By Kathryn Arbic, RMT
Registered Massage Therapist | ART® Certified Provider
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM)
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology — Candidate, Yorkville University
There is a moment that often passes almost unnoticed.
Something happens. We receive disappointing news, recognize a problem, feel a shift in a relationship, or notice an uncomfortable emotion rising within us. Perhaps we feel sadness, frustration, uncertainty, or a sense that something isn't quite right.
And almost immediately, we begin to do something about it.
We analyze the situation. We look for an explanation. We consider our options, develop a plan, reframe our perspective, or remind ourselves why we shouldn't feel the way we do.
Sometimes, we move so quickly into problem-solving that we barely register what happened inside us in the first place.
We go straight from something is wrong to what am I going to do about it?
But what if there is value in the space between those two moments?
What if we don't always need to move so quickly from recognizing an experience to resolving it?
The urge to fix
Our capacity to problem-solve is valuable. It helps us navigate challenges, make decisions, and respond to circumstances that need our attention. When something is within our control, taking action can be exactly what is needed.
But sometimes, our desire to fix a problem serves another purpose: it gives us somewhere to go when we don't know what to do with what we're feeling.
Emotions can be uncomfortable. Disappointment, grief, anger, fear, and uncertainty can leave us feeling vulnerable or unsettled. We may not know how long they will last, what they mean, or whether we can trust ourselves to sit with them.
Thinking, planning, and finding solutions can give us a sense of direction. Rationalizing can help us make an experience feel more manageable. Even positive reframing can provide relief when we are struggling.
None of these responses is inherently wrong. The question is whether we are choosing them because they are what we need, or whether we are reaching for them because we find it difficult to remain with the experience itself.
There is a difference between thoughtfully working through something and moving away from an uncomfortable feeling before we've had a chance to understand it.
And that difference can be surprisingly easy to miss.
What happens in the space between?
Imagine that something you had hoped for doesn't unfold as you expected.
You feel disappointed. Perhaps there is sadness beneath the disappointment, or frustration, or a sense of uncertainty about what comes next.
You might immediately begin looking for the lesson in the experience. You remind yourself of what you have to be grateful for. You consider whether your expectations were realistic. You start developing a new plan.
These responses may all have merit. But notice what can happen when they arrive too quickly.
The disappointment itself never really gets acknowledged.
The sadness doesn't have much room to be felt. The hopes that weren't fulfilled don't get much consideration. The experience is evaluated, explained, or reframed before you have had an opportunity to understand what it means to you.
You might arrive at a reasonable conclusion without ever fully acknowledging what you lost, what mattered to you, or what you were hoping would be different.
The in-between is the space in which we allow ourselves to notice these things.
It is the moment when we can acknowledge, I'm disappointed. This mattered to me. I had hoped things would be different.
We don't have to justify the feeling, talk ourselves out of it, or decide what to do next.
We can simply allow the experience to exist.
The purpose of the in-between isn't to solve the experience. It's to give ourselves the opportunity to experience it.
What happens when we bypass this space?
When we repeatedly move away from uncomfortable emotions before acknowledging them, we can become very practiced at managing our experiences without necessarily feeling that we've worked through them.
We may understand why something happened. We may have developed a sensible explanation and decided what to do about it. We may even be able to articulate the experience clearly to someone else.
And yet, something can remain unresolved.
Perhaps the same disappointment resurfaces in another situation. Perhaps we find ourselves reacting more strongly than we expected to something relatively small. Perhaps we feel disconnected, irritable, or unsettled without immediately understanding why.
These experiences can have many explanations, and not every difficult emotion needs extensive processing. But sometimes, they invite us to consider whether we have been giving ourselves enough room to acknowledge what we have experienced.
Emotional processing involves more than understanding an experience intellectually. It can also involve recognizing our emotional responses, allowing ourselves to feel them, and making sense of what they mean in the context of our lives.
When we habitually bypass this process, we may miss opportunities to recognize our needs, understand our boundaries, acknowledge a loss, or clarify what matters to us.
We may also become less familiar with our own emotional experience. If our first response to discomfort is always to explain it away, change our perspective, or find a solution, we have fewer opportunities to learn what happens when we simply allow a feeling to be present.
Over time, we can begin to treat emotions as problems to be managed rather than experiences we can become curious about and learn to navigate.
