Feeling your feelings is all the rage now.
Getting in touch with your emotions has been a trending topic over the last couple of years, and that’s great and all. We really need to stop pretending we don’t have strong emotions about things and then unload all our pent-up feelings onto an innocent cashier at the grocery store because our favorite ice cream is discontinued.
The world would be a much better, healthier place if we explored and expressed our feelings safely and honestly. That’s why I applaud everyone advertising the idea that feelings are not an unnecessary inconvenience for people who can’t keep their shit together, but an important evolutionary feature that helps us navigate our lives.
The infuriating thing, though, is that most people discussing the topic don’t really tell you how to actually go about feeling your feelings, or even where to start. It’s like trying to teach someone to swim by telling them, “You just get into the water and flail around.”
And what’s worse: they don’t give you a heads-up on the pitfalls of exploring and expressing your emotions. Even psychotherapists, spiritual teachers, and life coaches often fail to recognize that sticking your head into an untapped pool of stagnant feelings and memories can have serious implications.
That’s why I want to do that here. I will also discuss how to identify, explore, and process your feelings in the next blog post. This one will serve as a disclaimer for embarking on this very rewarding but possibly quite confusing, frustrating, and painful adventure.
1. Do you even know what you’re feeling?
The first issue is that a lot of people don’t even know what’s going on in their hearts and minds. When we have never learned to identify, let alone express our feelings, we often recognize our inner landscapes as simply good or bad. And some people might be so cut off from themselves that they can’t even do that. (Wrote a whole article on feeling empty here.)
We have never been given the vocabulary to name our inner workings—or worse—we’ve been actively discouraged or punished for experiencing a whole range of emotions: jealousy, envy, anger. Sometimes, even the most basic and vital of our feelings are deemed a character flaw—fear, hunger, lust.
And those undesirable emotions don’t just go away because we don’t wanna have them. They fester, grow, and erupt at the most inopportune times. Ever snapped at someone who didn’t really deserve it? Yeah, that was your emotional cup running over.
Or did you settle on the other end of the spectrum, where you shut down, developed depression, anxiety, or addiction? (Or why not all three? High five, comrad!) These conditions can all stem from a dysregulated ability to process and manage our emotions.
By the way, there is no shame in that. Understanding and tending to our feelings is still considered self-absorbed and weak in many environments. Strength and discipline are highly valued character traits in human societies, and those traits are often defined by the ability to ignore or deny one’s feelings.
So, of course, you never learned how to even identify what’s going on in your heart, let alone deal with it. Of course, you never got the opportunity to understand that icky feeling in your gut, that uneasy sensation that shapes your career, your health, and your relationships. And when someone asks you how you are, you don’t have the vocabulary to express it—not even to yourself.
2. Is there even time and space to feel your emotions?
Another issue I’m having with this whole new idea of ‘Just feel your feelings’ is the fact that so many of us live insanely busy, demanding lives. If you work a full-time job or have a family to take care of, it’s pretty tough to squeeze in some time to feel anything other than exhaustion and a sense of duty to everyone else but yourself.
I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t try to make room for yourself, but I wanna validate everyone who’s already overwhelmed with daily life and who might feel the urge to strangle me when I give them a ten-step list on how to feel their feelings. (Hey, murderous ruminations are feelings, too! Good job!)
Also, when you start to connect with your emotions, you might be surprised how exhausting, confusing, and dysregulating that can be. And a single mother of two might not have the luxury of rotting in bed for a day because she uncovered an uncomfortable memory and the grief attached to it. A lot of us are barely making it through the day as it is, and some feelings just can’t be processed between morning coffee and the car ride to work.
Yesterday, I did some trauma relief exercises for the neck and throat. Today, I woke up to dreams about a painful experience I once had, cutting my night’s rest quite short. Waking up to memories of a person who hurt you and thinking about it until the alarm goes off is really fun when you have an important meeting in the morning!
3. Does your environment benefit from your suppressed emotions?
We also need to recognize that not everyone has a supportive environment that lets them fumble around in the dark corners of their mind and retrieves them when they get lost. Our parents might show worry or discontent when we express our sadness openly. Our partners might start arguing when we show signs of disappointment and ask them to pull their weight. Our bosses might have a meltdown if we finally give voice to our burnout.
