Hard Feelings
Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Hard Feelings
Narrated by:
Timothy Andrés Pabon
Pre-order for $25.73
-
Narrated by:
-
Timothy Andrés Pabon
-
By:
-
Daniel Smith
About this listen
What if the emotions we fight hardest against—anger, shame, envy, regret, jealousy, annoyance, despair—are not enemies to be vanquished but essential guides to self-knowledge?
When two birthday gifts—a centuries-old treatise on melancholy and a book of Bosch’s hellscapes—arrived just months before the birth of Daniel Smith’s second child, he began questioning our culture’s dismissal of difficult feelings and his own lifelong struggle against these so-called “negative” emotions. Moving between intimate personal narrative and rich intellectual exploration, Smith investigates how our relationship with negative emotions has evolved through history—from the Seven Deadly Sins to modern psychology’s sometimes equally damning classifications. He explores what science, psychology, art, and philosophy can and cannot tell us about the nature of emotion itself, challenging conventional wisdom about what our feelings really are and how they function.
With unflinching honesty about his own emotional turbulence and the insights gained from his work as a psychotherapist, Smith makes a compelling case that our negative emotions serve crucial purposes—if only we would listen to what they’re trying to tell us. Whether examining the striking absence of anger among the Inuit or confronting his own emotional inheritance as a new father, Smith offers a perspective that is both deeply humane and surprisingly hopeful.
This book is not so much a guide to banishing difficult feelings, but rather an invitation to wholeness—to feeling everything—and discovering that even our darkest emotions contain intelligence, meaning, and the potential for profound transformation.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.