Greet your Emotions like they are your Guests
Welcoming our Emotions: The Guest House of the Mind
We’re visited by many emotions - some we embrace warmly, and others are harder to spend time with. This idea is captured in the poem The Guest House by Rumi, where he writes:
‘Welcome and entertain them all, even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honourably’
I love how this highlights the importance of meeting even our toughest emotions as valid guests - worthy of our curiosity rather than ignoring them completely, brushing them aside inattentively, or being entirely swept up by them.
From the Classroom to the Therapy Room: A Shared Understanding of Growth
Before I became a psychotherapist, I spent nearly a decade working in education. Maybe because of this, I often think about how both therapy and teaching are about fostering growth - not by handing out rote instructions, but by meeting people where they are, sitting with them in their challenges, and supporting them in recognising their strengths and navigating their own development.
There’s no manual for life, so there are no straightforward “answers” in therapy, the way you might expect in a maths class. A better metaphor might be creative writing. A good teacher doesn’t dictate what you should write but helps you develop your unique voice while offering structure - grammar, sentences, and paragraphs that hold it together.
In therapy, these foundations provide a safe, non-judgmental space for exploring emotions, with the support of psychological insight or practical tools. Real development comes from engaging in the process, not from being given a template that disavows your unique voice.
Before we Learn to Hold Back: Emotional Openness in Childhood
Working with children underscored how fundamental emotional regulation is to our well-being and how it impacts our ability to communicate and get our needs met. One thing I believe we can admire about young children is their openness to emotions. Before you shudder at the thought of epic tantrums, please hear me out!
Young children express emotions freely, sometimes dramatically, but there’s an authenticity in that - an openness to being in touch with their feelings and a willingness to communicate them to others. this is something we begin to guard against as we age, often shutting down or distancing ourselves from our emotions through defences. But it’s worth noting that this openness is a form of self-acceptance and engagement that many of us lose over time.
Emotional Development: The Lifelong Journey
As we grow, our relationship with our emotions and emotional expression become more nuanced, shaped by cognitive growth, language development, and social influences.
Emotional development is a continuous process, with significant changes in childhood and adolescence:
Ages 3-5: Children start to develop a "theory of mind," understanding that others have thoughts and feelings different from their own, which helps them grasp more complex emotions like empathy and jealousy.
Ages 6-12: Cognitive abilities increase, making it easier for children to recognise a wider range of emotions, understand their causes, and regulating emotional expression.
Adolescence: Hormonal changes and social pressures heighten emotional complexity, with adolescents learning to differentiate more complex emotions (such as resentment, anxiety, and infatuation), becoming more aware of their emotional patterns and developing more sophisticated coping mechanisms.
It’s important to remember that emotional development is unique to each person. Our emotional vocabulary and ability to express our feelings evolve at different rates, and emotional growth is a lifelong journey, with new insights and ways of managing our emotions continually refined through life’s challenges.
Our Lifelong Relationship with our Emotions
I passionately believe we should do more to support children with emotional literacy and regulation skills - not just for their immediate well-being, but as a foundation for healthier relationships and emotional resilience throughout life. (A quick aside: a wonderful resource for exploring this with children is the picture book The Grand Hotel of Feelings, by Lidia Brankovic). In the context of emotional development, consider the adage: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. This illustrates the importance of offering long-term solutions, not just a quick fixes. By supporting children’s emotional literacy, we’re not simply soothing them in the moment or solving problems for them; we equip them with tools to understand and manage their emotions - tools that will help them navigate emotional demands they will face throughout their lives. However, as emotional regulation is something many adults still struggle with, it can be hard to model or provide consistent support with.
The challenge of Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is difficult to master because life constantly shifts, throwing new challenges our way. To engage effectively with ourselves, others, and the world, we need to do our best to maintain a grounded foundation in emotional regulation. When we become overwhelmed, our cortisol levels rise, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. In these moments, it becomes harder to see or hear ourselves clearly, let alone connect with others.
Managing our emotions is an on-going, ever-evolving skill. By facing emotional challenges, we can grow in our ability to navigate our emotions, but we never gain the power to turn them off. Emotions arise spontaneously, hard-wired into both our psychology and physiology. Whether we welcome, ignore, or resist them, they remain ever-present, offering insight into what matters to us most.
