Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions.
She won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.
Most people think emotional work is about becoming more “regulated” or less reactive.
Two of the most common strategies I see:
- Emotional repression. We numb, distract, stay busy, avoid certain topics, or intellectualize. We tell ourselves we’ve “moved on” or “let go” when, in fact, we’ve buried something alive inside of us.
- Emotional management. The well-meaning attempt to “handle” feelings. We try to breathe through them, exorcise them by writing in a journal, reframe them, or meditate until they pass. These techniques can be helpful until they become a subtle form of resistance. When we use them to bypass what's real, they turn into avoidance.
But whether repressed or managed, avoided emotions don’t go away. They return in a pattern I call the “golden algorithm.”
It goes like this:
- Name an unwanted emotion in your life.
- List the ways you try to avoid it.
- Notice that every way you try to avoid it, you actually create it.
For example:
Avoid feeling like a failure → Play it safe → Feel like a failure
Avoid conflict → Ignore your needs → Constant inner conflict
The way out of the golden algorithm is by developing your emotional clarity.
It’s not about controlling, managing, or avoiding your feelings, it’s about developing a new relationship with them.
Emotional clarity means learning how to take your emotions seriously, not literally.
Our work is about learning how to stay present to your fear without collapsing into it, to feel anger without lashing out or pushing it down, and to move through grief without trying to rush your way out of it.
One of the first tools we teach is Emotional Inquiry. You can try it for free here:
