Help Me! I'm FEELING!

“Feel your feelings!” has been a professional battle-cry of mine for the past several years. Especially when I’m met with people who are second-guessing their feelings or downplaying what their feelings are or suggesting that they should not be feeling their feelings.

But what happens when we don’t want to feel our feelings? Why is this such a difficult thing to do?

Part of it is that feeling feelings is uncomfortable. Socially, we’ve been told to expect happiness and that if we’re experiencing anything other than positive feelings, something must be wrong.

Socially, we’re all doing each other a disservice.

A full human experience involves positive, negative, and neutral feelings. To allow ourselves to have a full human emotional experience we have to allow space for negative and neutral feelings without trying to fix them.

Your feelings, your emotions, they are all information and they all serve a purpose. One of the easiest ways to start getting comfortable with those more uncomfortable feelings is to match them not with immediate resistance, quelling, or denial, but rather meeting them with curiosity.

Ask yourself “what is this feeling trying to tell me?”

This also helps when you tend to hang out in big emotions, for example, if you’re a person who tends to express disappointment, sadness, frustration, and fear as anger, to start to figure out what’s underlying that big emotion. When you start to pick that apart, it puts you in a much better position to then change your mindset around it.

Emotions stop having such great power over you when you accept that they are there and they’re trying to tell you something.

Doing this work also helps you to be less reactive to your emotions as they come and go. This is invaluable to your personal wellbeing but also your relationships. If you’re able to go through your feelings and pinpoint your vulnerable feelings, you can express them. You can talk about your experience. You can get support around your experience.

It’s definitely a scary option and when you start to do it, you notice your whole world start to change. You are no longer held captive by the experience of having negative emotions.

When you give yourself permission to feel, when you get comfortable with the previously uncomfortable, you will find yourself starting to let go of things and stop seeing your emotions pop up over and over again because you’re allowing it to exist and to pass.