“DON’T ASK ME HOW I FEEL”
If you are adept at knowing what other people feel and you spend a lot of time worrying about others (often with resentment) you probably aren’t AS aware of your own feelings (other than worry and/or sometimes resentment). Shutting down your connection with your body and shutting down your connection with your emotions are both ways of reducing your power and making things harder for yourself.
When people are obsessing about something it’s usually a distraction from what they’re really feeling. “I’m fine,” and “what’s wrong?” “Nothing” keeps not only their focus away from emotions, it keeps others from connecting and caring on a personal level.
Growing up, you may not have learned to identify your feelings. “You are crying because you don’t get to see your friends today and you really wanted to” probably isn’t the type of reflection you heard from a parent. You may not have even felt it was okay to cry. Then, you not only didn’t get practice expressing yourself, you also couldn’t have a reflection shown to you of what was happening with your emotions. With this type of refection, a child can make sense of what she is feeling, hear from a trusted adult that it is normal to have the feeling, and hear that she will still be okay even though it feels bad. If you didn’t know you could express your emotions and so you also didn’t get these validating reflections made about your emotions, you instead felt ashamed and buried and repressed your feelings. So you never learned that feeling and expressing are the normal, healthy ways to experience emotions. And that doing this allows for healthy connections with the people around you!
Emotions (even painful ones) serve a purpose. They help you recognize your needs. Emotions also help you to adapt to what is happening. Awareness of your emotions is vital if you want to interact successfully with others:
Shame is meant to keep you from harming others.
Fear is meant to tell you to avoid danger.
Sadness is meant to help you let go.
Guilt is meant to remind you act congruently with your values.
Anger is meant to tell you that action is required to right a wrong.
Loneliness motivates you to reach out to others, because connection is the most important component of wellbeing.
When you tell yourself you aren’t having a feeling and you try to pretend to others that you don’t have feelings, you can get stuck. When the feeling doesn’t get released, it stays in your unconscious. Pain accumulates, and more pain implores more denial. Unfortunately, denying painful feelings means you are also numb to joy, gratitude, and love.
Energy that you would otherwise use for daily tasks like going out into the world, interacting with others, even getting out of bed, gets channeled into holding down your emotions. Just as the cork in a shaken bottle of champagne wants to burst out, it takes more and more energy to keep your feelings hidden inside of you. And so they probably seep out in ways you don’t want- snipping at people, complaining about small things, finding more parts of your body to hate- irritation increases as you work hard to NOT FEEL.
Denial of raw emotion makes it fester as an obsession, depressed mood, resentment, dissatisfaction with your bodies, annoyance with how we look. Seeing things on yourself to “fix” is a great way to ignore other emotions that we don’t know how to handle. I know exactly how to look in the mirror and critique my thighs. But allowing grief to fill my body and then tell someone else about it- that may seem unfathomable.
And yet, allowing feelings to flow releases the pent‐up tension.
When you deny your feelings, it keeps you from responding the way you want. It creates more problems. Once you can identify your emotion, look for its meaning if it isn’t clear. Talk with someone about what you notice about your feelings and your physical experience. If that doesn’t seem possible, writing about what you feel both emotionally, as well as the sensations in your body, as you allow yourself to feel your emotions, can allow you to sort through and begin to feel, process and eventually release your emotions.