Joe’s coaching move is counterintuitive: instead of helping the participant escape their stuckness, he asks them to increase it. “Feel more stuck. Feel so stuck you can’t even talk.” The participant’s body initially resists—it “wants to spend more energy getting out of that feeling”—but when they go fully in, they hit helplessness, then a “black hole,” and then come right back out, smiling.
This technique reveals a fundamental truth about emotions: they are self-resolving when fully felt. The feeling of being trapped by an emotion is actually the feeling of resisting it. When you stop resisting and go deeper, the emotion moves through its natural arc and releases.
The approach is not about wallowing or being consumed. It’s about discovering that the feared feeling has a bottom, and beyond that bottom is freedom.
Related Concepts
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Welcoming, not just accepting emotions
- Embrace intensity for transformation
- Avoidance is the stuckness, not the feeling
- Stuckness is resistance to the abyss, not the abyss itself
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them
- Resistance gives the inner critic its power
- Welcoming doubt instead of running from it opens the heart