Hmm. I never found reframing my emotions to be the same as avoiding my emotions. Perhaps that is something that you might need to talk with your therapist about (or perhaps your therapist really doesn't know how to do this with you).

Actually, reframing wasn't about reframing my emotions. It was about reframing my thinking so that my emotions would follow. So, for instance, I might be really angry and thrown by a student's behavior today -- I am totally keyed up and maybe even crying about it. My therapist would work with me to figure out what I was thinking about the situation; why was I thinking that thing; why was that thought so upsetting, when did I first have that thought about myself, etc. etc. What I would discover as we dug was that my initial thought (a thought that happened so quickly and instinctively that I probably didn't even recognize it in the moment) was almost always about something much older in my history AND often that thought was something that I had internalized as a belief about myself or about life that was usually a mistaken belief (core belief). Once I realized which thought had triggered such a chain of overwhelming emotion in me, I could reframe my thinking about what had happened with my student because, quite honestly, it wasn't today's incident with my student that was causing my extreme emotional reaction; it was that old stuff. Once I reframed my thinking and understood what was setting me off, I could at least acknowledge that the current situation wasn't nearly as severe as I was making it out to be. I could place the emotional reaction in the right context (old stuff) and handle the new stuff with more perspective.

So I wasn't avoiding emotions at all. I was validating where they came from WHILE reframing my thinking about current events. AND, once I had bumped into the same old thinking setting me off enough times, the bonus was that I reached a place where I could see it happening and calm the storm on my own more effectively.

If your therapist is just saying change your emotions, that's probably not taking it through enough steps to be helpful or validating.