ACT, Part Three: What We Do With the Feelings We Don’t Want

Acceptance, Experiential Avoidance and the Cost of Trying Not to Hurt

Removing every dark color from a painter’s palette because darkness is unpleasant would still allow for painting, but it would severely limit the ability to paint truthfully. Our emotional lives also require darker colors.

Part Two ended with a problem. Thoughts rarely travel alone.

Something terrible is going to happen may arrive with a tight chest and racing heart. She doesn't love me can bring sadness or panic. I've failed may arrive carrying shame.

Then another struggle begins. We don't merely dislike what we're feeling. We start trying to make it disappear.

There are feelings most of us would gladly return unopened. Anxiety is high on the list, along with shame, grief, loneliness, jealousy, rejection, uncertainty, and that peculiar variety of dread that wakes you at three in the morning and somehow knows exactly which unfinished problem you least wanted to discuss.

We often treat the arrival of these feelings as evidence that something has gone wrong.

Why am I feeling this way? I thought I was past this. I need to get myself under control.

Eventually we arrive at the question human beings have probably been asking since we became capable of worrying about our own worrying:

How do I make this stop?

Sometimes that's a perfectly sensible question. If my shoe hurts because there's a rock in it, acceptance is not my first recommendation. Take off the shoe and dump out the rock.

Emotional pain gets more complicated because we can't always dump it out. Sometimes our determination to get rid of a feeling becomes more disruptive than the feeling itself.

ACT calls this experiential avoidance: our attempts to escape, suppress, control, numb, or organize our lives around not having certain thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, or urges.

The name is technical.

The experience is thoroughly ordinary.

The Things That Work—Until They Don't

Human beings are wonderfully inventive at changing how we feel. We can use just about anything emotionally: staying busy, eating, drinking, working, exercising; or compulsively: shopping, fantasizing, checking, seeking reassurance. Or we might avoid things: people, places, conversations, memories, decisions, or situations connected with whatever is bothering us.

Some of these things are perfectly healthy. Distraction has its place. So do rest and comfort. There is nothing psychologically advanced about refusing to watch a good movie because you've decided you should sit quietly on the sofa and experience your boredom more fully.

The more interesting question is what happens when relief becomes a requirement.

Suppose I'm afraid of conflict. Whenever tension appears in a relationship, I become agreeable, smooth things over, and say It's fine when it isn't. It works beautifully in the short run. The tension disappears, nobody gets angry, and eventually I may find myself in a relationship where nobody actually knows me.

Or suppose I'm terrified of disappointing people. I say yes when I mean no, take responsibility for things that aren't mine, and become remarkably skilled at anticipating what everyone wants from me.

That works too, until I discover I've constructed a life around preventing other people from ever being unhappy with me.

That's the strange thing about avoidance.

It often survives precisely because it works.

For a while.

Relief Is a Very Good Teacher

Touch a hot stove and pull your hand away, and your nervous system learns something useful: don't do that again. Emotional learning can work much the same way, except the lesson isn't always as helpful.

Suppose I become intensely anxious in a crowded store and leave. By the time I reach the parking lot, my anxiety begins dropping. My brain notices the connection: Leaving worked.

The next time anxiety appears, leaving becomes more compelling. Eventually I may avoid crowded stores before anxiety even arrives, then concerts, airports, restaurants, or anywhere else escape feels relieving.

At every stage avoidance gives me something I genuinely wanted: relief. And every experience of relief quietly strengthens the lesson that anxiety itself must be dangerous.

This is one of the great paradoxes of anxiety. The more carefully we arrange our lives so we never experience it, the fewer opportunities we have to discover that anxiety can be experienced without catastrophe.

The world gradually gets smaller while anxiety gets larger.

The pattern isn't limited to anxiety. Fear of rejection keeps us from risking closeness. Fear of shame makes admitting mistakes difficult. Fear of grief can keep us away from places and memories we once loved, while fear of failure can keep us from attempting anything important enough to fail at.

