Why does trying harder to get rid of emotional pain sometimes make it even stronger?
Why do the emotions we suppress so often return in another form?
When we look at Buddhism and emotions, the Buddha’s approach was not simply about eliminating difficult feelings. It was about looking through suffering to understand where it comes from and how it can be transformed.
This is also one of the questions I explore in The Legendary Life of Shakyamuni Buddha: A Psychotherapist’s Journey Through the Life of the Buddha:
When we return the Buddha to the reality of human suffering, emotion, desire, and psychological transformation, how can the wisdom that emerged from his life help us today?
If your main question is why attachment and recurring emotional patterns create suffering, use the Buddhist Psychology Books for Anxiety & Attachment reading guide, then continue to The Eight Sufferings of the Buddha.
If you prefer to approach the same question through the Buddha’s life, explore The Legendary Life of Shakyamuni Buddha.
Hello, I’m Huishan.Have you ever felt this way?
You have already tried so hard, yet life still refuses to go easy on you.
No matter what you do, it never seems to be enough.
The worries and emotions keep coming. One frustrating event follows another.
Eventually, you begin questioning yourself:
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Am I simply unlucky?”
You may even wonder:
“Am I still not spiritually developed enough?”
Especially in East Asian cultures, many of us grow up being told:
“Control your emotions.”
“Stop thinking so much.”
“Just endure it. It will pass.”
But here is the question:
Do emotional pain, frustration, and suffering really disappear simply because we avoid them, refuse to look at them, or treat them with emotional coldness?
The answer is no.
From a psychological perspective, our emotional pain and distress can be understood almost like small “colds” produced by the body and mind.
They do not appear simply to torment us.
They function as signals.
They may be telling us:
There is a need that has not been met.
There is an emotion that has been ignored.
There is a way of thinking or living that needs to change.
If you continually avoid, suppress, ignore, or pretend that nothing is wrong, the problem may simply be pushed deeper into the unconscious, eventually returning through more intense anxiety, depression, or physical symptoms.
This is why psychological problems are not simply “bad things” that appear from nowhere.
And mental health is not something only “psychologically abnormal” people need to care about.
Sometimes, a mind that has been suppressed for too long is trying to cry out for help through the unconscious, through bodily reactions, and through emotional signals.
It is like a red warning light telling you to stop and ask:
What part of me needs attention?
What do I actually want?
What need within myself am I continually violating or ignoring?
It asks you to stop.
To soothe your inner world.
To face the emotions you have ignored.
To understand what you genuinely need.
And to give yourself the support and care that may have been missing for a long time.
In other words, the emotion is not necessarily an obstacle.
It can become a compass pointing toward the part of your inner life that needs to change.
On this point, Buddhist psychology and modern psychology meet in an interesting way.
Psychology contains many therapeutic approaches, practical methods, and tools designed to help us understand, process, and integrate emotional conflict.
Buddhist practice approaches the issue from another direction:
our afflictions and emotions themselves can become opportunities for practice—fuel that points us toward awakening, wisdom, and freedom.
Let me tell you a story.
A disciple once asked the Buddha:
“World-Honored One, throughout my practice I have been trying to control my emotions. I do not get angry. I do not complain. I try not to become sad.
Why, then, do I feel increasingly miserable?”
The Buddha did not immediately answer.
Instead, he handed the disciple a cup filled with water and asked him to hold it up while standing still.
After several minutes, the disciple said:
“It’s fine.”
After half an hour, his arm began to tremble.
After an hour, his face had turned pale and sweat covered his body.
The Buddha calmly asked:
“Has the cup become heavier?”
The disciple shook his head.
“No.”
“Then why are you suffering more and more?”
The Buddha continued:
“Emotions and afflictions that are never released are like this cup of water that you refuse to put down. The cup has not become heavier. You have simply exhausted all your strength trying to keep holding it.”
And this is also how many people live with difficult emotions.
We assume that suppressing them, refusing to face them, and ignoring them means that we have solved them.
But emotions and afflictions are not monsters or floods that must be destroyed. They can become lamps and sources of fuel pointing us toward the road ahead.
What truly torments you is often your insistence that the emotion must not exist—your determination to eliminate it.
In psychology, this pattern is often described as experiential avoidance.
It is one of the most common yet least visible psychological struggles of modern life.
The less willing you are to experience an emotion, the more persistently it may return.
Put differently:
The more you suppress sadness, the more it may turn into emotional numbness.
The more you suppress anger, the more it may become exhaustion.
The more you suppress anxiety, the more it may eventually appear in the body.
It may show up as insomnia, headaches, shoulder pain, chronic tension, mental exhaustion, and other physical symptoms.
So what do we do?
Psychology gives one answer:
Face it.
Accept it.
Understand it.
Allow it to become part of your lived experience.
The Buddha pointed toward something similar more than two thousand years ago.
Buddhism teaches the Four Noble Truths: suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path leading to its cessation.
Suffering comes first for a reason.
You are not asked to run away from it.
You are asked to look through suffering, understand the conditions that produce it, and discover the path by which it can end.
So emotional pain and affliction are not necessarily enemies on the path of inner cultivation.
They can become lamps.
They can become fuel. They can become the GPS of your inner life. Once you dare to look at them and face them directly, they may take you somewhere within yourself that you have never reached before.
Psychology also speaks about approaches to emotional transformation, sometimes described through transformational coping:
real growth does not necessarily mean making every negative emotion disappear.
It means giving the experience a new meaning.
Anxiety, for example, is not always evidence that you are failing.
It may be a sign that you are preparing to move beyond an old pattern.
Anger is not only destructive.
It may also signal that you are beginning to establish clearer boundaries.
This also echoes the Buddhist idea that:
“All sentient beings possess Buddha-nature.”
Every difficult emotion may contain the seed of awakening.
The question is whether you are willing not to run away, not to suppress it, but to go deeply enough to understand its roots.
Only then can the problem be pulled out from the root.
This is also what the Śūraṅgama Sūtra describes through the transformation of wisdom and consciousness.
In philosophy, Hegel proposed the idea often described as the “negation of the negation.”
Put simply, human growth requires us to confront suffering before genuine self-transcendence becomes possible.
From my perspective, what you call “bad luck,” “being stuck,” or even an “emotional breakdown” may actually be the heat engine of growth—and the GPS guiding your life toward its next stage.
So do not rush to eliminate your emotions.
Do not immediately try to escape your suffering.
Do not hate the darker parts of your own humanity.
Instead, look at where they came from.
Listen to what they are trying to say.
And recognize that they may contain more than one meaning.
Because real courage is not the ability to destroy emotion and affliction. It is the ability to find a flame of awakening and transformation within them.
Like the cup of water: put it down, and it is only a cup of water. Keep holding it, and it becomes your suffering.
Emotions and afflictions are not necessarily bad things. They may be the point from which you begin to live more deeply, more freely, and with greater awareness.
If you would like to continue through the Buddha’s life and see how his understanding of suffering, emotion, attachment, and awakening emerged step by step from Siddhartha Gautama’s lived experience, you can continue with my book:
The Legendary Life of Shakyamuni Buddha: A Psychotherapist’s Journey Through the Life of the Buddha
From Siddhartha’s life inside the palace, to his encounters with aging, illness, and death, and finally to renunciation, ascetic practice, and awakening, this is not only a biography of the Buddha.
It is also a journey back into ourselves:
Why do we suffer? How do we face suffering? And how can suffering itself eventually be transformed into wisdom?
Explore the complete Shakyamuni Buddha book and reading guide →