Coaching practices for Permission to Feel Emotions

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Permission to Feel Emotions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I feel the jealousy or the hurt and then immediately pile on a second layer of "I shouldn’t feel this, a mature person wouldn’t"
• The second a hard feeling shows up I clamp down on it and shove it away, but it just keeps coming back louder
• When a big feeling crashes over me it’s like I become it
• I keep trying to shove this feeling down or talk myself out of it, and the harder I fight it the worse it gets
• I’m stuck at one of two extremes with hard feelings

Practices that may help

1. Give yourself permission to feel
   Drop the judgment about whether you should or shouldn’t feel a certain way — the emotion is already there.
   Radical Honesty About Emotions, Made Practical
2. RAIN — Allow the experience to be here
   Let the feeling exist as it is for a moment, without pushing it away or feeding it.
   Radical Acceptance, Made Practical
3. Mindfulness of the current emotion
   Observe the emotion as a wave passing through — without judging it, feeding it, or running from it.
   DBT Emotion Regulation Skills, Made Practical
4. A — Allow the experience to be as it is
   Let what is present be here, without pushing it away, numbing it, or elaborating it.
   RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice
5. Mindful awareness of suffering
   Hold painful feelings in balanced awareness — neither suppressing them nor being swept away by them.
   Self-Compassion, Made Practical
6. Recognize aware presence within strong emotion
   When a strong emotion arises, shift to noticing the awareness in which the emotion appears rather than being swept by it.
   Non-Dual Awareness, Made Practical
7. Understand the function of the emotion
   Every emotion evolved because it does something useful — learn what yours is trying to do.
   DBT Emotion Regulation Skills, Made Practical
8. Radical Honesty About Emotions, Made Practical
   Naming and honestly expressing what you feel — rather than suppressing, masking, or performing emotions — is linked to lower physiological stress, better relationships, and more effective self-regulation. Decades of research on expressive writing and emotional disclosure support the general principle, though effects are modest and depend heavily on how disclosure is done.
9. Red hat: name the emotions without justifying them
   Give feelings a legitimate place in the discussion — the red hat makes emotional data explicit so it stops running covertly.
   Six Thinking Hats, Made Practical
10. Set limits on behavior while accepting the feeling
    All feelings are acceptable; not all behaviors are — hold both at once.
    Emotion Coaching (John Gottman)

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