Holding Space for Difficult Emotions
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and I want to take this opportunity to talk about holding space and being with someone who is experiencing sadness, depression, or anxiety.
While I agree that we need to stop the stigma placed on mental health, I'd like to expand that conversation: how do we actually support people through difficult emotional times (whether it be from a life event, or something like depression) rather than put the onus on people to reach out?
How do you hold space for someone to discuss sadness,
anguish, hurt, and pain?
I remember clearly a turning point in my own ability to support a friend who was in pain. I wanted to fix her pain, to take it away, to have her feel better. She told me to just sit with her. It was one of the hardest things for me to do to watch her cry.
The keyword in there is "me".
I’ve found that in being with people through emotion that what usually stops us is... us: our own ability to be with our own emotion, discomfort, and pain.
When we are unfamiliar with, judge, or shame our own emotions, we will often project the same onto others. It limits our capacity to be with them and instead tries to fast-forward them back to a pleasurable state where everything is once again ok.
But that approach doesn’t work.
In my experience in my own personal transformation and those that I create space for with my coaching work, what has been most powerful is actually seeing them and being with them through difficult experiences.
It required me to be able to hold space for my own emotion.
So as we work to reduce the stigma on mental health, let us all take a look inwards about our own judgments we hold on uncomfortable ‘negative’ emotions (in quotes because that’s a judgment in itself).
No one is perfect as a human being, even though we sometimes like to pretend to be (me included). We can't continue to believe that if we don’t talk about ‘negative’ emotions that they will just go away. We can’t isolate human experiences to just those feelings that are deemed 'positive' to have.
I don't have all the answers, and I'd love to know from you: what's the best way to support you when you're feeling bad? And, how can you be responsible for leaning into your own discomfort with emotion so you can grow your capacity to hold space?