Given enough practice, we can become remarkably good at protecting ourselves from life.

Maybe We Have Misnamed Half of Our Emotional Life

We commonly divide emotions into positive and negative ones. Joy, peace, contentment, and love go in one basket; anger, grief, anxiety, jealousy, shame, and fear go into the other.

The distinction makes sense because some feelings are considerably more pleasant than others. But the labels can smuggle in another assumption: if an emotion is negative, perhaps it shouldn't be there.

I'm not sure human beings work that way.

Imagine removing every dark color from a painter's palette because darkness is unpleasant. You could still paint, but there would be an enormous number of things you could no longer paint truthfully.

Our emotional lives need darker colors too.

Grief belongs to love because we grieve what mattered. Fear belongs to vulnerability because anything precious enough to love becomes something we can lose. Guilt may tell us we've wandered away from our values, while loneliness reminds us that human beings were never particularly well designed for complete self-sufficiency.

Even anxiety, troublesome creature that it is, often appears near things we care about. We worry about our children because we love them. Important conversations make us anxious because something is at stake. We fear losing things because they matter.

None of this makes feelings infallible. Anxiety routinely treats possibility as probability. Anger can misread another person's intentions, and shame can take one genuine mistake and inflate it into a theory about who we are.

Feelings are information. Sometimes the information is excellent, and sometimes the weather service has badly overestimated the storm.

But an emotion isn't necessarily an intruder simply because it hurts.

Some Pain Is the Price of Admission

There is a bargain hidden inside every meaningful life. Love people and eventually you'll worry about them. Become attached and you becomevulnerable to loss. Tell the truth and someone may not like what you say. Attempt something difficult and failure becomes one of the available outcomes.

We sometimes want the life without its admission price: love without vulnerability, achievement without uncertainty, parenthood without helplessness, intimacy without rejection, and change without discomfort.

I understand the appeal. I'd also like trout streams without mosquitoes, dogs without vet bills, aging without things beginning to make noises when I stand up, and relationships in which everybody I love behaves sensibly at all times.

Apparently none of those packages is currently available.

The deeper point is that some emotions aren't obstacles blocking the road.

They're part of the road.

There is no intimacy deep enough to matter that eliminates vulnerability, no courage that first eliminates fear, and no profound attachment that includes protection against grief.

Which changes the question. Instead of asking only, How do I stop feeling this? we might ask something harder:

What am I unwilling to feel, and what is that unwillingness costing me?

Pain, Plus Everything We Say About Pain

Pain already hurts. Human beings possess the additional ability to add commentary.

This shouldn't be happening. I can't handle this. I shouldn't still be grieving. I shouldn't be anxious. Other people cope better than I do. What's wrong with me?

Before long, I'm no longer simply experiencing an emotion. I'm evaluating myself for having it.

Anxiety becomes anxiety about anxiety. Sadness becomes fear that sadness will never end. Shame becomes shame about being ashamed, and anger can acquire another layer when we become furious with ourselves for being angry.

This doesn't mean suffering is merely a matter of attitude. Some pain cannot be reframed into submission. People die. Bodies hurt. Trauma leaves marks. Relationships end. People betray us. Occasionally life simply hands us something terrible without bothering to include an explanation.

Acceptance should never become another way of blaming people for suffering.

There is, however, a difference between the pain life gives us and some of the struggle we build around the fact that it has been given.

ACT is interested in whether we can stop adding quite so much lumber to the fire.

How Would You Treat Someone You Love?

We reveal something interesting in the difference between how we respond to other people's suffering and our own. Imagine someone you deeply love calls after a devastating day. You probably don't begin with, This is ridiculous. You're overreacting. Other people have much bigger problems. Why aren't you over this yet?

Yet many of us talk to ourselves this way with astonishing regularity. If a friend talked to me the way I talk to myself, I probably wouldn’t like them very much.

Compassion changes our relationship with pain. It doesn't say pain is wonderful, promise everything will work out, or insist that every loss contains a hidden blessing waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes compassion says something considerably simpler:

Of course this hurts.

