The Feeling Is Not the Problem

When I feel anger, what are my options? Shout or stuff it down? When I feel desire, do I act on it or fight it? There’s a persistent confusion in modern culture about what feelings are for — where feeling becomes a problem to be solved, a fire to be extinguished or a match to be struck. I think most people are operating under an assumption they’ve never examined: that if you feel something, you have to do something about it.

My argument is that feelings are not instructions. Feelings are information, data. And like any piece of information, you can let yourself become informed and then just sit with it.

Between suppression and indulgence, there is a third option that almost nobody teaches which is integration. It sounds fancy, but it just means going through an experience with your whole self. To integrate a feeling is to experience it fully, to let it register, to let it move through the body, without attaching it to an obligation. Integration is about feeling things without split-second reactions, without internal identity politics, and letting that feeling travel your entire self — body, soul, mind, spirit, chakras, spine, mojo, call it whatever you want, all of it.

The feeling of attraction does not require pursuit. The feeling of anger does not require confrontation. The feeling of envy does not require shame. The feeling of excitement does not require announcement. The feeling of love does not require possession. The feeling of pride does not require display. Each one can be noticed, examined, felt, and then released or chosen on your terms and not the impulse’s.

Most people seem to default to one of two responses without realizing about the third integrated option. If you step back far enough, the patterns are simple:

• The primitive model: feel → act.
• The suppression model: feel → deny.
• The integrated model: feel → observe → choose.

What distinguishes integrated people from reactive ones is not the absence of difficult feelings, but what happens between feeling and action. That interval — that breath or two — is where character lives.

Here’s where it gets contradictory. A culture that fetishizes natural food, natural medicine, stillness, and conscious living often treats natural impulses with enormous hostility. Lust is sold as pathological. Aggression is toxic. Ambition is suspect. Jealousy is something to post about apologetically. But these are not aberrations of character; these human experiences are biological, normal, organic, and non-GMO. They served evolutionary purposes long before the concept of a workplace, a marriage contract, or a social media platform existed.

And then look at what passes for “strength” now. The “alpha.” The “high-value man.” Watch what actually gets modeled in those spaces: it’s the primitive model wearing a suit and some perfume, probably drives a cool ride but it’s just reactive dominance and possibly some sprinkled emotional volatility framed as passion. Chest-puffing framed as boundaries. Cutting people off at the first sign of friction framed as standards. The language borrows from psychology and self-development — attachment styles, red flags, inner child — and uses it to justify the exact opposite of what integration looks like. A man who explodes at a restaurant because the service was slow and calls it “not tolerating disrespect.” A man who ghosts a woman after a disagreement and frames it as “protecting his peace.” (I’m so sorry Katie!!) A man who can’t sit in a difficult conversation without escalating, because escalation feels like control and stillness feels like weakness. That is feel → act dressed up as philosophy. Primitive behavior with a marketing budget. And it is dangerous and irresponsible, because it teaches men that reactivity is power when reactivity is the opposite of power. How can you claim strength when you don’t even possess self-mastery? I’ve been there. I get it. But I also got past it.

What you actually want is not to be alpha. What you actually want is to be integrated. Because from integration you become your own authentic self — a beast of your own construction. Not a template or a brand. Something you built through the slow, unsexy work of learning what your feelings are telling you and choosing what to do about it with actual strength: self-discovery, self-awareness, self-discipline, RESTRAINT!

The problem is not that humans have these drives but that most people receive no instruction in how to carry them, and the result is a world where adults mistake feeling for permission and confuse impulse with directive. We are not taught enough about our feelings and how to handle them. I was told “crying is bad” and “calm yourself” every time I pushed back. Most of my life I ended up suppressing or absorbing, which erased my integrated self in favor of some sort of cold-war peace — feeling nothing on the surface while everything churned underneath.

There is a version of this “self-control” that is really just self-erasure — white-knuckling through emotion, pretending not to feel things, building an identity around stoic numbness. This is not integrated strength. It is suppression with good PR. And that PR is not as good as it looks — maybe passable in the short term, but it fools nobody long enough to matter.

The integrated person is not someone who feels less. They often feel more, precisely because they are not afraid of what they feel. They have learned that they can hold a feeling at a distance, examine it with curiosity rather than dread, and still be the one determining what comes next. That capacity — to feel without flinching, to observe without panicking, to choose without being compelled — is not a temperament. It is a skill. And like all skills, it can be practiced or neglected.

Integrated strength is something quieter and more difficult. It looks like a person who for example feels strong physical attraction in a professional setting — and experiences it fully, notices it, even finds it amusing — without the slightest compulsion to act. Not because the desire was not real but because the feeling and the action are understood as separate events, governed by separate faculties. It looks like a person who feels genuine anger at an injustice and sits with that anger, understands it, even honors it — without becoming the anger. Without letting the anger make the decisions. It looks like a person who feels a surge of love for someone — and lets it be full and real without needing to secure it, control it, or demand it be returned on a timeline. It looks like a person who feels pride in something they built — and lets that pride live quietly, without needing an audience to make it count.

It looks like a person who feels deep grief after a loss — and lets it sit in the chest, heavy and real, without rushing to fix it or explain it away or perform recovery on anyone else’s timeline. Not because they are broken. But because they understand that grief is the body’s way of registering what mattered, and that process does not need to be efficient.

It looks like a person who feels envy watching someone else succeed at the thing they’ve been struggling with — and instead of collapsing into shame or manufacturing resentment, they let the envy speak. They hear it say: this matters to me, I want this too, I’m not where I want to be yet. And they let that be useful information rather than an indictment of their worth.

Here is the part I’m still figuring out. I live this work. People soften around me when I’m integrated, or they hate how I behave if they’re close enough to witness it, close enough to clash with it. Integration is not comfortable for everyone in the room. But what I’ve learned, what I keep learning, is that sitting with my feelings is mostly about energy conservation. I conserve so much energy when I cherry-pick which feeling to respond to. Not every feeling deserves a reaction and not every impulse earns an action. Most of them are just information passing through. Feelings are signals, after all. The integrated response is to let them pass, note what they carried, learn a thing or two, and keep moving.

I am still calibrating. When to sit with a feeling. When to act. And when I act, how much intensity to bring. That calibration is the actual work — not arriving at some final state of calm, but getting better at reading the data and choosing the response. That is what integration gives you. Not peace as a permanent condition, but the power to choose where your energy goes.

The instinct to pathologize emotions is understandable. Feelings cause trouble — in relationships, in careers, in courtrooms, at the Costco/Aldi parking queue. But feelings are also the source of everything that matters. To eliminate the emotional life is to eliminate the human one.

This third road is narrower than liberation or repression. It requires self-knowledge, practice, and a tolerance for sitting with uncomfortable internal states without rushing to resolve them. It requires learning that discomfort is survivable. That a feeling can be metabolized — felt, witnessed, understood, and then released or chosen — until it stops having autonomous power over behavior. It becomes data. Information about what matters, what threatens, what pulls, what has been survived.

The feeling is not the problem. The problem is everything we were never taught about what to do with it. At least I wasn’t. And this has been my life work — to feel without reacting, to respond when it merits, and to sit with it when it doesn’t.