“Feeling a Feeling”: What Our Emotions Need From Us

What is your first instinct when you are told to “feel your feelings”? 

Perhaps you think this means mindfulness, or sitting silently and identifying a feeling. Then what? How can we move toward healing by simply identifying a feeling? How do we truly “feel” it? Trauma researchers have begun to explore the complex systems that make up our emotional selves. When we experience something traumatic- these difficult emotions might get “stuck” in our bodies. 

Imagine you are spending the last five minutes of your mid-day lunch break on the phone arguing with your partner. Without a resolution, you must clock back into your shift. While this may not be particularly traumatic, intense emotions may still come up for you. Perhaps you feel angry at your partner, fearful of what the relationship might become, or guilty for your harsh words. These feelings have nowhere to go, yet they desperately need to be felt- to be processed. When we don’t grant these feelings the space or time to exist within us, they tend to show up in more unhelpful ways in desperate attempts to be acknowledged. 

We often treat feelings unfairly. Jealousy, for example, is uncomfortable. We may want to ignore it, maybe even tell it to go away and never come back. This feeling of jealousy, however, is showing up with an important message for us. To feel a feeling, we must treat it like a welcome guest rather than an unwanted visitor. What might it be like to invite our anger into our home when it knocks on our door? To pour our anger a cup of coffee and listen to what it might have to share with us? 

There is no “right” way to feel your feelings. Once we begin to accept that unpleasant feelings might show up at our door from time to time, we can then begin to get curious about what they have to say rather than instinctively slamming the door instead.