If you’ve read some self-help books or follow any kind of mental health or personal growth accounts on social media, you’ve probably heard people express that it’s important to “feel your feelings’ – but this is not necessarily an easy or straightforward thing to do.
It feels similar to telling someone who is recovering from disordered eating to “eat intuitively” or “listen to your body” as if it could be so simple... but there are just so many reasons why this is nearly impossible. The same is true for feeling your feelings. It sounds simple enough, but in reality it is not (at first).
This is because although it is our most natural expression to experience emotions, our society’s conditioning has led most people to live in a state of disconnection. What this means at the most basic level is that your nervous system hasn’t built the capacity to hold a wide spectrum of emotional arousal.
Some quick background on this concept: Your nervous system is essentially your body’s natural mechanism of defense. Behind the scenes, your nervous system is always assessing situations for risk based on what is happening around you. This is called neuroception, because it is perception that is happening at a neurological level, rather than in your thinking mind – AKA you’re not consciously aware of any of this happening.
Your nervous system’s goal is always to establish safety (regulate) – by alerting you to any present threats and returning to safety both externally (escape danger) and internally (physiological balance) as soon as possible.
These days, it’s rare for the issue to be a present danger that needs immediate external resolution (i.e. run away from the tiger!!) and much more common for you to be dealing with internal stress experienced as thoughts or emotions. *Even if the issue seems ‘external’ such as having an unexpected expense from needing to fix your car or something, it is still technically internal stress because your life is not presently in danger at this very moment.
How this applies to today’s post is this: If you didn’t receive the necessary attachment nurturing or stress regulation modeling/support as a child to teach your body how to regulate amidst stressors and big emotions, then you won’t have the capacity to be with those stressors or emotions as an adult today. Instead, your body will try to establish safety in another way – usually by using some sort of substance or behavior to escape the experience.
The problem is that in such cases you don’t actually escape it, you just suppress it. Womp womp.
This is where coping mechanisms come into play. I’ve spent many years studying and supporting women who struggle with disordered eating, and this is the root of most food behaviors and fixations whether it be the restriction and control side of the spectrum or the binge eating and ‘emotional eating’ side of the spectrum. Behaviors like drinking alcohol, smoking weed, doom scrolling social media, watching porn, compulsive shopping (and anything else that gives you a dopamine hit and/or gives you a temporary sense of relief but doesn’t address the source issue) also fall into this category.
SO, when you are told to ‘feel your feelings,’ the first step is learning how to widen your nervous system’s window of tolerance so that you have the capacity to choose differently than whatever is your typical go-to coping mechanism of choice.
I often have my coaching clients incorporate meditation into our work together, and it’s pretty common for people to struggle to sit in silence with their thoughts and emotions for even just 5 minutes. This is normal (sadly) and if you’ve never intentionally built your own meditation practice then you can probably relate!
*Prior to 2015 I was absoluuuutely one of those people!!*
If you cannot sit with your feelings for five minutes, no wonder you can’t help but have a glass of wine, stop for takeout, eat way more than you need, scroll social media for 2 hours, or snap at your partner/kids (or all of the above).
Widening your nervous system’s window of tolerance means increasing your capacity to handle a wider range of stressors and emotional experiences without becoming dysregulated. This involves enhancing your ability to stay calm and present during challenging situations. Staying calm and present happens at the level of your body first, physiologically, and then extends to your mental state.
There are many regulation tools you can use to train your body to stay calm, present, and grounded within increasing amounts of stress, emotion, and stimulation – I won’t go into this at length today but practices such as breathwork, tapping, vagal toning stretches, the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), yin yoga, shaking, sound therapy, reducing screen time around your pre- and post-sleep hours, matching your circadian rhythm and sleep cycle to the light/dark hours in your time zone, and in general reorienting your lifestyle to prioritize a sustainable pace with healthy habits that help you to feel connected and present.
I had to start with all of this because this is an often overlooked but absolutely necessary step to the process!
So, once you have created the capacity to actually FEEL what is going on within your body without distracting or disassociating from the experience… then what?
The next step is to drop the story & focus on the sensation.
If you’re like most people, then most of the time you probably do the opposite. When you attempt to ‘feel your feelings,’ what usually ends up happening is that you start spinning the story in a loop in your mind.
Whether it’s about another person,
“He said he was going to pick up the groceries this week. I can never count on him to follow through with what he says he’ll do. He just expects me to do everything…”
Or about yourself,
“Why did I eat those extra slices of pizza after I was obviously full? Why did I even order the pizza in the first place? I bought things to make here. But work has been so busy. But I know that’s just an excuse. Why can’t I get my shit together? Why can’t I…”
Spinning the story is NOT feeling the feelings.
Emotions happen in your body, not in your brain.
We like to label things, so if you want to do that in order to understand what you are feeling, it helps to reduce it to a single word. That might be: anger, disappointment, fear, grief, embarrassment, shame, judgment, insecurity, betrayal… there are lots of options 🙂
Your primary focus, however, should be on the sensation. WHAT do you feel, and WHERE do you feel it?
