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Originally Posted by pluralone
This might be just a matter of semantics, but since we're relying on words to communicate here I'd like to expand a bit on the concept of emotional resistance. Of course I can only speak from my own perspective, so...
When I feel anger, I know that if I take a good look at it I'll discover a more specific feeling. I may feel hurt or disrespected or impatient or intolerant, etc. Maintaining the vague, angry feelings allows me to avoid (resist) confronting the cause; naming the underlying emotions prompts me to act. I have a tendency to just keep things at the angry stage because then I don't have to do anything. It's been quite a few years since I figured this out about myself, and I do my best to work through the anger and resolve the underlying conflict but truly my 'best' really sucks sometimes.
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Right, this is what I've found in my own experience, too - I've heard it said that anger is a secondary or 'cover' emotion, and when I examine my own angry feelings more closely, I do find this to be true. When I first started to investigate it more closely I was surprised to find that below the surface of the anger there were feelings of despair, hopelessness, powerlessness, and tremendous hurt, it made me realise that at the heart of every raging monster there's a distraught child. In my own case I was an extremely sensitive and troubled child, but as I got older I learnt to repress the hurt because it wasn't socially acceptable to express it, and one of the by-products of the repression, so it appeared, was negativity in the form of anger, resentment, bitterness, depression, etc. It's taken me a long time to come to terms with it because I'd unconsciously built up so much resistance to the underlying hurt, and it's only intensive meditation that has really started to shift things.
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Anyway, point is that for me the avoidance or resistance is not about protecting myself from my feelings; it's about maintaining things as they are so I don't have to do anything to resolve them. This isn't going to be true for everyone, but I thought I'd throw that out there anyway just to share a slightly different perspective.
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Why is it that you're unwilling to do anything to resolve them, do you think? What in your opinion is required to resolve them?