How to Feel Your Feelings

Just in case nobody told you before now, all of your feelings are valid. You should never ignore negative feelings and emotions because they help you prioritize what you should pay attention to and prepare to act on.

As a survivor of long-term trauma, I learned to cope by repressing my most traumatic emotions. It took me many many years to seek out the help and support that I truly needed because I had not been taught how to actually “feel” my feelings.

Why do we need negative feelings?

Negative emotions like sadness, hurt, grief or anger are signs that something is out of alignment in or around you. These feelings help you prioritize what you should pay attention to and prepare to act on. Your emotions provide you with information about yourself and the things going on around you. For example, fear tells you that you may be in danger, while sadness tells you that you may need some time to take care of yourself or seek help from others.

Judging Your Feelings

There’s no right or wrong way to feel. People who struggle with depression, anxiety, bipolar, or PTSD tend to feel things very deeply, which is certainly the case for me.  However, when we invalidate or judge our own emotions, we strip them of their ability to teach us.

Many of us were taught from a very early age that negative emotions should be hidden and avoided at all costs. We may have been called a “crybaby.” We may have learned that raw anger was “batshit crazy.” We may have been judged and punished for having strong feelings, so we learned to hide them.

Suppressing Your Feelings

Suppressing your feelings (technically known as emotional avoidance) is a common reaction to trauma. It serves as a way for people to escape extremely painful or difficult emotions. Avoidance refers to any action designed to prevent the occurrence of an uncomfortable emotion such as fear, sadness, or shame. 

Emotional avoidance may be effective in the short term and can provide some temporary relief, but in the long run, it often causes much more harm. While emotional avoidance temporarily suppresses difficult emotions, the emotions you’re trying to avoid may grow harder to ignore over time.  Your emotions may “fight back” in an attempt to serve their functions.

Avoiding your emotions also takes considerable effort, and as the emotions, you are avoiding grow stronger, more and more effort is needed to keep them at bay. As a result, little energy may be left for the important things in your life such as family and friends. Also, using all your energy to avoid certain emotions may make it difficult to manage other experiences, such as frustration and irritation, making you more likely to be “on edge” and angry.

If you really want to improve your mental health and emotional well-being, you must allow yourself to fully feel all of your feelings.

Throughout my healing journey, I’ve employed several practices to help me reconnect with my feelings.  At first, It might be difficult to connect with your feelings initially, but once you do, you will be able to better understand what your feelings are trying to teach you. It takes patience and practice to learn how to identify and sit with your emotions.

Name your feelings

Instead of stuffing them down and avoiding them, or judging them as wrong and inappropriate, you can simply name them. They are just feelings. If you are feeling angry about something, name the feeling as anger. Allow yourself to feel the anger and any other feeling that is associated with it, including sadness, fear, and pain.

Non-judgment

A feeling is a feeling. It is not inherently good or bad. It just is. Practice becoming an observer of your feelings. When you notice that judgment is coming into play, observe your judgment and then let it go.

Journal

You could also try writing down what you are feeling. For example, try to recall an experience that you have difficulty discussing because of the painful emotions that come up. Write down this experience and name the feelings associated with it. Once you acknowledge what you are feeling, allow the feelings to be. Crying, punching a pillow, talking to yourself, and soothing yourself can allow you to honor your feelings in a healthy way.

Practice self-compassion

Allow your emotions to be felt and respond with compassion. Acknowledge what you are feeling and remind yourself that it is okay. Get comfortable with all of your emotions and become more self-aware. Let your judgment go and fully embrace the experience of feeling. 

Learn the lesson

When you honor your feelings, let them have their time, and learn from them, it is easier to process them and let them go. This way you can focus more on the positive feelings that you will also find easier to access.