Why You Can’t Just Move On - And What to Do Instead of Emotional Avoidance (part 1)

Why is it so hard to leave situations we know deep down aren't right for us? Whether it’s a relationship that’s run its course or a job that drains us daily, many of us find ourselves stuck—unable to move forward even when the decision seems obvious on paper. 

In this episode of This Is How You Think, we're unpacking one of the most common (yet least understood) reasons why we stay in cycles that don’t serve us.

This conversation dives into the very human experience of emotional attachment, why logic alone isn’t enough to create change, and the often overlooked skill that makes all the difference when it comes to real emotional resilience. 

We also explore what it actually means to “sit with your feelings,” why most people avoid it, and how bypassing this process keeps us trapped in the same emotional loops.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated with yourself for not being able to “just move on” or found it hard to support a loved one who’s struggling to let go, this episode is for you. You’ll walk away with a new lens on emotional growth—and why the work you might be avoiding is exactly what will set you free.

Topics Discussed in the Episode:

• Why we stay in relationships or jobs that aren’t working
• How emotional avoidance keeps us stuck
• What it actually means to “sit with your feelings”
• The difference between emotional processing and emotional outsourcing
• How to build emotional resilience without bypassing pain

Chapters

• 0:00 Why We Stay Stuck
• 0:28 Logic Versus Emotion
• 1:55 The Elephant And The Rider
• 4:59 Breakup Story And Coping Gaps
• 7:51 Fear Of Feelings Traps Us
• 9:41 Escapes, Rebounds, And Workaholism
• 11:42 Stop Shaming Your Emotions
• 12:55 Support Helps, But Don’t Outsource
• 14:22 How To Sit With Feelings
• 16:12 Avoid Intellectualizing And Ruminating
• 17:11 Share, Text Questions, Thanks

