The self help/healing world is ALL about the idea that in order to HEAL in our lives we must learn to FEEL our feelings.
But the bottom line is - many of us really, really struggle to actually do this.
Many of us have done a LOT of work on ourselves to try to get to a place where we’re able to just ‘be’ with our emotions - and what we’ve found is that no matter how hard we try, we continually find ourselves resorting to coping mechanisms and strategies that help us numb, suppress, deny and run from our emotions.
Many of us are going to recognize that as we start to develop emotional awareness and capacity, we actually have little to no idea what we’re actually feeling at any given time.
We’re going to notice that we have a whole bunch of stories built up around our emotions, what they mean, what they mean about us and our lives and this causes us great resistance.
The reality is, many of us are existing in a state where we have little to no emotional awareness or connection - not because we’re failing, not because we’re unspiritual, not because we’re not trying - but because we were never given the TOOLS to be with our emotions and because we live in a world that doesn’t make emotional intelligence a priority - quite the opposite in fact.
If you struggle to be with your emotions, and you want to learn how to be emotionally intelligent, I feel like it’s important to start with the awareness of why you may struggle in the first place so we can avoid you getting caught in cycles of shame and guilt that will distract you from doing the work that needs to be done.
YOU Are Not The Reason You Struggle To Be With Your Emotions
For many, many years there was a rather pervasive and false narrative that the BEST way to come to a place of health, wholeness and wealth, the best way to manifest our dreams, the best way to create the lives we wanted to live was to DENY any negative, unpleasant, undesired or otherwise misunderstood feeling as much as possible.
We were told that if we were to wallow in anger, get stuck in sadness, spend too much time focusing on anything we resent or even feared that this would cause more of that to be drawn into our lives and experience.
We were told that in order to be happy we had to feel happy. In order to be fulfilled we had to be fulfilled. That in order to be ANYTHING that we wanted to be we had to ‘act as though’ it already was that way so that we could create it.
This created a situation where a LOT of people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing everything possible to deny, deflect from and try to ‘heal’ their negative emotions - generally leading people to feeling stuck, like they were constantly having to monitor their thoughts and feelings in a way that made them get overly obsessive and generally led to a lot of shaming, blaming and guilting people for creating their own misery.
It created a situation where a lot of people just straight up lied to themselves and others about how they were actually feeling, which meant that genuine connections became harder and harder to come by - as everyone was trying to pretend that they had transcended feelings and thoughts they really hadn’t and was believing they had to put on the act of being an ‘enlightened’ person in order to exist.
It created a situation where people felt deeply shameful and like they were failing all the time when they were sad, scared, lonely, angry or otherwise upset - and rather than being given any kind of tools to process of work through these emotions they instead turned them in on themselves and believed that if bad things were happening to them it was BECAUSE they still had negative emotions they hadn’t overcome.
It was a trash-fire to say the least.
Along with that, we have to realize that we’re living in a world that, in general, is pretty emotionally stunted and unaware.
We live in a culture that tells us that any emotion that gets in the way of us being productive, any emotion or feeling that stops us from striving to be and do more and any emotion that is unpleasant makes us unworthy, unlovable and generally bad.
We live in a culture that tells us that if we ARE having negative emotions this means we need to be fixing ourselves because something has gone wrong within us.
We live in a culture that deeply shames any emotional expression that isn’t happy and positive OR that demands that we are ‘authentic’ and constantly showing our pain/sensitivity/problems to the world in a very curated way that will make us look like we’re being ‘vulnerable’ and ‘real’ but only in very contextual and controlled ways.
We have a social-media world that’s filled with pop-psychologists that have really ‘normalized’ mental health/nervous system/emotional intelligence LANGUAGE but in actual practice has actually made these things even MORE abstract and detached from our actual reality - because it’s all hypothetical and things we ‘say’ but don’t actually know how to DO or APPLY to our lives in any meaningful way.
We can talk the talk but most of us can’t actually walk the walk because no one’s teaching us how to do that.
Many of us grew up in households that were emotionally unaware and encouraged us to hide our emotions. We grew up in households where we weren’t taught how to healthfully process our emotions, and many of us had the exact opposite experience where we were trained to deny our emotions, suppress our emotions, to fear our emotions and to see our emotions as being the reason we weren’t being loved and accepted in the ways we needed to be loved and accepted.
Many of us have had incredibly painful experiences of being abandoned, rejected, shamed and blamed when we were expressing big, challenging emotions - and this caused us to develop an existential relationship to our emotions.
This caused us to see our emotions as being the REASON we were being cut off from the love, care, support and guidance of our caregivers - things that we 100% relied upon to be safe and well in this life - and this caused us to develop a deeply existential relationship with our emotions.
We learned to run from, fear, deny and reject our emotional expressions because from our perspective our emotions were literally making us unsafe and insecure.
In other words, we currently exist in a world where the actual practice of feeling our emotions is very, very outside of what MOST people understand.
We live in a culture that has made a caricature out of emotional awareness.
We live in families and social circles that shame emotions.
We live in a world that has pathologized normal human emotions, and has created all sorts of self help/spirituality/personal growth materials around ‘fixing’ what are actually totally normal, natural and healthy emotional expressions to life.
