Do you spend ages in your head debating why you feel the way you do?
Do you analyse and judge your feelings, processing them by deciding if they are valid or not?
How we feel affects our physical state. It causes tension in the body, muscle problems, anxiety, and can manifest in a multitude of ways; I’ve suffered muscle problems in my back, neck and shoulders, heart palpitations, anxiety/panic attacks, hyperventilating, acid stomach, irritable bowel syndrome, and eczema. All of them were a direct result of how I was feeling at the time, even though I often wasn’t conscious of it.
While working with my physiotherapist, we discussed how I process my feelings, and I said I thought about how I felt and sort of debated or discussed it in my head as a way to resolve how I was feeling. Sometimes it would only change the emotions – and not always in a helpful way. If I judged myself, or told myself off for feeling that way I would make myself feel worse.
By way of a diagram they showed me that this was the long way round, and actually would trigger more feelings, causing me to delay resolving my initial feelings.
Thinking about them instead of feeling them meant I held them in my body for longer, sometimes forever without ever resolving them. But if I didn’t engage with them mentally, if I just sat with my feelings, let myself feel them, without judging or thinking about them, simply experiencing them, then my body would release them much quicker. And if it was a negative feeling, the intensity of the feeling would be reduced the next time it showed up.
I believe one of the biggest reasons behind the rise in mental illness and mental health issues is that we are taught that feeling our feelings and expressing them is a bad thing.
“The avoidance of feelings amplifies the feeling. Directly turning into the feelings will dissipate them.” – Chris Witecki
We are told expressing emotions exposes us or makes us vulnerable. That it is ugly or brash and something to be ashamed of; that it offends other people, whether it is anger or sadness, and we should hide it from other people.
But even though our society has taught us that expressing our feelings is a bad thing, our feelings are there to be felt – not discussed, not negotiated, not confined, repressed or pushed way, but felt.
If we don’t feel our feelings, we can’t trust our feelings, or know how we feel about anything. It undermines our self confidence and ability to be sure about what we like and don’t like, or what we want and don’t want. It can stop us being able to build any kind of inner security.
If we don’t feel our feelings we can’t learn how to regulate and balance them, and decide what is normal within our own bodies, and be able to identify when we are feeling more sensitive than usual.
Without feeling our feelings, we can’t really know how we feel about anything, good or bad. And it cuts us off from ourselves making us less in touch with who we are, which in turn affects our ability to connect to others in a confident, healthy way.
“Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance.” – Deepak Chopra
In the case where feelings are about past trauma or part of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) it can be very difficult to feel those feelings again, and the knee jerk reaction is to push them away and not want to feel them; to dissociate and detach from them. But those feelings more than any others need to be felt so that they can be acknowledged and released. This helps resolve how we feel inside, and teaches us how to respond to them if and when they come up again.
By allowing ourselves to feel those raw feelings and sitting with them for a while, they won’t be so raw the next time. They will be significantly reduced and maybe disappear all together.
“The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.” – Nicholas Sparks
Here’s the process my physio taught me when I felt triggered or upset:
- Where in your body are you feeling this feeling? (often for me it was my stomach; I felt sick)
- Sit with that feeling – really feel it throughout your whole body;
- Imagine that feeling as a ball, or turn it into a ball in your mind’s eye, and imagine taking that ball out of your body and holding it in your hands;
- Then try and put that ball back inside you;
- Does it feel different? (usually it feels completely different or has changed and you can't get it back in)
But you don’t have to imagine it as a separate entity and imagine taking it out of yourself, you can also imagine it just fading and releasing.
We can’t change anything without acknowledging and accepting it, so by doing this we are able to change it. Not only the feeling and how we hold it in our bodies, but also how we respond to it. By being still and letting it consume us for a moment we are present with it, and present with ourselves. We learn how we feel, how our body feels, and build a better more connected relationship with ourselves.
“To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself IS the reason.” – Ai Weiwei
