This is so important! For some people, this kind of work could be the most crucial thing they get out of therapy. Others may need more or different things from therapy, but for a lot of people, getting more in touch with emotions in ways like these would be a huge help with the other work they need to do, and sometimes it's a prerequisite for it.
I have an addition to make!
It's best to engage in a substantial way with emotions as they come up, either in response to a situation in a present, or when something stirs up something from your past. But there are times when this isn't feasible. Occasionally, you really won't be able to engage at all. It's OK to make a choice to avoid the emotional response entirely, but this should be saved for the toughest or most high-stakes cases, like when you're in the middle of a job interview, or your two-year-old is having a huge meltdown in the street, or something.
More often, you'll run into situations where it's hard, but you still have the capacity to sit with an emotion at least partially. Even if all you can do is take a split second to name the feeling and acknowledge it, that is better than engaging in full-on avoidance. You're still chipping away at the backlog of unresolved stuff you're carrying around. You're still building the habit of being mindful and making space for your feelings.
To put it more succinctly: sit with your emotions fully when you can, and when you can't, sit with them in some small way whenever you possibly can, while being gentle with yourself if you really need to go into full avoidance mode in a crisis.
Also, the more you process your emotions fully at those times when you have the right (or right enough) circumstances and energy to spare, the more you'll build habits that will be there for you when your situation is more challenging.
I'll give a couple examples from my life. After working on sitting with my feelings more for a number of years, I learned about the concept of self-compassion and tried doing some compassionate self-talk in hard situations. I would find myself, when I did this, putting my hand on my chest like I was giving myself a comforting, centering touch. At another point, I heard about the benefits of having a shorthand phrase to use in distressing situations. When my twins were babies and I was off-the-charts stressed a lot of the time, my shorthand phrase was "this is the work." It meant that when things go "wrong" in a parenting situation, this isn't some kind of interruption to a default parenting situation where everything goes perfectly and exactly as you planned—actually, unexpected, challenging situations are the norm in parenting and how you handle them is what defines your parenting, not your ability to avoid them ever coming up (which, again, is impossible). Over time I started to apply the same principle to other areas of my life because really, everything worth doing is like that.
Nowadays, if I can't sit fully with a feeling and can only take a minute, or if I'm someplace where I can't let on that I'm experiencing a tough emotion, I can put my hand on my chest and channel a little bit of self-compassion, or I can tell myself "this is the work" and it'll often help me to shift my perspective away from inwardly protesting about the challenges of life and toward facing them in the best way I can.
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