Why You Need to Engage with Your Emotions
By Kerry Biskelonis, LPC, RYT
Last Updated 03/10/2026
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Mental Health Struggles Caused by Michigan Winters
It’s been a winter for the ages, and personally I’ve struggled. I know many are experiencing similar heaviness, although for many different reasons. We all have seasons of life that are more challenging, and sometimes that is related to our immediate circles and daily life, and sometimes it’s how we’re connected to larger global events — to things beyond our control.
Last week, our team met and spent a lot of time talking about how each of us responds to stress. We all experience stress — good, bad, indifferent. We all experience events that startle us, unexpected encounters, and hard reminders.
Understanding How You Respond to Challenges
We used a really helpful model called the Drama Triangle, which describes three roles people fall into when they go “below the line” in the face of a challenge: the Victim, the Villain (Persecutor), and the Martyr (Rescuer). The line, it turns out, is fear. I find this point really important. “Above the line” behaviors are responses rooted in awareness and intentionality, while “below the line” responses are driven by this internalizing of fear and reactivity.
How do you respond to fear?
Fear, and how we respond to it, decides our reactions and responses. It’s not the incoming stressors, triggers, or challenges — it’s how we perceive them. This is what that model keeps pointing me back to - as renowned psychologist Gabor Maté often says about trauma: it’s not what happens to us, it’s what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. In relation to this model, what happens inside us is our perception of the occurrence and our awareness to question our reactions.
Now, I want to be delicate here because we often don’t have control over how we experience fear. Our wiring, epigenetics, nervous systems, learned behaviors, intergenerational traumas, environments, and cultural backgrounds can all factor into our ability to stay above the line.
Much of the work we do in psychotherapy is to gain awareness of this “how”—our habits and common reactions. It’s in this awareness that we gain empowerment because then we can start to see where we may have a choice in our responses.
Therapist Reflects on Her Reactions to Personal Challenges
So, over the last few months, our family has been given some challenges. I wish I could say I took these challenges in stride, staying above the line. Above the line would have been the ability to see the meaning behind them, trusting it’ll work out for the best, letting go of my attachments and anxieties, engaging with the stressors with curiosity and creativity. And yet, I wasn’t able to do that. Maybe it is because it’s been the longest, coldest winter of recent memory. Maybe because I’m grieving other things. Maybe because I just fell into familiar habits of victimhood.
Driven By Fear
Instead of seeing opportunity, I only saw fear: fear of uncertainty, fear of rejection, fear of change, and fear of loss. I wanted to avoid the pain of change, hold on tightly, prove I was right, and resist the disruption that was becoming increasingly inevitable. I can reflect now and see how many of my reactions were below the line: I spent some time not being impeccable with my word and talking in ways that I regret (Villain). I found a fair amount of time wallowing in self-pity and isolation (Victim) and a decent amount of time “holding my head high” despite my pain, trying to prove I could handle it all and didn’t need help (Martyr).
Struggles to Engage and Suppression of Feelings
I had a really hard time engaging honestly with my feelings, working towards accepting and letting go. I had a hard time trusting. I had a hard time believing anyone was truthful. I didn’t want to accept certain realities and what they meant for my family, my identity, my envisioned futures, and my children.
And here’s the thing about letting fear run the narrative — it drives you further and further away from clarity, from peace, and from joy. Staying below the line, unable to rise above the line, and be curious, creative, and strengths-based can be really hard. And despite fear sending me into reactivity, something even bigger was happening that kept me there.
Experiences of Grief
When I really named what I was feeling, it was grief and I did not want to reveal that truth because grief is complicated and not quickly resolved. There were many times during the last couple of months when I wished I could just snap out of my funk. I meditated. I even went for runs, hoping nature and cold air would shake the depression loose. I would bounce up for a day or two, but then plummet again. I couldn’t “love and light” it away — once again, a familiar habit for many of us who don’t love big feelings — to bypass the process in order to just feel good again. My usual tricks and tools were not working.
How do you grieve?
The truth was that I just had to be in it. Grief demands our attention (often at really inconvenient times) and asks for our time, patience and respect. I had to engage with these big, heavy feelings. I had to sit with a journal and let the feelings pour through me. I had to move through my aching neck and hip, tender points where I hold most of my emotions and grief. I had to be patient, embodied, and forgiving. Offering myself grace over and over again, that it’s okay to not be okay, and trusting that this will pass in time.
