Hello everyone and welcome to Therapy in a Nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. This video is all about getting better at feeling.

This is the one skill that I wish everyone could learn,

because it's like flipping a switch on your emotions,

switching off the struggle and turning on peace with your emotions.

The skill is called willingness.

When you learn to use willingness, you can take all that energy

that you were wasting, fighting your emotions, and you can channel it toward the life that you want.

This is the last video from the foundation section of this course, where you've learned how to

notice and name your emotions without judgment, avoidance, and struggle. In the upcoming sections, I'm going to

teach you a dozen skills to resolve painful, crappy, intense, distorted emotions that you're feeling.

But to get there, we have to be better at sitting with them as step two in this process. So hang tight.

As much as we may wish that we didn't have to feel painful emotions, it's just not possible.

Emotions, physical sensations, and thoughts, they're all part of who we are.

They're a beautiful, vivacious part of being alive.

They're essential to our ability to live and love and connect and care.

So just for a minute,

let's compare painful emotions to this brick, right? This brick represents a painful emotion like

sadness or anxiety or chronic pain. Now, when I just want to avoid it, when I try not to think about it,

when, you know, I say, why me? You know,

when this feeling comes up, that's like holding this brick at arm's length. Now, how long do you

...