This doesn't mean every feeling contains a hidden message or that we need to examine every uncomfortable experience. Sometimes, we are simply tired, frustrated, or having a difficult day.
But when we consistently move straight into fixing, we risk overlooking information that could help us better understand ourselves.
Learning to trust the process
One of the challenges of making space for our emotions is that it can feel unproductive.
We live in a culture that often values action, efficiency, and measurable outcomes. We tend to recognize the value of doing something when we can identify what has been accomplished.
Problem-solving produces visible results. We make a decision, complete a task, resolve a conflict, or develop a plan.
What does sitting with disappointment accomplish?
What is the benefit of allowing sadness to be present when we cannot change what happened?
How is it useful to spend time with uncertainty when what we really want is an answer?
These are reasonable questions, particularly when we are accustomed to responding to challenges by taking action.
But the value of emotional processing isn't always immediately visible. Sometimes, it becomes apparent in the way we relate to an experience afterward.
We may discover that we feel differently once we've acknowledged what happened. We may recognize that a situation mattered more to us than we initially admitted. We may become clearer about what we need, what we are willing to accept, or what we want to do next.
And sometimes, the circumstances remain exactly the same, but our relationship with them changes.
We can acknowledge disappointment without interpreting it as evidence that we've failed. We can recognize sadness without deciding that we need to make ourselves feel better immediately. We can allow uncertainty without demanding that we resolve it before we are ready.
This doesn't mean that slowing down will always bring relief or clarity. Sometimes, an emotion remains uncomfortable even after we've given it space.
The value lies not in guaranteeing a particular outcome, but in developing our capacity to remain present with our experiences without immediately needing to change them.
That capacity can help us approach ourselves with greater curiosity, make decisions that reflect what genuinely matters to us, and respond to difficult circumstances with more room to choose.
We can feel something without having to fix it
Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of this practice is learning to tolerate the fact that an experience can remain unresolved.
We can feel disappointed and still have hope for the future.
We can feel sad about a decision and still believe it was the right one.
We can be grateful for what we have while grieving what we had hoped for.
We can recognize that something needs to change without knowing how to change it yet.
These experiences aren't necessarily contradictions that need to be reconciled. They are often simply part of being human.
When we rush to resolve them, we can inadvertently place pressure on ourselves to arrive at a single, coherent feeling or perspective. We want to know whether we are okay with a decision, whether we have accepted a loss, or whether we are ready to move forward.
But emotional experiences don't always follow the same timeline as our thinking.
We may understand something before we feel ready to accept it. We may know what we need to do while still feeling sad about having to do it. We may be moving forward while still carrying some disappointment about what we are leaving behind.
Giving these experiences room doesn't mean we are stuck. It may simply mean we are allowing ourselves to move through them at a pace that respects their significance.
And we don't need to make an emotion disappear before we can continue living our lives.
Sometimes, we can carry sadness and still take the next step. We can acknowledge uncertainty and still make a decision. We can allow disappointment to be part of our experience without allowing it to define the whole of it.
The in-between gives us room for that complexity.
The space before the next step
There is no perfect way to navigate difficult experiences. We will all have moments when we avoid an emotion, rush toward a solution, or try to make sense of something before we are ready to feel it.
The invitation is simply to notice.
To recognize the moment when we begin explaining away a feeling, searching for an answer, or telling ourselves why we should already be over something.
And, when we can, to pause.
Not because we must process every emotion before moving forward, but because we deserve the opportunity to understand our own experiences rather than continually moving past them.
We don't always need to know what comes next. We don't always need a plan. We don't even need to know what an experience means.
Sometimes, we need a little time to acknowledge what has happened, to feel what we feel, and to let ourselves be where we are.
There is value in the space between what we experience and what we do about it.
It is where we can meet ourselves with curiosity rather than correction, acknowledgment rather than judgment, and patience rather than pressure.
And sometimes, that space is precisely what allows the next step to emerge.
Interested in exploring this further?
Recognizing the value of slowing down is one thing; learning how to do it in everyday life is another.
In the companion article, The Practice of Staying: How to Make Space for What You Feel, we explore gentle ways to notice emotions, become curious about our experiences, and create space between what we feel and how we respond.
© 2026 Kathryn Arbic / Callisto Therapeutics. All rights reserved. Ottawa-Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada.
