I get it, there is a lot of stigma on feelings. Conversations about love, and “cheesy” expressions of love still make me cringe and yet I’m out here advocating for people to feel their feelings. Feelings often have a connotation of “weakness” or being “irrational,” for those who express them they may be seen as “less than” because feelings are typically correlated with pain or uncomfortableness. I think this connotation comes from the fact that everybody has experienced an uncomfortable emotion like fear, pain or sadness and therefore assign negative labels to the feeling that further stigmatizes feeling it again. I actually think that the people who attach that negative connotation actually never allowed themselves to fully feel that uncomfortableness, which led to self-invalidation and ended up being projected onto others. Unfortunately, that is what happened to me, and what I am trying to unlearn with you all as witnesses.
While I thought not allowing myself to feel was helping me achieve my academic, professional, and financial goals it was actually sabotaging them in a delayed compounded interest payment. The compounded interest is how gray my mental health was, and the sabotaging was all the horrible decisions I made on impulse while on fight or freeze response. I’m quite still paying my debt, literally (financially), but unlearning to numb is also part of that debt. Because I learned to not feel the pain and the hurt, that also meant I learned to not feel joy or happiness. I was in one of those settings where it’s all or nothing. My body couldn’t differentiate between the joy or the sadness, so it just shut all the feelings down. Except for the occasional glitch where I would feel the hurt and then freak out and outburst on everyone. Quite the sabotage to my social friendships to be completely honest. When teaching about trauma, I like to share with my clients and audience that the symptoms and feelings of trauma are like a beach ball that you want to disappear so you try to sink it underwater. You can keep it underwater for a very long time, with a lot of effort, but eventually, it will have to come up. I sure have seen how the pressure pushes the ball back out of the water with so much more force, and it is very similar to the emotional outbursts that appear for what we say is “no reason”. Newsflash, it is the effects of trauma.
So how do you address those outbursts? That ball that keeps floating back? You let it float. You feel those feelings. No matter how uncomfortable and scary they are. Feelings cannot kill you. Feelings can make you want to stay in bed, and use up a lot of your energy; but I promise you, you won’t be bruised up or physically hurt when you allow yourself to feel them. Do notice your thoughts though, your thoughts could be telling you otherwise and will even encourage you to act on those feelings to inflict the pain your body is feeling. Don’t listen to the thoughts, ignore them. Just concentrate on your body and feel all of your feelings.
Let me further explain why feeling your feelings is so important:
- Mind-body connection
Yes your brain is fantastic, it tells your body to breathe, eat, move in different ways, tells your organs to do their job, and transfers signals left and right throughout your whole body. Your brain actually ignited the curiosity for you to click and read this sentence right now. However, that’s a lot of work for one organ, and so your brain sometimes glitches and trips out too. I like to say that it feels so important that it starts to become a bully, to its own host. YOU. When your brain is your own bully it really messes with your thoughts and tells you to act on the fear your body is feeling. It develops “solutions” to stop feeling that fear and it sometimes involves hopping 1,000 different hoops and 25,000 scenarios. In reality, your body already knows what to do and it does not have to move a finger. Feeling your emotions is an act of bravery, and an opportunity to have your brain and body work together. When you feel your feelings, your consciousness, and your brain are aware of where you are ( maybe in your room, lying on your bed) and are able to look around and notice there is no immediate physical danger. This creates a sense of safety for your brain in order to allow your body to take over and feel the emotion you are experiencing. Will you experience tightness in the chest or a tingly sensation in your feet? I don’t know. It depends on the emotion and how your body processes that emotion. It may be different every time, and it may be different emotions at the same time.
When you begin to allow your body to feel your feelings, you will begin training your brain to connect with your body and not carry all the responsibilities all the time. If you think about it, your mind-body connection is really a radical non-hierarchical nation, no organ is more important than the other, and they work collectively in order to succeed. This means that with time, as feelings of anxiety or fear appear in your body, your mind and your body can collaborate to assess for real danger to act on or decide if it’s an emotion to feel in your body. With time, when another event comes that breaks your heart and leaves you devastated; your body and your brain will understand this too will pass and they can rebuild together.
- Connecting and communicating with others
Communicating with words comes first of course, and I’m sure if you’ve been to therapy or watched a few videos on communication you have heard that using I-statements are incredibly useful. That is all true and you should practice it as much as you can. However, you can run into some hiccups if you don’t know what you are actually feeling. How do you communicate your disappointment and sadness if your I-statements are focused on thoughts and assumptions you made about the other person? You can’t. The empathy a lot of us seek when communicating with others comes from understanding and expressing our feelings, this further creates connection with others.