Many of us fear our emotions and that fear is actually making them WORSE and MORE intense for us than they would be if we had been taught to just sit with them and feel them.
We have stories about what our emotions mean and what it’s going to mean if we feel them that are painful, confusing and fill us with resistance.
So is it any wonder that so many of us struggle a great deal to ‘be’ with our emotions?
Why Learning To Be With Emotions Is SO Challenging
With all that said, the reality is that learning to be with our emotions is an incredibly beneficial thing.
I’ve talked at LENGTH around here about emotional intelligence and why emotions exist - and the reality is that our emotional experience these days is a LOT more complicated than it would have been if we had a culture that had a healthy relationship with emotions.
For most of us, it’s going to take a considerable amount of work to get to a place where we are even able to be aware of the actual emotion we’re feeling.
This is because a lot of us tend to exist in a space where we think that what we’re feeling is shame, a feeling of being inadequate, a feeling of being not worthy of love, a feeling that we’re ‘doing something wrong’ or that we’re failing - and we are confusing this for the ACTUAL emotion we are feeling.
Many of us walk around having no idea that we are resentful, angry, sad, lonely or confused, because our childhood brains are taking these painful experiences and turning them inward - in the hopes that if we can figure out how WE are the cause of our negative emotions then we can fix ourselves and in doing so we will make the pain go away.
Check out this video here for more on this
Next, many of us may be doing the work to unpack our shame, blame and guilt stories in order to access the emotions that are actually there asking to be felt, and by the time we get in contact with those emotions the physical/mental/emotional experience of feeling those feelings is SO strong and overwhelming, that it actually feels like it’s going to kill us.
Many of us have experienced intensity in our felt emotions that literally drives us to being convinced that if we don’t fix the emotion, if we don’t make it go away, if we don’t solve it or otherwise figure out where it’s coming from as fast as possible that we will literally die or be consumed by the emotion.
Many of us have such resistance and fear around our emotions that getting to a place where we can just feel them is almost impossible because the experience is incredibly intense and not something we’re used to.
Finally, again many of us have deep associations with our emotions and what they ‘mean’ about us, which again drive us into a state of not being able to simply be with and process what we’re feeling.
Instead of just being able to be angry, sad, resentful or scared - we have a whole slew of stories built up around what feeling these emotions MEANS about us as people (angry people are bad, sad people will be alone forever, no one likes to be around someone who’s resentful etc), what they mean about our lives in general (I’m going to be sad forever if I let myself feel this sadness, I will never forgive and that makes me a bad person who no one will ever love) and again, we then have a fear that if we face our emotions and are actually honest with ourselves about what we’re feeling that this will mean our entire lives are ruined (If I admit I’m angry with my caregivers I then have to cut all contact and I am not ready to be independent so I have to keep pretending to be fine, if I admit that I have negative emotions about my job that means I have to quit and that would mean having to figure out a whole new career which I can’t do at my age because I’m already so behind.)
You see what we’re up against here?
Many of us have never been taught how to take a step back, how to come into that ‘witness’ perspective, how to separate ourselves from our emotions just enough that we don’t feel like they are ALL of who we are, how to dissect the STORIES we are telling ourselves from the actual emotions themselves, how to let an emotion move THROUGH us - watching as it becomes big and intense and then falls naturally on it’s own - and then how to determine if all we needed was to let the emotion roll through or if it has a message for us about our lives and what we need.
Many of us simply don’t have the tools to deal with our emotions, and thus this entire thing is a massive mess that leaves us feeling like our only two options are to be taken over by our emotions or to suppress them in some way.
And the world gives us a MILLION options for emotional suppression. In fact, our entire culture is set up around helping us avoid having to FEEL what we’re feeling and having to PROCESS what we’re going through - so that we will remain in a constant state of reactivity and short-term pleasure seeking - because this is great for maintaining the power structures that we have by keeping us in a constant state of fear, self loathing and hyper consumerism.
All of this is to say - if you struggle to be with your emotions, it’s not your fault.
There are a million reasons why being with your emotions is likely difficult and none of those reasons are your fault.
So before you read any farther, can you take a moment to simply validate yourself that you are not broken, bad, wrong or shameful on any level if you struggle to be with your emotions?
That you’re not simply choosing to abandon yourself or to make your life worse by trying to escape your emotions with whatever coping mechanisms you have?
Can it be ok that you fear your emotions and don’t know how to make space for them?
Can it be ok that you have the stories that you have around your emotions that stop you from being able to feel what you’re actually feeling?
Can you see that you may have habits of self rejection that are blocking you from feeling what you’re actually feeling - and can you have compassion for yourself that you didn’t create that situation, but rather you adapted to a life that gave you no other option?
If so, you’re well on your way to learning how to be with your emotions.
Learning that it makes sense that it’s hard, learning that it’s not your fault that it’s hard and learning that while you didn’t create the circumstances that have made being with your emotions hard, this doesn’t mean you can’t learn and eventually develop the capacity to be with your emotions.
It’s just going to take time, practice and patience.
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Next week we will look at WHY we would even want to develop the capacity to be with our emotions, and we will look at some tools to help get you started on that path or help support you in continuing to walk this path of emotional awareness if you’re already on it.
See you next week!
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