What you feel might be tightness in your chest or throat, or knots in your stomach. You might feel small, as though you are shrinking into yourself. You might feel heavy, like your body is made of lead. You might feel like every cell in your body is buzzing, as thought there is so much energy you might explode. There are unlimited sensations you can feel and all of them are real and valid.
When your nervous system has a wide window of tolerance, it doesn’t mean that you won’t ever feel these sensations – rather, it means that you WILL. It seems counter-intuitive, but the goal is not to only ever feel calm and at peace, but actually to be able to ride the waves of the sensations within yourself while maintaining a sense of grounding – instead of feeling out of control and/or needing to distract or escape.
It is healthy to be able to feel rage, to feel grief, to feel it all, even the ‘bad’ feelings. The key is to be able to sit with the discomfort and express the emotions in a productive way that moves the energy through.
Spinning the story is like sitting in a whirlpool. You might be moving the energy around but you’re also bathing in it. This keeps you stuck, which is not the goal.
The goal of feeling your feelings is to move the experience through you. It is often said that emotions are energy in motion. They are not meant to stay with you, they are not stable; they are meant to be fluid. You are the vessel for the emotion to have a voice and then be released. You alchemize the energy of the emotion within your body when you feel it and then free it.
What does expressing and moving your feelings through you look like? It can look like a lot of things. It can look like crying. It can look like stomping your feet or punching a pillow. It can look like dancing. It can look like screaming in your car. It can look like lying on the ground, noticing the sensations and then sending them into the earth. It can look like rolling around on the floor and moaning. It can look like journaling, writing as the emotion itself expressing what it feels and needs to say.
Personally, I’ve learned that the more I allow my expression to be as big as the emotion feels inside, the more quickly and fully I move through it. I used to pride myself on being able to contain my intensity – to not react and remain calm. This is a skill in certain ways, but it is an incomplete understanding. I have since learned that it is just as powerful and important to be able to express the intensity in a way that is healthy and safe.
If that feels like enough for today, you can stop reading here. These first two steps (1. increasing your nervous system’s capacity to feel emotion, and then 2. dropping the story to focus on the sensations) are going to be game changers for your mental, emotional, and physical health.
However, if you want to take your feelings game to the expert level, here’s step three 😇
If the emotion is dysregulating, it probably has a history (“if it’s hysterical, it’s historical”). Your subconscious programming based on prior experiences is leading you to react as though a situation is threatening – when really, you are safe. Thankfully and so beautifully, you have the ability to rewrite these programs within yourself!!
The next step in feeling your feelings is taking ownership of the emotional habits that you have, and creating a new normal for yourself. If you don’t like the way you feel in certain situations or relationships (with humans or with parts of your life), you CAN change! *In your big picture, long-term experience, after lots of focused effort ;)
This is one of the many cases, where my favorite combo for personal growth comes in: compassion + curiosity.
You cannot fully explore an emotion if you are being judgmental of your experience. You must have compassion for yourself first, and then apply curiosity to find out what is happening within you, and why.
One of my favorite questions to ask a coaching client when they are in the middle of a tough emotional experience is, “How old do you feel right now?” – it might sound like a silly question as you are reading it, but in the moment of an emotion, you probably will surprise yourself with your capacity to answer the question with a specific number like “5 years old” or even more generally, “I feel like a teenager.”
This answer will give you a clue to what your body is responding to internally – which is not what your logical mind sees happening externally, hence the overreaction.
From here, you can try to remember a time at that age when you felt the same sensations and emotions that you are feeling at present. This will help you to understand your current reaction, and hopefully have even greater compassion for yourself (both in the past, and at present).
Finally, ask yourself what would have been the best case scenario for you to experience in that past time? Imagine how you would have felt if that best case scenario had happened for you (if you had gotten what you needed). Ask yourself questions like, how would that have changed things? What would I have felt or believed differently about myself or the world? And, how would I feel today/in this current experience, if all of that were true?
It’s a deep dive into understanding how our past experiences shape the perception through which we view and experience the world today. This usually happens below the level of conscious awareness, but your emotions give you a window into bringing what is subconscious forward for you to explore, move through, release, and rewrite. It’s an opportunity to take the wheel and create your reality – because it all starts within you.
Feeling your feelings is no joke, no walk in the park, no [insert other phrase for it being easy peasy]. But it is healing, empowering, freeing – and a key part of playing human 😉
I hope that this post helped you to understand the process and how to go deeper into your own experience of emotional expression.
As always, I would love to hear your reflections in the comments below!
Big love,
Tara
P.S. If this is hitting home for you and you can feel the voice of knowing inside you saying, “I need this,” then please remember, I’m here to help! I’ve walked through my fire and fog of figuring all of this out, and I can help lead you through your own. I offer private, individualized mentorship and/or my signature Reconnect Academy course (which is currently having a big sale offer!).
If you resonate with me and feel inspired by what you read here, then follow that inner call. Please send me a direct message here or at Tara@reconnectcollective.com and let’s talk about helping you to close the gap on who you truly desire to be.
This was extremely informative and helpful. You are such a treasure Tara. Thank you.
You are an inspiration and a gift to all who know you! 🤍🤍🤍 Living the wisdom every day ✨