Transforming Limiting Beliefs About Emotions: How to Embrace and Find Wisdom in Your Feelings

I’ve been surprised by the limiting beliefs I’ve operated from, in spite of having done a lot to surface and shift beliefs. The tricky thing about limiting beliefs is their ability to camouflage—they survive by hiding in plain sight.

A couple of years ago, I did a deep excavation about my beliefs about emotions. What I uncovered changed the way I live. I realized that some of my long-held beliefs weren’t just unhelpful—they were actively holding me back. These beliefs included:
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• 🚫 I can’t handle fully feeling all my emotions. If I was to feel sadness fully, I thought I wouldn’t be able to function.
• 🚫 My emotions are dangerous. 
• 🚫 The only way to deal with feelings is to think them into submission. If I learn more about emotions and understand them cognitively, I can control them. 
• 🚫 Emotions only have a purpose if I can learn something from them, otherwise, they’re just a problem.
• 🚫 I’d prefer not to have emotions. I just don’t like them.

These beliefs were deeply ingrained, and while I’d done a lot of cognitive work to unpack them, I hadn’t fully released them. It wasn’t until I delved into therapy and examined the roots of these beliefs—my childhood traumas—that I was able to truly shift my mindset and behavior.

Identifying Limiting Beliefs About Emotions

Limiting beliefs about emotions often develop as coping mechanisms during challenging times. They might have served us in the past but can become obstacles to growth and fulfillment. Recognizing these beliefs is the first step to liberation.

The Cost of Repressing Emotions

By repressing emotions or trying to think our way out of them, we restrict access to the full spectrum of our human experience. Suppressing emotions takes a tremendous amount of energy—energy that could otherwise be spent on creativity, connection, and joy.

Adopting New Empowering Beliefs

Through deep emotional work, I’ve replaced my limiting beliefs with empowering ones that have transformed my relationship with emotions:

• 💡 Feeling all emotions is liberating: I can fully feel my feelings, including sadness. When I feel safe and held, and when I surrender to my grief, it moves through me like a torrent of energy. I have moments of feeling liberated from my fear of emotions and from the weight of unprocessed grief. 
• 💡 Emotions are energy, not threats: They are neither friend nor foe—they just are. My mind can derive lessons from them, but emotions themselves aren’t dangerous.
• 💡 The body is the key to healing: In order to release emotions, I need to be in my body, not in my mind. The body is the portal to liberation. 
• 💡 Releasing emotions opens the door to joy: Repressing emotions (and being afraid of them) has restricted my access to joy, love, awe, ease, and satisfaction. As I form a new relationship with my emotions, I feel increasing expanses of joy. 
• 💡 Repressed emotions drain energy: As I release unprocessed emotions, I realize how much energy it took to keep them suppressed, and I’m finding access to a tremendous reserve of energy that’s now available for creating, appreciating, connecting, loving, and being in the way I want to live. 

Transform Your Beliefs About Emotions

By identifying and shifting limiting beliefs, we can form a healthier, more balanced relationship with our emotions. Doing this work will make you a better coach and a better person.

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