I am new to scholars and the podcast. When I first learned about the model, I thought its purpose was to ultimately make me feel better. I agree with the importance of feeling and not resisting negative emotions (podcast episode #8), but now I’m having some confusion about how how the two work together (owning negative emotions and the model). You touched on this briefly at the end of podcast episode #175 for our August homework, but I’d love to hear more.

A part of me really resists the idea of allowing and really experiencing a negative emotion when I think I could just go to the model and change my thinking so I feel better. Why stay with negative emotion if I don’t have to? I guess I’m missing the link that allows these two concepts to work together in a complementary way.

If the model is really just to understand problems (not fix them), and I’m encouraged to fully allow negative emotion, I’m not sure where positive emotion fits into this equation—its scary to me to focus on all this negative stuff because I don’t want to ignore the positive! I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!