The Feeling You Continue to Run From Is the One You Need to Face

We live in an age of emotional urgency.

The moment something feels hard, we reach for something, anything — our phone to doomscroll, a glass of wine, online shopping, Netflix — a crutch that will lessen the discomfort we are experiencing. We’ve built entire routines around not feeling things fully.

What if the very instinct to escape discomfort quickly is the thing quietly keeping us stuck? The phrase // what we resist persists carries so much truth.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality about avoidance | it doesn’t work. When we sidestep a painful emotion to lessen its intensity; through distraction, numbing, intellectualizing, or staying perpetually busy — the feeling goes underground. It is not resolved; it is just invisible.

Underground feelings have a way of running things. They show up as low-grade anxiety you can’t quite name, as irritability that seems disproportionate to the circumstance, as patterns you keep repeating in relationships without understanding why.

The paradox is a cruel one | the act of running from something painful keeps us tethered to it. We think we’re protecting ourselves. What we are truly doing is postponing the reckoning of what is real within us.

The Problem With Treating Emotions Like Emergencies

Somewhere along the way, many of us internalized the idea that difficult feelings are problems to be solved as quickly as possible. We approach our own inner lives like a to-do list — identify the wound, find the insight, complete the healing, move on. Check, check, check.

And when it doesn’t work, when the feeling comes back or the progress feels slow, we assume we’re doing something wrong. Emotions aren’t problems to solve. They’re information to listen to.

Emotions have a cause, an effect, and a resolution.

The catch? They can only complete that cycle if they’re allowed to. When we interrupt the process with avoidance or force it along with urgency, we short-circuit something that was trying to move through us naturally.

What Distress Tolerance Actually Means

Distress tolerance at its core, simply means the capacity to feel hard things without needing to immediately escape them. It’s not about enjoying suffering, or being passive, or telling yourself it’s fine when it isn’t. It’s about developing the ability to stay present with discomfort long enough for it to have space to shift on its own terms.

This is the skill that no one talks about enough in healing conversations. We use words like insight, inner child, reparenting, attachment theory — and this is all valuable — but the root underneath most of it is this more foundational capacity // can you be with what is hard?

When you can’t sit in uncomfortable moments, when you avoid difficult feelings repeatedly — physiologically, you send a signal to your nervous system that the feeling is dangerous. That it must be escaped. And your nervous system, which is just trying to protect you, believes you. It starts treating emotions themselves as a threat. Avoidance becomes automatic. The window of what feels tolerable shrinks.

When you can sit in discomfort and survive heavy feelings, you show your nervous system that feelings can be tolerated.

The Only Way Out Is Through — But Through Doesn’t Mean Force

There’s a version of “pushing through” that isn’t healing at all. It’s white knuckling. It’s telling yourself you’ve dealt with something because you stared it down hard enough for an afternoon and then packed it back up. Or you named it in a therapy session or 2 and then moved on with your day or week.

Genuine sitting with discomfort is slower & more intentional. Noticing where the feeling lives in your body + letting it be there. Not immediately building a story or explanation around the sensation or coming up with a way to fix it — just; this feeling is here. I can feel it. I am safe feeling it.

You’re trying to be present with it. You’re not trying to understand your way through the feeling. There’s a significant difference. Analysis keeps you in your head. Presence brings you into your body, which is where the actual processing happens.

Why This Is So Hard (+Why That’s the Point)

Let’s be honest about something, sitting with discomfort is uncomfortable. That is why so many humans bypass it and stay in familiar cycles of pain, dissatisfaction and overall unhappiness. There’s a particular layer of difficulty in the discomfort of sitting with discomfort — the restlessness, the urge to do something, the feeling that staying still is somehow making it worse. That’s the work itself.

Growth doesn’t live in comfort. Growth comes from learning to navigate discomfort. Every meaningful change — leaving something safe, grieving something lost, learning something that challenges how you’ve seen yourself — requires tolerating the feeling that comes with it. Not bypassing it with a reframe or rushing to an invisible end goal with frantic urgency. Simply tolerating it.

And the thing about tolerance is that it compounds. Each time you stay with something hard + come through to the other side, you add to a quiet internal evidence base that says // I can handle difficult things. You become, gradually + then all at once, someone who is less afraid of their own inner life.

What Healing Actually Asks of Us

Healing doesn’t move on our timeline, and it doesn’t respond well to urgency. It’s less like a project & more like a season. It must run its natural course. If you try to find a shortcut, inevitably it will return, often with more force, and ask you again to work on processing what you didn’t the first time around. Similar to the idea, the universe will give us the same lessons repeatedly, until we actually learn from them.

The most counterintuitive truth at the center of all of this is that the feelings you’re most afraid to feel are usually the ones with the most to offer you. The grief, when you let it move through, makes room for something new. The shame, when you stop running from it, loses its grip. The anger, when you stop treating it as an emergency, becomes something you can actually work with.

The next time you reach for your phone, or the glass of wine, or the distraction that takes the edge off — just notice it. You don’t have to stop. Simply pause + notice when you are reaching. That moment of awareness, that tiny pause between the discomfort and the escape, is where everything begins.