by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Acceptance vs. Resistance & How Judging Your Own Emotions Causes You to Bring Unnecessary Friction to Your Life
There’s a very common way that many people make their lives far more unreal than they need to be:
It doesn’t usually look that dramatic, doesn’t announce itself in big flashing lights, and often hides behind words like self‑control, being ‘good‘, being ‘mature‘, or having it ‘all’ together but – at its core – it all boils down to one simple habit:
Judging and fearing our own emotions to the point that we resist them.
At first glance, this can feel like a sensible strategy for dealing with our emotional ‘stuff’ in general:
If something feels uncomfortable, disruptive, or socially awkward, then surely it’s better to suppress it and move on?
Honestly, in the short term this strategy can appear to work as it can allow you to avoid conflict, not have shame be triggered, and stop you from rocking the boat, but the problem is that in the long-term, this kind of resistance doesn’t actually deal with anything.
Instead, it just creates inner friction and this friction just ends up handing control of our lives over to the very emotions we’re trying to escape.
This article is about a far more REAL approach to the human experience:
Acceptance over judgement and conscious choice over unconscious drives created by resistance.
It’s an approach that comes up constantly in my work with people and – once you really ‘get’ it – it changes everything.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Acceptance vs. Resistance: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- Acceptance vs. Resistance & How Judging Your Own Emotions Causes You to Bring Unnecessary Friction to Your Life
- Resistance: The Hidden Cost of Judging Yourself
- Resistance Turns Your Own Emotions Against You
- The Basic Formula Behind Ego Resistance of Emotions
- The Truth About Emotions and The Human Condition
- The Light & Dark Potentials of Human Emotions
- Reality is Medicine
- Questioning Resistance to Lean Into Acceptance
- Acceptance vs. Resistance: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
- The Final Word: Acceptance vs. Resistance
Resistance: The Hidden Cost of Judging Yourself
The human experience comes with a built‑in range of emotions, impulses, and needs that are inevitable and unavoidable no matter who you are:
Lust, anger, fear, desire, guilt, aggression, preference for one thing over another, and a whole cornucopia of other emotions – it’s a messy spectrum for sure but it’s what makes us whatever it is that we are.
The bottom line is that all of these emotions just is what they is and none of them are ‘mistakes’, ‘wrong’ to experience, or glitches in the system – they’re just part of being human.
What’s clear, though, is that problems with them always begin when we JUDGE these experiences instead of accepting them:
This is because when we judge an emotion, we’re not responding to reality:
Instead, we’re reacting to a story about reality and a story that’s almost always inherited from childhood, culture, religion, or social conditioning, or any other place you might think of…
When we react like this it means that Ego, not truth, is doing the talking and so we’re acting on autopilot instead of with actual presence in our own lives.
This is ‘bad’ news because, once an emotion is judged, fear follows quickly behind and fear leads to resistance which always makes things worse than they need to be:
It normally leads to attempts to suppress what we feel by tyring to manage our inner life in the way a bad parent would deal with an unruly child: by shushing it, locking it away, or pretending it doesn’t exist.
This creates an illusion of control, but it’s a fragile one because whatever we resist doesn’t just ‘disappear’. – instead, it persists, goes primal, and turns against us instead of being something we can use to build our real lives with.
Resistance Turns Your Own Emotions Against You
Here’s the paradox most people miss:
Resistance just gives emotions more power, not less.
This is because whenever we resist, we add an extra layer of tension and unnecessary friction on top of the original feeling:
Even though the emotion may be hidden from view, this tension keeps the emotion charged at an unconscious level and so instead of being something we have, it becomes something that has us without us even being aware of.
I see this pattern constantly in real life when I’m working with people:
Lust
One man I spoke to recently was deeply ashamed of his lustful thoughts and feelings and so every time any kind of sexual desire showed up, he panicked and immediately started judging himself.
Ironically, this judgement was just another form of resistance because – by trying to push his lust away 0 he ended up placing even more attention on it and so his mind became hyper‑focused on what he was trying not to feel.
(Which is unfortunate because what you focus on grows).
The result of this resistance?
The thoughts intensified.
The shame deepened.
The cycle reinforced itself and his lust OWNED HIM even more than it already did.
Lust wasn’t the problem: resistance was.
Anger
Another man had learned early in life that anger was ‘wrong’ or inappropriate and so whenever anger surfaced he simply suppressed it.
Over time, he built an identity around this suppression as “I’m someone who never gets angry” but – instead of dealing with his anger problem – this identity just became a conceptual prison:
His anger didn’t disappear (no emotion ever just ‘disappears’ because you’re resisting or suppressing it) – instead, it turned inward which meant that he ended up freezing in moments that required assertiveness and judged himself for holding back and hesitating in his own life.
In short, a healthy human emotion became self‑directed judgment and unnecessary inner criticism that stopped him showing up in his own life.
Aggression
A woman that I worked with judged her own aggression which is really just the energy required to stand up for oneself.
Again, this went to the level of her identity and so she created an image of herself as someone who had to be perfectly pleasant and ‘nice‘ at all times.
The result was predictable to say the least:
Her boundaries were repeatedly crossed but she still she said nothing (to be ‘nice’) and so resentment built up over time
Instead of expressing her truth, she turned the frustration on herself, and just ended up judging herself and beating herself up.
Again, a natural and healthy emotion (aggression) wasn’t the issue – the judgement of it was.
The Basic Formula Behind Ego Resistance of Emotions
When you zoom out a little, all of these stories all follow the same basic pattern:
- We experience a totally normal human emotion that simply is what it is, beyond ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (because it doesn’t become ‘good’ or ‘bad’ until we DO something with it).
