5 Steps to Let Go of Negative Feelings

Chichester hypnotherapist and mindfulness teacher Kate Delaney is in print with FREED: 5 Steps to Let Go of Negative Feelings.

The book is released through FREED Publishing, with the paperback (black and white) available at £9.99 on Amazon. It is also available on Kindle. The colour hardback can be ordered on Kate’s website for £25.99: www.katedelaney.co.uk/freedbook

Kate, aged 49, explained: “FREED grew out of one very simple observation from more than a decade of working as a hypnotherapist and mindfulness teacher: people often understand why they feel anxious, angry, hurt or overwhelmed, but understanding a feeling is not always the same as being able to let it go.

“We are very good at trying to think our way out of emotions, distract ourselves from them, suppress them or tell ourselves to be more positive, but those strategies can leave the feeling sitting underneath everything.

“The book offers a five-step process – Feeling, Resistance, Experience, Examine and Distance – which helps people stop fighting what they feel, process it more directly and then regain perspective and clarity. It draws on mindfulness, neuroscience, my clinical work and my own lived experience.

“It is particularly significant to me because in my twenties I became severely ill with Lyme disease and was bedbound for years. I lost my health, my career and much of the life I thought I was going to have. Learning the difference between pain itself and the extra suffering created by resisting reality became enormously important in my own recovery and later in my work with clients.”

Kate added: “I think the book will appeal to anyone who has ever been told to 'just let it go' and thought 'Yes, but how?' It is practical rather than abstract. You do not have to become a different person, think positively all the time or spend years analysing yourself. The aim is to give people something they can actually use in the middle of real life – when they are anxious, upset, triggered, overthinking or simply stuck.

“I came to write FREED after using the process again and again with clients and seeing the same pattern: once the emotional charge softened, people were often able to see their situation much more clearly and find their own answers.

“After supporting hundreds of people one to one, I realised I wanted to make that process available beyond the therapy room.

“I’m not going to lie: it was really hard to write! I work all day with clients and I have a young daughter so most of it was written in the evenings after she was in bed, when I was already tired and had often spent the day holding space for other people.

“There was also a much more personal difficulty: revisiting my years with Lyme disease. Having essentially lost my twenties to Lyme disease it took me around a decade to feel willing to revisit that period of my life. Going back into it on the page was hard.

“What kept me going was a real fire in my belly. I had seen these ideas make a genuine difference to people and I felt passionately that I wanted to share them more widely. I wanted to give people a practical way of working with difficult feelings rather than simply being told to ‘let go’, calm down or think positively.

“I was also always struck by how much my personal story seemed to inspire people. That felt slightly strange to me at first, but I couldn’t ignore the way that coming through that adversity seemed to give my clients hope. So no, writing the book wasn’t easy at all, but I cared so much about getting this work out into the world that I kept going.

“I started writing the book seriously in 2024. I wanted it to be for ordinary people, not just people already interested in therapy or mindfulness: busy parents, professionals, people dealing with anxiety or overwhelm, and anyone who notices that their emotions sometimes drive their thinking and behaviour. The starting point was the idea that emotions themselves are not the enemy; often it is our resistance to them that keeps us stuck.”