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The three things you do to avoid feeling
💡 Sedating and managing your emotions feel like handling them, but only consciously feeling them — integration — actually resolves the charge.
Brown says we habitually deal with uncomfortable emotion in one of three ways. The first is sedation: numbing the feeling through distraction — food, screens, busyness, substances, entertainment. The charge is muffled but never resolved.
The second is management: trying to control the feeling and its triggers — organizing our life so the emotion never gets provoked, or channeling it into blame and drama. This is more sophisticated than sedation but still keeps the emotion at arm's length.
The third, which the whole process aims toward, is integration: consciously feeling the emotion all the way through, without a story or a fix. Only integration actually processes the charge. Brown's insight is that sedation and management feel like coping but are really strategies of avoidance in disguise.
Source: The Present Process — Michael Brown