As teenagers, we may start recognising the challenges of experiencing conflicting emotions at once - for example, joy and sadness together, as seen in the Pixar movie Inside Out 2. This can be unsettling. We may try to ignore feelings, deny their presence, or refuse to engage with them, but emotions don’t just disappear. Instead, they linger beneath the surface, shaping our thoughts and actions in ways we might not even realise.
In response to this struggle, we all develop emotional defences - sometimes without even noticing - to shield ourselves from overwhelming emotions. These defences can be helpful, but they can also distance us from fully engaging with what we feel and what we want. Recognising them empowers us to navigate life more effectively. So, let’s meet some of the most common emotional defences we use…
Meet your Emotional Defences
From birth, we have a deep drive for survival, which includes the need to be cared for and accepted by others. As we grow, we develop emotional defences - unconscious strategies to cope with distressing emotions or situations. We use these defences to navigate life’s complexities and to protect ourselves when emotions feel unsafe to engage with, whether due to external responses or internal overwhelm.
As relational beings, especially vulnerable in childhood, we internalise many messages about emotional safety. We may have experienced others’ emotions as frightening in their intensity or unpredictability, or overwhelming in their demands. If our feelings were met with dismissal, rejection, or shame, we may have learned that it wasn’t safe to express them - or even feel them.
Developing emotional defences to shield ourselves from both internal overwhelm and external responses is a normal, necessary part of the human experience. However, leaning too heavily on these defences can hinder our growth and negatively affect our relationships.
There are many defence mechanisms, but let’s take a quick look at some of the most common:
Repression, Denial and Minimisation: Pushing painful memories or feelings out of conscious awareness, refusing to acknowledge uncomfortable truths or personal responsibility, or downplaying the significance of an issue or relationship to avoid feeling distress.
Rationalisation: Justifying actions with seemingly logical-sounding but ultimately flawed explanations to avoid confronting uncomfortable emotions - such as fear, guilt, or shame - or the deeper motivations behind behaviour.
Projection: Disowning uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, or behaviours by attributing them to others. For example, distancing ourselves from someone while perceiving them as the one doing so, leading to feelings of rejection. Or projecting traits like distain or disapproval onto others that we are struggling to recognise or accept in ourselves, leading us to interpret them as critical instead of realising it’s our own self-criticism. There may also be a disconnect between how we treat someone and how we believe we are treating them, leading them to experience us in a way we may struggle to acknowledge or connect with the impact of.
Compartmentalisation: Suppressing emotions to function in the short-term, like at work, can lead to them being boxed away on an extended basis. Over time, this habit of emotional disconnection can limit our ability to understand ourselves or others, thwarting personal growth and preventing integration of certain parts of our selves.
Splitting: Seeing people or situations in rigid absolutes - either wholly good or entirely bad - can provide temporary relief from the demands of conflicting thoughts, feelings and actions. However, this prevents us from engaging with nuance, whether in ourselves or others, and distances us from being able to take personal responsibility - both of which are essential for deeper growth and understanding.
Finding a Healthy Balance with Emotional Defences
The goal isn’t to rid ourselves of all defences, because we need them. As human beings, our defences evolve to protect us from psychological overwhelm. Tracing their origins often leads us to childhood, a time when we had limited control over our environment and had to rely heavily on strategies to cope with difficult experiences. These personal defence habits become ingrained patterns that shape how we process emotions on deep, subconscious, or unconscious levels.
As natural responses to life’s emotional demands, defences remain essential in adulthood, particularly in emotionally overwhelming situations like grief or any highly stressful experiences. Given that we all face complex existential challenges, such as mortality, it’s understandable that we might rely on emotional defences to shield ourselves from emotional overload.
However, while these defences may be protective, they can sometimes become problematic. It's important to note that defences exist on a spectrum. For example, using humour to relieve stress can be helpful, but if humour is constantly used to avoid difficult emotions, it may shift from a healthy coping tool to something that prevents us from fully connecting with others and may limit our ability to express or communicate our needs and care.
In light of this, it’s crucial to recognise that being mindful of the context and degree of our defences is key. The challenge lies in recognising when we rely on them too heavily in rigid, avoidant, or unhealthy ways. When defences dominate, they can negatively impact well-being, hinder personal growth, and strain relationships. In recognising your reliance on a defence, it can be helpful to gently ask yourself:
“Is this strategy serving me, or is it holding me back?”