Why We Must Engage with Our Feelings
See, what I was avoiding - just being with the pain- was actually the above the line response. Once I stopped fearing and resisting what was happening, I could be with the big feelings in a collaborative, open way. But this didn’t happen overnight; instead, it took many efforts and reminders of how good it feels to courageously engage - first with others and then myself - to build my capacity to confront my grief.
Depression, grief, fear — below-the-line behaviors — tempt us with isolation as a salve. The external world feels like too much, and we’re too raw to interact with it. And yet, the more we stay in our own little world, the larger our problems feel. While centering ourselves in our feelings can have a powerful purpose for processing and transformation, too much of a thing is usually too much of a thing.
1. Collective healing is real.
I know this is why, when the needle moved a bit in my depressive funk, it was after times of connection with others - when I really had no choice but to engage with the world. While it is so tempting to say “no” to the world, these obligatory and impromptu gatherings were what I needed the most, despite my initial aversion.
I truly felt the shift happen last night. After months of avoidance and then moments when I could engage with myself and others, I felt the fog lift. With an odd sense of urgency, I felt a call to attend a local women’s seminar I had only just learned about earlier in the day. It was completely random, and I had never been to this place before. I didn’t know a single person, and it was on a school night! Getting there on time was a miracle. And yet, each moment I was there, I knew it was exactly where I was supposed to be. The connection I felt with the others in the room, the feelings that were validated and spoken about by others, made me finally feel so much less lonely.
2. Uncomfortable emotions only become harder to bear in isolation.
I had to listen to the nudges, notice the call, and then muster the courage to actually follow through. I know I missed some of these nudges the last few months — moments when I was gently guided — because I was pretty low. Grief and depression do that - it keeps you tuned out, especially when we avoid welcoming the heaviness of it all. And the thing is, missing that greater connection only compounded my isolation and loneliness.
Funks happen. Depression bouts occur and recur. We experience suffocating grief. Fear knocks us down. Our familiar reactions of distraction through villainizing, victimhood, and martyrdom take over. Feeling the feelings, rather than dissociating and avoiding, is difficult and laborious work. Being honest with ourselves is even harder.
But there are people — strangers and loved ones — who make it a bit easier. There are huggers and people who look you in the eyes while tears well up. Holding space, being patient, loving you anyway. They’ll ask you to show up, invite you to events, and want to be with you. Let them and try to go. Each time you have the courage to show up, you’re proving to yourself you can show up for yourself too, no matter now hard it feels.
3. The only way out is through; you can’t release what you haven’t felt.
While it may be familiar, comfortable even, we cannot stay below the line. We have to be brave and address our feelings, let them move us, shake us, destabilize us — and then find their way through.
The only way out is through.
It can be very lonely if you let it. Or, we can reach for the helpers, the tools, the patience, the courage to actually engage with the hard work, and trust that we have the strength to move through. Because it’s worth it. Relief, joy, connection, laughter, and play are waiting for us.
But we have to engage.
Where can I find a therapist near me?
At Reset Brain and Body, we support clients through foundational and holistic wellness, nervous system regulation, and more. If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Our team is here to walk with you—through the overwhelm and into presence.
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Conscious Transparency: This newsletter was edited by AI for grammar, spelling, and sentence structure, but every idea, tone of voice, perspective, and word choice was my own. This newsletter is imperfect because a human wrote it. Thank you for your graciousness.
This week’s Tools, Gratitude, Innovation, Feels
Tools: I mentioned it above, but getting out of the house is vitally important. To breathe fresh air, to feel your feet on the Earth, to smile at strangers, and just engage in small talk. It’s a reminder of your aliveness, and that you’re not alone in your pain.
Gratitude: Spring has officially sprung, despite conflicting weather reports. We’ve needed this transition, and here’s to more sunshine, more warmth, more outdoors, and more hope. I plan to celebrate the Spring Equinox with joy and good food, along with some friends.
Innovation: A dear friend of mine recently hosted a workshop on supporting Iranian clients. While the workshop is over, what Hasti Raveau and Mala Family Services are offering for support and education is incredible.
Feels: I attended a seminar last week on Finding Hope in Dreadful Times (uplifting, actually!) and, while I want to integrate it more before I share here, one of the speakers, Jon Batiste, said of our experiences, “we need to have a depthful presence.” And I feel this as I noticed how presence and the joy and freedom found in presence are only truly available when we engage with it deeply.