The people who benefited from your ignoring your feelings and needs will not give up without a fight when they have to face a reality in which you might no longer be available as their primary source of emotional, financial, sexual, or mental support.
To be fair, even non-toxic people will find it difficult to adjust to you possibly doing a 180 in your established relationships. But that’s just another reason for us to talk about the consequences of tapping into your feelings and the importance of finding a reasonable route and pace to do the work.
Also, there is something that needs to be said about privilege here. Some people just have more support or independence than others, and I always found it unfair to shame people for not getting in touch with their feelings when their place in the world is so different from mine.
Of course, there are still ways to get in touch with yourself with little time and energy—especially since the extra effort you put into your well-being is supposed to pay off by freeing up mental and physical capacities. Just be mindful not to compare your journey to someone who has more resources at their disposal or make yourself vulnerable in an environment that cannot honor that.
4. Connecting with your feelings has consequences.
I already hinted at this uncomfortable notion that getting in touch with your emotions might demand changes of yourself and the people closest to you. And if there is something that people really hate, it’s change—especially when that change entails you no longer prioritizing their feelings over your own.
My mother once told me, “You’ve been doing too much therapy. I no longer know how to talk to you.” When I first heard her say that, I felt sorry for her and ashamed of myself. What a sad state to be in when you don’t know how to talk to your own flesh and blood.
But then I remembered that our conversations had always been one-sided in her favor and that she was lamenting the loss of a connection we never actually had. She was actually complaining about the fact that I had gained emotional maturity (ish) while she remained as unregulated and unchecked as ever. And that made her feel insecure.
Cutting contact with her was a direct consequence of feeling that disconnect and the disruptive emotions she was still stirring in me. There came a point where I felt the threat of that woman to my health and well-being so intensely that I could no longer ignore it.
The decision to cut her out of my life was an act of liberation and the start of a new chapter of healing. But it was also incredibly painful, and nobody prepared me for that pain.
I think a lot of people start therapy, journaling, or other forms of self-exploration and then get scared when their emotions demand changes in their lives. And then they regress on their journey of growth to not derail their lives or hurt the people they love.
That dynamic is so common that it makes one wonder why therapy doesn’t come with a warning label. At least a little heads-up would be nice.
But I don’t want to imply that emotional exploration always comes with the total derailment of your social circle. Not every unhappy relationship needs to end because you discovered that unhappiness. The exploration of your inner world can be slow and gentle, helping everyone involved to adapt and possibly inspiring them to do the work with you—or for themselves.
5. Are we really supposed to feel all of this?
Can we talk about how difficult our modern lives are? How much information we have to process on a daily basis? I’m a very political person, but I have stopped watching the news and cut down heavily on my social media consumption. I found myself no longer being able to process everything that’s being thrown at me: destruction, betrayal, injustice, pain, hatred, greed.
Am I supposed to have well-balanced emotions on everything that’s going on in the world? Am I supposed to have none? Is it healthy to be educated on every conflict that currently plagues the world? I want to be, I really do. But I no longer have the emotional bandwidth, and I don’t think that my heart was built to hold the grief of seven billion people.
Never in the history of mankind have we had so much information so readily available at our disposal. We have feelings for people who don’t know we exist. And everyone we do know can contact us at any given moment via the shiny device attached to our thumbs. That’s undeniably cool—don’t get me wrong—but it also creates an overwhelming sense of constant stimulation and pressure.
We also live in times where there are endless triggers to our emotions, and whole industries are strategically built around triggering or even manufacturing emotions in you for commercial or political gain.
Feel insecure with the endless demands on you as a person? Buy this book on confidence.
Feel ugly looking at all these surgically enhanced people online? Buy this 10-step skin care routine.
Feel the gaping emptiness from working too much and living too little? Fill it with this never-ending social media feed.
Feel fearful about your future after doomscrolling for two hours? Vote for a rich guy blaming poor people.
When you find yourself not being able to untangle and process this ball of feelings in your chest, or you run out of empathy for your partner, maybe the first step isn’t to start a feelings journal, but to monitor your intake of emotional triggers and cut down on the things that overwhelm you. Your heart and mind were not meant to feel and hold all of these emotions, and it would be unhealthy to try.
