When we desperately don’t want an emotion to return, we create the very conditions for its return. Joe demonstrates this with a man terrified of falling back into depression. The man’s entire orientation—guarding against depression, not trusting his intuition, withdrawing from communication—was organized around avoiding the thing, which kept him locked in a contracted, depression-adjacent state.
The intervention is deceptively simple: say “I can’t wait to be depressed again.” The man laughs. The resistance dissolves. When you genuinely welcome an emotion, it loses its grip. You can’t be terrorized by something you’ve invited in.
“The more that you don’t want it to happen again, the more likely it is to happen again.”
This is the fundamental paradox of emotional resistance: the energy spent avoiding an experience keeps you in relationship with it. What you resist, persists—not as a cliché, but as a nervous system reality. The body stays braced for the thing it fears, which is itself a form of suffering nearly identical to the thing being avoided.
Related Concepts
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Welcoming, not just accepting, emotions
- Welcome shame rather than pushing through it
- Fully falling in love with the avoided feeling is the quickest way to stop a negative pattern
- We recreate painful circumstances to finally welcome the avoided emotion
- The discomfort of emotions is the resistance to them, not the emotions themselves
- Depression can be a gift you wouldn’t trade