Are You Giving All Your Attention to Negative Emotions?
When Amanda Sheeren (co-founder of If Lost, Start Here) joined me on A Thought I Kept, she brought a thought that had stayed with her for years:
“Even in the darkness, there is light.”
It sounds simple but it came from a place of burnout, emotional overwhelm, and the quiet collapse that can happen when we believe we’re doing everything “right.”
In the episode, Amanda shares a moment from early motherhood: two small kids, no sleep, therapy for the first time. She described showing up to those sessions thinking she’d be praised for being emotionally attuned. “I was validating every feeling. I was letting my kids be sad, be mad, feel all the things.”
But then her therapist asked her something that stopped her in her tracks:
“Is it possible that you're giving all your attention to negative emotions?”
That was the pivot point.
When Feeling Deeply Becomes Feeling Stuck
If you’ve ever been told to feel your feelings — and taken that advice seriously — you may know this space. You learn that sadness, anger, and frustration are valid. You work hard not to bypass or brush past what’s hard.
But here’s the catch: when we spend all our energy in the shadow emotions, we can forget to make space for joy, hope, and light. And those emotions need practice too.
In emotion coaching, we talk a lot about awareness, validation, and regulation. But there's a step people often miss:
Attention. Where are you placing it? What emotions are getting airtime?
Validating sadness is powerful. But so is dancing in the kitchen. So is naming a moment of peace, or laughing at the squirrel outside your window — something Amanda shares in the episode that shifted how she related to joy.
Emotions are not just there to be survived. They're part of what makes life meaningful — all of them.
What Are You Practicing
In the episode, Amanda reflects on how her own attention began to shift. Not through gratitude lists or forced positivity, but through tiny joys. A squirrel doing something weird. A rainbow on a grey day. The “glimmers,” as some researchers call them.
And with time, those small practices started to grow into something more sustainable — a full-spectrum emotional life, not just a deep one.
Interested in Emotion Coaching?
We offer 1:1 emotion coaching sessions for people wanting to better understand their emotions — parents, creatives, leaders, those who feel a lot and want to feel more resourced doing it.
Explore our coaching offers here
