterns. You connect the dots so well you could draw a map of your own pain.

For years, that’s exactly what I did. And don’t get me wrong: there was real value in that. Understanding my patterns gave me compassion for myself. It softened the shame I carried. It allowed me to see that my reactions and behaviors weren’t random—they had roots.

But even with all that clarity, I stayed stuck. The same emotions kept circling back. The same feelings, the same fears, the same unresolved pain—over and over, demanding to be truly met.

It was only when I learned to actually sit with them that things began to shift in ways I couldn’t have imagined. So today, I want to share with you what I learned along the way.