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Why do you keep staying in things you know aren't working? The relationship that's been dead for a year, the job you complain about every day, you know you should leave, but you don't. You yell at yourself to be logical, to stop being weak, but nothing works. And even if they leave or they fire you, you still don't move on. Well, a lot of this happens because most of us don't understand that humans are biologically wired to be emotional creatures. So trying to outlogic our wiring is like yelling at the wind to stop blowing. But most of us still expect ourselves and everyone around us to just put away our emotions, like it's a light switch you just turn on or off. And that expectation is exactly why you're stuck. Whether you're staying in something way too long or you can't move on even after it ends, it's really the same thing underneath. You never learned how to feel or handle your feelings. So you avoid the path forward because you're afraid. Today I'm talking about why it's so important to do the inner work around understanding and sitting with your feelings. This isn't about being overly sensitive or emotional or weak. It's necessary for your growth. And refusing to do this just makes the pain last that much longer every time you have a rough day. Let's dive in. So I just got this message from one of my clients last week. He's talking to his friend who just broke up with his girlfriend, and his friend is so emotionally invested that he just can't let go. And my client is questioning why is it so hard for his friend to cut off that attachment? Like just make a decision and do it. Why is such a simple thing so hard? Why can't we just let go and be purely logical? Now, I will say this, okay, this client has never actually been in love. So he's looking at his friend's pain like it's a problem to solve instead of something human and real to feel. And what's really interesting about this guy is that he's taken several acting classes. And it turns out that his acting coach and I have actually given him the same feedback that humans are animals. We are all animals and we forget that. We like to think of ourselves as very elevated, and of course, we do things that most animals can't, for sure, but we are still ruled by a very strong emotional core, where the rational, logical part of us is more like this thin layer on top. It reminds me of this drawing I saw once from the happiness hypothesis that shows a person riding an elephant. The elephant represents our emotional side, our instincts and feelings. And the person is the much weaker, rational, logical side. And sometimes you can guide the elephant, and sometimes the elephant takes the reins and you're just hanging on. So my client keeps coming back to this idea that he should be able to shut off the irrational part of himself. And that right there is a problem. He's expecting the impossible because he does not accept that this is a part of human nature. To be alive and to be human is to form attachments. Every animal out there forms attachments when they form a relationship with anything. There is no love without also being vulnerable to attachment and being vulnerable to the loss when one day it ends. So of course his friend is in pain. That's the natural consequence of loving someone. No matter how much you want to avoid it, this is what happens. And the sooner we stop fighting that reality, the sooner we come to peace. But when you expect yourself to just exert logic and let go like you're some kind of robot, you're setting yourself up to fail because that's not how people work. This is why one of my favorite quotes is by Antonio D'Amasio who says, We are not thinking machines that feel. We are feeling machines that think. But look, I get it. It's natural to want to just cut things off to let go and stop the pain. I very much relate because I remember spending my early 20s having gone through a couple of breakups. The worst breakup was so bad I dropped out of law school. It was pain on a level that I'd never experienced before. Like, never. I thought I was gonna go out of my freaking mind. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. It was so bad. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. But it was also really odd because I was insanely productive. And it turns out it was because I was so frantic to do anything to get away from how horrible I felt with the breakup. I was completing my to-do list like a terminator because I didn't want to sit alone in my apartment with my feelings. The problem for me back then, and maybe this is true for you as well, is that I hadn't been taught any type of coping skill for this. I hadn't been taught how to feel my feelings. I wasn't taught how to handle that intense discomfort, the heartbreak, the rejection, the isolation, shame, guilt, the regret. If anything, my parents told me I shouldn't date. And I sure as heck had never been taught how to have these feelings and to let them be there without drowning in them. How much of this sounds like you? Because honestly, I think this is most people. Most of us were never taught how to handle our emotions. Take a moment and think back to those really hard times, whether it was a breakup or you failed at something. What did you do? For me, I did the only thing that I knew how to do, which was call up my friends, burden the shit out of them, overshare, lean on them to an unhealthy degree, and tunnel vision on my work. I would swing from one end of the spectrum to the other. I had days where I was ultra productive, and then the next day I would just fall apart and barely get out of bed. I eventually moved on and recovered, but looking back now, I didn't actually build any emotional resilience. I was kind of like a house of cards just waiting for the next strong wind to knock everything down. And that was the issue. I wasn't dealing with my feelings in any kind of healthy way. I was either running away from the feelings or I was completely overwhelmed by them. I hadn't learned to navigate that middle ground of allowing myself to feel the pain in degrees without letting it swallow me up. And because I didn't have emotional resilience, I not only repeated the same behaviors, I stayed in my next relationship for seven years. I kept staying because I was so afraid of dealing with a breakup again. I was terrified that my life was going to fall apart like the last time, but I was afraid that this time I was going to crumble forever. And that becomes a trap. You stay in the thing that isn't working because you're more afraid of the feelings that come after than you are of wasting your life in something that isn't serving you. So whether it's the relationship, the job, where you're living, whatever it is, you know it's wrong and you've known for quite a while. But leaving means feeling something you don't know how to handle. So you stay and you keep staying, and years go by. This is the perfect example of how everything we do is because of how we think we will feel. So if you think that you're going to be scared of something, you are going to do everything in your power to avoid doing the thing that will lead to being scared. Even though you don't actually have proof that you're going to feel that way, you only think you do. It's