6. By the way, feeling emotions can actually harm you.
We’ve already talked about the fact that not everyone of us has the privilege of a safe environment to explore and express our feelings or the time and energy to work through things as they arise. But we didn’t yet discuss the deep and buried feelings that stem from trauma, and how not all of the emotions connected to that trauma might be ready or safe to explore and process.
I have made significant progress from working through my deep-seated pain, but I have done so with the help of a trauma specialist, very slowly and carefully. Attempting this work on your own and biting off more than you can chew has the potential to retraumatize you, sending you into dangerous spirals of depression, disassociation, psychosis, or worse.
Again, the work of healing is truly worth it, but I want to caution everyone with trauma experiences to not dive headfirst into unexplored emotional territory without proper support. Sometimes, your brain suppresses feelings as a protective mechanism, and it’s wise to be mindful that prematurely uncovering them might trigger an avalanche of emotions capable of burying you.
Also, facing your feelings takes a lot out of your psyche—and your body! So maybe don’t tackle your unprocessed anger right before you take a long roadtrip. Don’t explore the old grief over your Grandmother’s death when you’re scheduled for your yearly seasonal depressive disorder during January. And maybe don’t meditate on how much you hate your life, the day before you have spinal surgery.
And most importantly: Don’t talk about your emotions to people who are unsafe or who don’t have the mental capacities to hold space for your unleashed feelings. I don’t talk to my narcissistic mother about what makes me happy, and I don’t talk to my depressed friends about the really, really dark stuff.
7. Bonus-warning: Happy feelings can be difficult, too.
This one was a real curveball for me. When I started exploring my inner workings, I had prepared myself for difficult feelings:
- embarassing feelings that won’t vibe with my self-image or pride
- emotions that come entangled with three other ones
- conflicting feelings that shouldn’t really go together
- feelings that flipped into their opposite without warning
- teeny-tiny mousy feelings that turned into giant elephants
- feelings that were not ready to be felt
- feelings that demanded immediate action
But I didn’t expect that among those difficult feelings could be happy ones, too. And there are a variety of potential reasons why emotions we would all consider pleasant could, surprisingly, be very unpleasant to encounter.
My emotional explorations uncovered a joyful child-version of myself, and it was heartbreaking to realize that she had survived years of my self-abuse and how long she had waited to be free. Releasing her from her prison was very necessary, but this child-like joy, curiosity, and hunger for life had little room in my life at the time.
She ignited this intense need to give expression to joy, but I didn’t really know how to do that anymore. Feeling that disability wasn’t only profoundly sad, it also forced me to confront how small my life had become. That was something I didn’t have to feel during my deep, dark depression, when I was numb to the bleak reality of my world.
And this also ties back directly into the levels of support you have in your life. Does your spouse, your workplace, or your friend group allow your joy, your love, and your curiosity to exist and be expressed freely? Do you?
These days, a lot of people seem so cynical and afraid to express their silly selves for fear of making themselves vulnerable to rejection and ridicule. They’d rather be unfulfilled than cringe.
So, when you allow yourself to connect with those beautiful aspects of your internal world, I hope you can integrate them into your life and the lives of your loved ones.
This is a word of caution, not discouragement.
Phew, I actually wrote a 2500-word warning label for feeling your feelings. I didn’t do that to sway you from discovering yourself or prevent you from healing deep-seated pain. Emotional work is incredibly rewarding on so many levels, not only fostering personal growth but also contributing to healthier relationships and a more empathetic community.
My intention with this post wasn’t to scare you, but to prepare you for what could lie ahead and for the particular challenges you might face. I’m not telling you to avoid diving in, but I am pointing out the shallower areas, suggesting a life jacket, warning of potential storms, and offering a map of the currents.
The emotions you will uncover within yourself may not always be comfortable, safe, or easily understood, but they are vital pieces of the intricate puzzle that constitutes your identity, and worth the effort to assemble.
In my next blog post, I’ll be talking about safely exploring, expressing, and processing emotions. I will share the insights gained from my own journey, what surprised me, what proved helpful, and what scared me. And I’m excited that you’ll join me on that adventure as I still learn to understand this infuriatingly fascinating creature called the human psyche.
