Can Mindfulness Meditation Cause You Emotional Harm?

Mindfulness meditation is often touted as an incredibly beneficial practice that can significantly help reduce your stress, anxiety, depression and generally help reduce negativity. You might be wondering how useful mindfulness meditation is in practice and if it actually helps with stress. There is no denying that this meditation method can indeed be a very effective form of meditation, but could it also be causing you emotional harm?

Let's take a look at how mindfulness meditation can actually affect you.

What Is Mindfulness Meditation?

Mindfulness meditation is a specific type of meditation that focuses on developing the skills that are needed to recognize and accept both inner and outer life experiences.

The theory of mindfulness meditation is that by mastering your awareness and being mindful of each and every moment, individuals can become more in-tuned and live a fuller life because they are consistently present in every moment in their lives. How does mindfulness meditation work in practice, though?

How Does it Work?

Mindfulness meditation works by teaching individuals how to become aware of and then release any negative emotions or thoughts they may have. By doing this, it encourages the awareness of only positive feelings and emotions.

Is it Effective?

Although it may not work for everyone, current research suggests that mindfulness meditation can be effective for individuals suffering from depression, anxiety and other mood disorders. A recent study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that mindfulness meditation was equally effective as traditional antidepressant medications in treating depression.

Can it Cause Emotional Harm?

Although mindfulness meditation can be a highly effective tool for handling stress, it is not a magic cure for negative emotions. Although this type of meditation can help you, it cannot be relied on as a sole source of problem solving.

If you avoid all negativity rather than learn how to handle negative situations (which are a normal part of life), it can lead to unrealistic attitudes and ultimately do more harm than good. To address negative emotions, you must first become mindful of them so that you can pay attention to what they are telling you. If instead you detach from negative emotions and ignore the problems that come with them, in the long run things will get much worse.

Is There a Downside to Mindfulness Meditation?

There can be. Because mindfulness meditation encourages individuals to learn how to accept all situations they encounter, it contradicts opposing theories that state that you have to go through negativity to get over it. When it comes to stressful situations, emotional pain and suffering, physical discomfort and pain, or any other unwanted condition, many professionals believe that there are more effective ways to work through these situations other than just acknowledging and accepting them.

How Can Mindfulness Meditation Cause Emotional Harm?

It Can Promote Denial and Avoidance

Because mindfulness meditation encourages the acceptance of all situations, including negative emotions, many individuals use it as a tool for suppressing and avoiding negative emotions. By claiming to just accept any negativity they are experiencing, these individuals are not actually experiencing the negative event and the emotional pain that comes with it.

Instead, they are merely saying “this is a negative event, and negative events occur in life, and rather than experience this normal emotion, I’m going to accept it and subsequently avoid it”.

Though it may seem like an effective way to handle negativity, it can actually be an avoidance behavior. You may feel better initially, but those negative emotions remain in the subconscious. Without experiencing them, they can lurk there for long periods of time, only to appear on the surface down the road.

It Can Cause You to Misjudge Your Emotions

Mindfulness meditations can lead to the disassociation of emotions. Some individuals start to regard emotions as not being real, as something that will pass in time. Instead of accepting negative events and emotions as a normal part of life, some people practicing mindfulness meditation will label disconcerting thoughts and negative emotions as inferior or bad. This mindset prevents the true healing that comes only from experiencing negativity, learning from it, healing and growing.

It Can Cause You to Adapt

Adapting to your environment is generally a positive thing, however, when it comes to experiencing negative emotions, it can cause more harm than good. Mindfulness meditation teaches individuals how to hold back their anger, and push any negative emotions deep down. Rather than going through the negative experience, some people will adapt their emotional response to avoidance. By not acknowledging negative feelings, they think the pain is gone, and it is, but only temporarily.

It Can Prevent Necessary Grieving

There is a natural grieving process that normally occurs following emotionally painful or traumatic experiences. The nature of mindfulness meditation causes some individuals to cut the grieving process short, or avoid it all together.

It Can Cause You to Become Complacent

Having to face hardships and experience stress is a normal part of life. In time, we learn how to face our challenges and we take away life lessons from negative events. To learn how to effectively handle pain and discomfort, you must first experience it. Some individuals rely on mindfulness meditation to fix their problems for them. They use it as an unrealistic coping mechanism to resolve conflicts.  These individuals can become detached form life events, relying solely on the meditation to bring about their happiness. Negative emotions serve a purpose, they are there to alert you to a problem. If you ignore the emotions, you are also ignoring the underlying problem, which prevents true happiness.

It Can Have a Negative Effect on Your Relationships With Others

Because of the avoidant nature of mindfulness meditation, some individuals may detach themselves from friends, partners or loved ones who are going through rough times. Because the person does not effectively know how to handle negative emotions, he may become aggravated with others who sad, angry or upset. He may view this as a sign of weakness in others, because to him they do not have the ability to just calm down, let it go or wish the negativity away.

Some people practicing this type of mindfulness have trouble making a connection to their own feelings, so naturally they find it difficult to connect to the feelings of others. This has detrimental effects on relationships, because the person’s ability to empathize is nonexistent. There is no compassion or concern for others feelings because those emotions don’t exist in the individual’s own self.