- We judge the emotion as ‘meaning’ something about us (i.e. we put a meaning onto something that doesn’t have inherent meaning because of the way we project onto things).
- We suppress it and send it into the Shadow Territory, creating a self‑image that pretends it doesn’t exist.
- Resistance creates tension, friction, and increasingly unreal situations in our lives as the resisted emotions boil away beneath the surface of our lives.
If this cycle isn’t broken, the suppressed parts grow stronger for the simple fact that if we don’t own them, they start running the show from behind the scenes.
In extreme cases, this becomes genuinely destructive because of the law that:
Self‑destruction is self‑resurrection.
(See my book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World for more on this concept).
In other words, if we refuse to integrate whatever we have sent into exile as part of the Shadow Self, then it will eventually take us places we don’t want to go.
The Truth About Emotions and The Human Condition
Here’s an uncomfortable fact about reality most people try to avoid:
We will all feel difficult, messy, and socially inconvenient emotions at various points in our lives.
There are literally no exceptions and no matter how ‘enlightened’ or ‘successful’ we might end up becoming in life, we’ll still have to contend with our human emotional ‘stuff’:
(Even Jesus wept).
Suffering always begins in cases like these when we judge these emotions and ascribe meaning to them instead of allowing ourselves to feel them and then consciously make a CHOICE about how to act.
It becomes much easier to make a REAL choice when we realise that ever emotion carries both a dark and a light potential – depending entirely on whether it’s accepted or resisted.
Let’s explore this idea now:
The Light & Dark Potentials of Human Emotions
Here are a few examples of how every human emotion has both a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ potential depending on whether we accept it or resist it:
Lust:
Resisted, lust becomes sexual compulsion and obsession.
Accepted, it can become a vessel for real intimacy and connection.
Sexual energy:
Denied, it turns destructive and compulsive.
Accepted, it becomes creative, life‑giving energy.
Anger
Suppressed, it becomes destructive and reinforces shame.
Accepted, it becomes fuel for real purpose and a force that dissolves shame.
Guilt
Clung to, it leads to heaviness and depression.
Accepted and learned from, it frees us to become more real.
Fear
Resisted, it causes paralysis and avoidance of what we really want in life.
Accepted, it shows us our edge and where growth is required to go to that next level.
Discernment
Unowned, it becomes judgement and disconnection.
Accepted, it clarifies boundaries and what needs protecting.
Desire
Resisted or indulged unconsciously, it creates neediness and outcome‑dependence.
Accepted, it moves us forward and expands our lives.
You can literally look at any human emotion in this way but literally none of these emotions are ever the enemy:
Resistance to them is.
Reality is Medicine
There is no point judging our emotions or needs because they’re just inescapable features of leading a human life:
When we resist lust, anger, fear, desire, or [anything else] because we think there’s something ‘wrong’ with having them, then we just fragment ourselves and disconnect ourselves from truth.
This sucks because disconnection from truth is always painful and always leads to us living in the Void.
The simple thing to remember is that:
Resistance means we’re avoiding some aspect of reality.
Which is a failed strategy for getting through life because:
Reality is always medicine.
What harms us isn’t what’s real but what’s unreal and the stories, beliefs, and identities we use to avoid reality.
(See this article to go deeper into the “reality is medicine” idea: Reality is Medicine: From Resistance to Acceptance).
Questioning Resistance to Lean Into Acceptance
The way forward and back to realness starts with curiosity.
Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?”
Start asking yourself:
“Where did I learn that this emotion ‘means‘ something about me?“
“Who taught me that this was wrong?“
“What’s actually true?“
This can free you from yourself and your old patterns because the truth is simple:
An emotion doesn’t mean anything until we decide what to do with it – in other words, meaning comes from your choices, not from the sensations you feel.
If you’re serious about overcoming resistance and developing unconditional self-acceptance then check out Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World.
Acceptance vs. Resistance: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
A practical way to work with this is to take yourself through the Awareness, Acceptance, and Action model I use with my coaching clients.
(You can use this model for any transformation you want to make in your life):
Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego):
Notice the emotion as a mere physical sensation – perhaps tightness, heat, pressure, movement, or just ‘energy’.
Allow yourself to just feel whatever this is and to let it expand as a sensation and without any kind of story or ‘meaning’ attached (these stories and meanings always come from ego and familiar identities – not actual truth).
Just feel what’s actually happening in the body and let it do its thing without resisting it (you’re perfectly safe to do this because it’s just emotional discomfort – not physical danger!).
Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)
Allow the sensation to be there without trying to change it, dramatize it (which means you define yourself by it), or to suppress it.
Feel it as energy, not as a problem, and ACCEPT it as something that is there and that doesn’t need to be hidden in the shadows.
Action (Trust Yourself & Life)
Once you’ve become Aware of it and Accept it for what it is then you’re ready to make a conscious choice about how to use that energy in alignment with your vision, goals, and values.
This is where transformation happens because when we choose consciously, we move towards the light expression of the emotion instead of the dark.
Flow replaces force, integration replaces fragmentation, reality replaces illusion, and we can finally live in a real way – not by becoming something other than human but by finally accepting what we already are.
The Final Word: Acceptance vs. Resistance
In the end, becoming more real isn’t about ‘fixing’ yourself or eliminating parts of your humanity but about ending an unnecessary inner war:
When you stop judging your emotions and start accepting them as neutral energy that can be directed, you reclaim authority over your own life.
What once drove you unconsciously can now be directed consciously and the ‘dark’ no longer needs to sabotage you because it’s finally been seen, felt, and integrated.
From this place of realness, choice becomes possible, flow replaces force, and growth stops being something you chase and starts being something that happens naturally as you tune back into life.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re tired of dealing with the symptoms of resistance and you’re ready to start actually living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start building flow.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.
