There are certain strategies that people use to handle emotions, and some of them lead to more happiness than others.
We might try to resist the emotion, which in many cases results in the emotion continuing. As many have said, “What we resist, persists.”
Another approach is to suppress the emotion, pushing it down so we don’t feel it. Naturally the feeling will emerge in other ways.
A related approach is to “spiritually bypass”, putting our focus on positive things, evading the adverse feelings by putting a veneer of happiness over it. The emotions don’t get processed, and can fester within us.
When we feel certain emotions, we might judge them positively. For example, we might feel angry and encourage the feeling, thinking about the situation that inspired anger within us. The result is that we feel more anger.
Another strategy is “paradoxical intention”, deliberately feeling the emotion, perhaps even pushing ourselves to feel it a little more - without justifying it intellectually. In this case, we normally feel it fully, and it quickly leaves us.
Similarly, we can embrace the emotions, using patient love, similar to the love of a grandmother, to observe the emotions, surround them in love, giving them sufficient space to transform or dissipate.
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