Why Are We So Uncomfortable With Emotions?
By Dr. Stephanie Samar
As a psychologist and a mother, I’ve recently found myself holding an experience that is surprisingly hard to put into words.
In my professional role, I am trained to understand emotions - particularly anxiety and depression. I help parents make sense of their child’s big feelings, recognize signs of dysregulation, and respond in ways that foster emotional growth and resilience. Yet, at home, I am also the parent of a young child navigating symptoms of anxiety. And in those moments, my clarity sometimes dissolves into confusion.
Over the past month, this tension came into sharper focus. New holiday celebrations, anxiety during swim lessons, and the start of a new art class all presented familiar challenges for my child. When I viewed these moments through my clinical lens, I understood exactly what was happening and how to support her. But when I experienced them as her parent, something else crept in - self-consciousness, self-doubt, and the quiet fear that perhaps I was overreacting, or worse, that my child’s struggles were somehow my fault.
How could both of these realities be true at the same time?
The Moment of Clarity
The answer emerged one afternoon as I sat outside my child’s new art class, reflecting on a few minutes prior when she sobbed into my lap after leaving the class as they transitioned to a new activity she wasn’t expecting. Together, we worked to help her body regulate. When she was ready, she made the brave choice to rejoin the class.
While I felt sure of my role in helping her learn to calm her body down, I couldn’t help but feel shame from the responses from the people around us. One parent said, what I assume was a comment meant to minimize my child’s reaction, “I wish my child loved me enough to not want to leave me,” while the teacher asked “How old is she? Maybe she’s too young for this class.”
In that moment, it became clear: I wasn’t only helping my child manage her emotions, I was also trying to manage the emotions of the people around us.
I was attuned not just to my child’s distress, but to the perceived discomfort of other parents, teachers, and observers. Their imagined judgments. Their unease. Their questions.
And that’s when a deeper question surfaced:
Why do children’s emotions - especially big, visible ones - make adults so uncomfortable?
The Pressure to Feel “Happy”
In my practice, I often hear parents say that their goal for therapy is for their child to “feel happy.” This desire is understandable, we want our children to feel good. But as a therapeutic goal, happiness alone is unrealistic and can place enormous pressure on children to perform emotionally.
Happiness is an important emotion, but it is only one part of the human emotional experience. Fear, sadness, anger, confusion, curiosity, and frustration are equally essential. A healthy emotional life isn’t about eliminating discomfort - it’s about developing the capacity to move through a full range of feelings.
Our lives are meant to be a vibrant kaleidoscope of emotions. Each feeling offers information:
about ourselves
about others
about what feels safe or unsafe
about what matters to us
When we try to narrow that range - when we signal that only certain emotions are acceptable - we unintentionally teach children to suppress or judge parts of themselves.
Emotions Are Not Problems to Solve
Sadness, fear, and anger are not problems in need of fixing. They are signals, experiences, and opportunities for connection. Yet many of us were raised - explicitly or implicitly - to believe that strong emotions should be contained, quieted, or resolved as quickly as possible.
So when a child cries in public, freezes in a group, or struggles to participate, it can activate our own discomfort. We may worry about how it looks, what it means, or whether we’re doing something wrong. In those moments, the urge to make the feeling go away often has more to do with our anxiety than our child’s needs.
Supporting Emotional Tolerance, in Children and Ourselves
Helping children develop emotional resilience requires that we, as adults, build our own tolerance for discomfort. This means:
Allowing emotions to exist without rushing to fix them
Separating our child’s feelings from our fears about judgment
Recognizing that regulation is a process, not a performance
When we can sit with our child’s emotions - especially the messy, inconvenient ones - we send a powerful message: All of you is welcome here.
And in doing so, we may also find ourselves growing alongside them.
My child and I will keep working on her anxiety. She has created her own bravery statement – “I’m feeling scared and I still want to do it.” And as she faces her fears, I’m noticing other emotions manifest in her little body - Pride, Confidence, and Joy.