Your dog dies after fifteen years and you're devastated. Of course you are. You loved your dog.

Your marriage ends and part of your life seems to have been torn away. Of course it hurts.

Your adult child is struggling with something you cannot fix, and you feel anxious and helpless. That feeling doesn't necessarily need an interpretation.

Sometimes feelings need company more than they need correction.

Acceptance Is Not Approval

This is where ACT's choice of the word acceptance creates problems. In ordinary conversation, accepting something can sound suspiciously like approving of it: Accept the way he treats you. Accept the injustice. Accept that nothing is going to change.

That isn't what ACT means.

Acceptance is willingness to allow an internal experience to be present when fighting that experience is futile or when the fight itself is pulling us away from the life we want.

I can accept the presence of anger and still confront injustice. I can accept anxiety and walk into the room anyway. I can accept grief and continue rebuilding after loss. I can accept uncertainty and make the best decision available without checking for the seventeenth time.

I can accept that somebody hurt me without deciding that what they did was acceptable.

Acceptance concerns my relationship with what's happening inside me.

It doesn't require passivity toward what's happening around me.

Get Curious About What Is Actually Happening

Sometimes acceptance begins by moving away from the story and toward the experience itself. Suppose anxiety arrives before a difficult conversation. My mind immediately begins explaining it: This is going to go badly. I'm not ready. He's going to be angry. Maybe I should wait.

Instead of solving every prediction, I can become curious about the anxiety itself. Perhaps there's pressure across my chest, a restless stomach, tight shoulders, warmth in my face, and a remarkably persuasive urge to postpone the conversation until sometime after the next presidential administration.

For a moment, I don't have to make any of it disappear.

This is anxiety. I don't particularly like it, but I can make some room for it. And it makes sense that I'm anxious because this conversation matters.

Something important has shifted.

The requirement is no longer I must become calm before I can do this.

The question becomes:

Can anxiety come with me while I do what matters?

That's much closer to what ACT means by acceptance.

Feelings Can Ride Along Too

In Part Two, thoughts became passengers without automatically becoming the driver.

Feelings can ride along too. Anxiety may give directions. Shame likes bringing up previous trips, and anger has a strong preference for taking the next exit and settling something immediately.

Acceptance doesn't require throwing any of them out of the car.

It means they don't automatically choose the destination.

This is where acceptance begins connecting with commitment. The important question isn't whether I can finally arrange my internal world so nothing uncomfortable happens there. What is important is asking whether I can carry what I feel without allowing those feelings to decide the size of my life.

Experiential avoidance offers a tempting bargain: I can help you feel safer.

Sometimes it can.

It just doesn't mention the price immediately.

The price may be the places I stop going to, things I stop saying, memories I refuse to visit, risks I won't take, people I won't get close to, or decisions I postpone until certainty arrives. Little by little, the boundaries of life move inward.

Safety increases while the territory decreases.

Acceptance makes a different offer.

It doesn't promise comfort, certainty, or anything resembling a painless life. It offers room—room for grief and love to occupy the same heart, for fear and courage to exist in the same body, and for uncertainty to remain unresolved while I still make a choice.

We don't make room for pain because pain is virtuous. We make room for feelings we cannot eliminate without also abandoning things we value.

And that may finally be the question:

Can I make enough room for what I feel that I don't also have to make my life smaller?

What to Carry Forward

Part Three adds three things to the flexibility we've been building. Pain and struggle aren't always the same thing. Avoidance can provide immediate relief while quietly making life smaller. And acceptance means making enough room for an unwanted feeling that it doesn't automatically decide what happens next.

Part One gave us room to make choices .

Part Two gave us room around our thoughts.

Part Three gives us room for what we feel.

But room for what?

That's where the series changes direction. If thoughts don't have to choose our direction and feelings don't have to choose it either, something else has to help us decide where we're going.

We've spent three articles making room.

Part Four gives us a compass: What are your days adding up to?

© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.

Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.