why we get into the rebound relationship, or we go from relationship to relationship, because we're afraid of facing our feelings alone. It's why you see people dive into work after suffering a really big loss, like a breakup, a divorce, or someone close to them passed away. Or we hear that saying, the best way to get over somebody is to get under somebody new. And while that can be kind of amusing, me as a coach is like, oh no, do not do that. I definitely do not recommend doing that. But I get it. We all do some version of this. Because when we are in pain, all we want to do is make it stop. We will do anything. And that is the number one problem. We seek to escape the pain instead of fully experiencing it, absorbing, and then learning what we can. So here's a really weird thing I've noticed. When we're physically hurt, we know we need to go to the doctor or to the hospital, depending on how bad it is. But when we're hurting emotionally, most of us don't seek professional help. And it's even worse when we haven't been equipped with the tools to handle it on our own, which is why most of us rush past the pain or we take shortcuts to do anything to end the suffering. And as if that's not bad enough, we pour gas on the fire with this other weird thing. We berate and we shame and we guilt ourselves about the fact that we feel this bad, the fact that we're having emotions. Again, it's like yelling at the wind for blowing. Anything that takes you away from processing what's happened to you, it's a distraction. It only makes the pain last longer. When we turn on ourselves and we judge the heck out of ourselves, it just becomes another smokescreen that keeps us from healing and learning so that we can then finally move forward. You're already going through a tough climb up the mountain. Don't throw more boulders at yourself. So the answer really is to honor that we are emotional creatures that sometimes need special tending when we are in emotional pain. Just like when we go to the doctor or we go to the hospital when we're in physical pain, we need help when we experience emotional pain. Now, I know that many people do seek support and comfort from their friends, their family. Maybe they even go to therapy or they work with a coach. And for sure that can help, especially with therapy and coaching. In fact, this is what therapists and coaches actually do. They help you recognize what you're feeling and actually feel it so that you can resolve it and finally move on. But the thing that I really want to stress here is that the primary skill you want to develop is the ability to sit with your own feelings. Because if you don't have that one skill, then all of that external support becomes a crutch. If you can't sit with your own feelings, what you end up doing is living like the 99% of us out there, who are so afraid of feeling a certain way that our choices are no longer our own. And the reason why I'm saying external support can become a crutch is that you feel like you're doing something. You feel like you're working on yourself by talking through your feelings. You feel like you're making progress, but you're not actually processing if you're not doing the work on your own at least some of the time. You need to sit with yourself and practice opening the faucet on your feelings without trying to run away and without trying to resist. If you only do that when you're in the company of others, then you are outsourcing the work. Real healing requires you to be with yourself, and no one else can do that for you. Now, I've had multiple clients ask me, what the heck does sitting with your feelings mean? And that's a fair question. So think about the elephant and the writer again. The elephant wants to turn left, back to the ex, back to checking their Instagram, back to texting them. The writer keeps yinking right, saying, No, we're done, move on, stop this. But the harder the writer pulls, the more the elephant digs in. What actually works is if the writer pauses and acknowledges that the elephant misses what used to be there, and lets the elephant breathe, take the space to grieve without whipping the elephant to keep moving. That's what sitting with your feelings is. In practice, if you want to try doing this at home this weekend or whenever you have some time and space to sit with your feelings, the first step is to notice where the feeling is in your body. Where do you feel something physically when you're having these feelings? Just notice that. Step two is to stay with the physical sensation without replaying the events of why you're feeling this way. Okay, so you're to just sit with the physical feeling in your body. Let the wave move through you without trying to brace against it. Feeling your feelings is to surrender to the wave. With most emotions, you will find that the wave will peak and then it passes, typically in under two to three minutes. And I know that doesn't sound very long because it isn't. But the studies show that when you allow the emotional wave to pass through you without trying to push it aside, without replaying and dwelling on events, that's actually about how long they last, unless we're talking about grief. Grief is different because it's not just one wave, it's hundreds of waves that come over time. But I'll get into that in a different episode. Now, regardless of which emotion, here's what's true across the board. All the detours you're taking through avoiding, burying, and resisting your feelings, that turns your emotional experience into this miserable game of whack-a-mole that lasts days, months, or even years. Now, here's a note: if you decide to sit with your feelings, be careful that you're not focusing all of your energy thinking about the feeling, because that's intellectualizing it. You also don't want to replay the events over and over, which is ruminating and drags out the emotions. Don't judge or beat yourself up for feeling the way you do. And also don't push yourself out of the feeling by thinking positive. This is not the time for a reframe. Your only job is to open yourself up to your feelings and to let them be there. This is how you teach yourself that it's okay to have your feelings and emotions and still do what you want to do. This is emotional resilience. It's not easy. It can be hard for a lot of us to do this on our own. And it's also hard to watch someone else go through it too. So you remember my client from the beginning, the one who was asking why his friend doesn't just let go? My client's reaction is pretty common. And to that, I'll just say that while it's natural to not want to see your friends suffer, that reaction is actually about our own discomfort. We want a quick resolution to close the loop. So that causes us to push our friends or families forward when they're just not ready. It's like baking a cake. If you try and take the cake out of the oven too soon, even though it looks baked on the outside, it's still a raw mess on the inside. So let the cake bake. It takes as long as it takes. If you like my podcast and want to support me, would you mind sharing it with a friend? You're also welcome to send in comments or questions. Just text the link in the description. As always, thank you so much for listening. And remember, I believe in you. See you next time.