My most recent survey findings.

Family Feud would be the game I have complete confidence I’d dominate. Don’t be surprised if you find me on some sketchy game website to test my skills, no doubt collecting several viruses on my computer.

But I can’t resist. There’s no high like blasting through the Fast Money Round.

Fortunately, my immediate family has the same boisterous confidence in their survey answer guessing skills. In front of the TV, clinks of forks on dinner plates are only interrupted by shouts of answers, dings, claps, and Steve Harvey’s hearty laugh.

While I plan to acquire the entirety of my retirement savings via multiple wins on Family Feud, the art of “the survey” is a tool I employ off-screen.

I like forming juicy questions like:

• If you had to fake your death, could you pull it off?

• What’s your ethical call on flirting purely to make a sale?

• How do you deal with it when one person in your group has an issue with a decision that most of the group is already on board for? 

• Age gaps in relationships. What’s the cap? Does it change based on how old you are or other factors?

• If you knew you'd be okay, would you go to the bottom of the ocean by yourself?

• If a loved one came to you and asked you to be their surrogate, would you do it?

I’ll keep these questions in my back pocket and pull them out when curiosity calls. I’ll ask anyone—coworkers, friends, family, customers, or anyone else. Interjected into organic conversation, these questions receive a spectrum of answers delivered via furrowed brows and contemplative gazes, and I love every minute of it. As people form their responses, I see sides of them small talk would’ve never revealed.

My most recent survey question was the simplest ever—or so I thought.

Prompted by my recent discovery of my attachment style and looking to get a handle on my harmful tendency to avoid negative emotions like the plague, I asked a range of people in my life:

How do you feel? What I mean is—how do you do the activity of feeling?

What do you do when you’re in the gunk of an emotion? Just sit there? How do you go on with your day?

How do you specifically feel?

I expected a repetitive, universal formula to “doing feeling” successfully. I needed steps, strategy, something to write on paper and plaster around my apartment. Something like: five deep breaths, ten jumping jacks, three Hail Marys, and you’re good to go!

To my surprise, most responses went something along the lines of: “I don’t know how to do it either. If you figure it out, let me know.”

Comforting, yet annoying.

While I felt less alone in my deer-in-headlights relationship with emotion, I was dumbfounded so few people had language for how they personally handled theirs.

And I needed answers because my long-standing automatic response to negative emotion has been: “This is uncomfortable. SUPPRESS IT.” This looks like reasoning it away, throwing myself into work, intellectualizing it and calling it “processed,” or distracting myself incessantly—anything to avoid enduring the physiological experience of that feeling. While this strategy has historically helped me cope thus far, I’ve lived enough life to recognize how I can’t go on living it by burying every negative emotion that comes my way.

This tendency has only brought on additional pain, hurting me and, ultimately, hurting the people I love.

So I’ve been practicing a different approach: acknowledging my feelings, and IT’S AWFUL. Without my old strategies of avoidance, staying with negative emotions has been so unbearable I began to wonder if I was missing something. It couldn’t possibly always be this agonizing, right?

This sent me on my quest to discover the mechanics of feeling, survey question in-hand.

As I asked around, gathering answers and sparking deeper and deeper conversation, the picture of the art of feeling began to gain more color. Beautiful responses included journaling, meditating, and getting in a good cry.

But one response hit the nail on the head for me.

It came from my somatic coach. Paraphrasing, she said, “Difficult emotions don’t last forever, but they will return. The trick is to stay with an emotion long enough for something to change. Learn how to attend to it in whatever way that calls for and notice the shift in your body when there’s relief.” She suggested movement, walking, singing—whatever got you out of your head and into your body—to attend to those feelings.

There’s no formula to resolve them. Moving through it takes continually renewed attunement to your mind and body every time.

With this fresh batch of survey responses, I realize I cannot “avoid my way” out of negative emotions in this life.

It’s not possible.

I will be sad again.

I will grieve again.

I will be angry again.

However, if I can learn to face emotions and attune to their every ebb and flow, I think this work could be the greatest gift I ever give to myself.

All that to say…

What game show do you feel confident you’d win?