Denying, distracting, suppressing is not the same thing as "sitting with."

I see it more as we can't selectively only feel the good feelings. Nor can we only selectively supress the bad feelings. It's just not how our brains work. Good and bad go together. There's a difference though between sitting with and dwelling upon. The idea is to sit with them until we have consciously opened them up for examination, and separated those which reflect present reality, and those which are remnants of a dysfunctional past experience. The ones that reflect reality, we are then in a position to respond to in different ways: distract, put aside until later, act on, refute, whatever. Those that don't reflect present reality, need to be let go. How anyone lets go is very individual. Some find yoga or meditative practices helpful, others find physical activity or an engrossing activity that requires control and focus helpful.

I just read an interesting study from the British Psych Assoc that examined journaling. The results found that those who could write about their negative/ traumatic experiences within a sense of self-compassion, benefitted from writing. Those who could not summon self-compassion in their perspective, not only did not benefit--they perceived their distress as greater after than before writing.

So I think a crucial part of sitting with is that it must be with an absence of self-judgement. It needs to be an awareness of feeling these negative feelings, but at somewhat of a distance, without using them as a weapon against ourselves. This may explain the success of mindfulness training.