For example, take a look at the emotion wheel by Human Systems below…
Stating “I feel discouraged” tells us more of a story than stating “I feel sad.” Now let’s remember a time when you felt discouraged. How did it feel in your body? I know that for me, I feel it in my shoulders, a sensation that lets my arms feel the tension of wanting to do something and not being able to. It then travels to my stomach and my chest to let me know it’s uncomfortable and makes me feel sad. Explaining how discouraged feels creates a more specific experience that will help us connect with someone who has felt the same exact way rather than a generalized answer like “sadness” or “bad.” Feeling your uncomfortable feelings with others has always been a more positive experience than feeling alone. This is why funerals or group therapy are so important when grieving, the connection that comes out of these events it’s essential to healing.
- Maintain balance
Balance. The idea of balance deserves its own post for another time. This idea of balance is actually taken from Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategies. Balance is described by her as the restoration of homeostasis or equilibrium. For every good reaction, there is an equal or opposite reaction Scientists will say. In other words, for every uncomfortable emotion there is an equally comfortable emotion out there. The perfect example I can recall of this is the disappointment I felt during my graduate degree program after I heard the comments of students in agreement with staying impartial about atrocities happening in the real world (think racism, homophobia, xenophobia). I remember a fellow classmate expressed that since the solution was not in our control we should not even bring it to the therapy session. I immediately felt angry, this was a common and fitting emotion for my role as the angry brown woman in grad school, and of course spoke up on the importance of politicizing your practice and the solidarity that comes from challenging viewpoints and harmful beliefs in others (my favorite people to learn this from is Dr. Jenniffer Mullen and Gigi’s therapy world, check them out here). The problem for me is not the anger, but the anxiety that comes up after those interactions, and I question my whole existence and beliefs. It wasn’t until a few days later that my best friend was telling me about a story in her grad program (not therapy-related) where somebody spoke up regarding some problematic take in urban planning. My friend, being the bad ass chingona that she is, spoke up and enlighten her classmates with her knowledge of social justice perspectives in urban planning. In that moment, while carrying my disappointment in myself over speaking up and questioning my beliefs, it hit me. For every negative interaction, there will be a positive reaction. For every person speaking some problematic non-sense in class, there will also be (hopefully) a chingona out there calling them out— and that’s balance. Every time that something wild comes up in our lives we always figure it out— and that’s balance. Therefore, very similar to these action and reaction homeostasis, there is emotional balance. For every heartbreak that we allow ourselves to feel, beautiful love sensations and joy will come. And while I cannot guarantee it will come back immediately, it will come. It’s the laws of the universe and emotions (I think).
- Release stored Trauma
My journey with EMDR has taught me this. While I knew I was traumatized I did not think I was holding it all in my body, that of course was until I received EMDR therapy. Together, my therapist and I explored my trauma response, which was shut down, and she explained to me that when I encountered danger in my childhood my body would shut down in order to not feel the emotional pain in my body. Well, when we re-called the memory of the traumatic event, I finally felt it. And it was overwhelming, to say the least. I was legit scared of dying during the session because the sensation felt so powerful in my body. The sensation traveled from my stomach, into my chest, into my neck and then I cried. A lot. Days afterwards I felt defeated and damaged, but as the days went on I started to gain a sense of fullness once again. A fullness that I had not felt since the traumatic event happened and I am certain it’s because my body released that stored trauma. Can you image what your body is holding to? How many years have you been resisting those emotions? How has that stored trauma made you physically ill? Can you imagine what your body may feel like with all that heaviness being felt and released?
- Resilience and/or Evolve
I hate the word resilience. I don’t want to be called resilient, I simply don’t want to have to overcome suffering. It’s a word people throw around to make the person feel better for having such a shitty life. Which is why I will let you label yourself that way only if you want to. Although I hate that word, and most certainly be labeled as resilient, I think there is power in labeling my body and my capacity to feel both joy and hurt a trait of resiliency. When I allow my body to feel the feeling of a heart break, the disappointment, the fear and unsafety, I also open the doors to feel the joy and the love and the laughter. There is a clear distinction between these comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, and because we know there is balance in feeling them, we know there is resilience in our body when it feels both. And every time we allow ourselves to feel a strong overwhelming emotion we give our body permission to evolve. To increase our capacity to feel even greater emotions. We’ll be able to distinguish remorse from humiliation and detached from isolation. We’ll be able to feel the most expansive admiration and thrilled surprises. Through feeling our emotions we grow empathy, and encourage others to do it to.
Can you imagine all people of color unapologetically feeling all their feelings and releasing all their stored trauma? I can, and we can start with you.
