That we have emotions is a given. How we react or respond to them is a matter of choice. Victor Frankl offered the important insight that there is space between stimulus and response, and if we can pause and bring the full light of our awareness into it that space, we can free ourselves from automatic reactions that are often dysfunctional. Mindfulness practice will allow you to recognize that space and use it to respond to your emotions with clarity, compassion, and skillfulness.

It’s likely that your reactions to difficult emotions create much of the suffering you experience in regard to shyness and social anxiety. On one hand, the more you try to block, avoid, control, or escape difficult emotions, the more certain they are to revisit you time and time again and become problematic. On the other hand, if you’re swept up by each passing emotion, you’ll find yourself careening from one overwhelming event to the next. But if you can learn to attend to difficult emotions with clear awareness and acceptance, you may be able to find a middle ground where you can work with your emotional states more skillfully. The intention is to be with difficult emotions without inflaming them or being driven by them. When you begin accepting and conversing with your difficult emotions, you’ll find that they have much to teach you about who you are and how you can more effectively navigate your most difficult and complex interpersonal relationships.

working with emotions

Up to this point, you’ve invested a lot of time in developing skills that will help you undertake the important work of transforming your relationship with difficult emotions like anxiety. For example, the skills and perspectives you’ve developed in working with thoughts will also be helpful with emotions, in part because of how thoroughly intertwined thoughts and emotions are. As with thoughts, you can turn toward difficult emotions by feeling into them, acknowledging them, and letting them be. Anxiety itself may become an object of compassionate investigation when you find a place within yourself to witness it without pushing it away or being overwhelmed by it.

When you turn inward to mindfully witness your own inner process, you’ll notice that you only become aware of emotions after they begin. However, you may be able to see that a thought or environmental cue immediately preceded that emotion. You’ll also notice that until you began working on mindfulness of your inner state, the interplay of your thoughts and emotions generally happened outside your conscious awareness.

Like thoughts, emotions play a large part in shaping and coloring your interpretations and perceptions of the world. Let’s look at how thoughts and emotions are intertwined using an example from earlier, about giving a presentation in front of a group of people. Being shy, this probably makes you feel frightened, and this emotion could lead to the thought that the audience is judging you harshly. You might then look around the room to discover a lot of frowning faces, which you interpret as confirmation of what you expected to be true. The curious thing about this perception is that someone in a comfortable and secure state of mind who happens to think he or she is a fabulous speaker could look around the same room, see only smiling and nodding faces, and go away believing that everyone loved the presentation. Recall the quotation from the Talmud, which expresses that we see things as we are, not as things themselves are. Our perceptions generally conform to our expectations.

The many ways that emotions and thoughts play off of one another to color your perceptions can become the object of mindfulness as you witness what you feel and hold it in awareness. It’s challenging to stay with and investigate difficult emotions—to stay present with fear and anxiety long enough to recognize how difficult thoughts and emotions are playing into your perceptions and actions. Just looking at emotions in this way begins to create some space between fear and the urge to escape or avoid interactions. Each time you turn toward fear from this place of self-observation, you can increase that space and free yourself a little more from the old habits that comprise your shyness pattern. Each time you welcome and entertain these difficult guests, you can diminish both the intensity of the fear and the amount of time it takes you to recover your equanimity.

This work is difficult, but it’s worthwhile, as it will allow you to disengage the automatic connections between your thoughts and emotions and short-circuit the self-propagating feedback loop that ties you in knots when you’re around other people. It’s liberating to learn to live with rather than from your emotions.

Excerpt from The Mindful Path through Shyness: How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Help Free You from Social Anxiety, Fear, and Avoidance by Steve Flowers MFT.