Good question. The other replies have been interesting. I can only try to answer how it is with me. To me, facing an emotion means not running away from it but feeling it. I've been doing a lot of work in therapy with this as I've tended to only allow myself to feel the emotions that either make sense or that I classify as OK - the other ones I've tried to shove back down.

So I'm trying to allow myself to feel any emotion that comes up without judging it. But of course there's a difference between feeling and acting. I may suddenly feel so angry that I want to take a hatchet and knock a few holes in the living room wall. But I can FEEL this without actually DOING it.

One trick I've learned is to let the emotion flow through me. In other words, I don't let my body catch it and hold onto it - I don't want an emotion to "stick" in my body. I let it pass through. It doesn't lessen the intensity at all, but knowing that it's moving through, and that at some point it will pass, helps make it bearable. It works really well for sorrow and pain. And while this is happening, I try to figure out where it's coming from. If it's obvious, like a friend died, this is no big deal. But I experience intense emotions where I'm not sure where they're coming from. So I try to figure it out. And therapy is helping tremendously in working on where the inappropriate or unknown emotions are coming from.

Like someone else said, it's easier to just feel it than try to hold it back. That just messes you up, because there's a reason you're feeling the emotion. It's trying to tell you something. And ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. It'll just come back again, and again, and again....

My two cents. I know I'm weird, but I guess we all figure out different ways to cope.