There seem to be two camps. One that says “we don’t talk about feelings, shut that down.” And the other that screams, “You need to feel!” Would you be surprised to learn that they both have value, in the grand scheme of things?
Feel your feelings!
We’ve talked about the importance of feeling your feelings before on this site, which you can read here. But essentially, you’ll find that if you have a habit of avoiding your feelings, repressing them, or even just refusing to confront the situations that are causing them, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.
That’s because emotions, left unattended, can actually cause us harm. And they can wreak havoc on our lives. On the emotional side, you may think that you can stay shut down forever, but you can’t. Eventually, what happens is that our emotions come out in ways that we don’t intend. Sometimes it’ll be a passive aggressive comment, others a full on meltdown. But I find the most unfortunate consequence of an emotion left unattended is the resentment and regret that can crop up towards others and yourself, seemingly out of nowhere.
Yes. If you keep ignoring how you feel about something, you may wake up one day with a life you hate. You may wake up not liking someone you loved. You may wake up realizing that you hate yourself. The quiet destruction that lies in repression is nothing to scoff at.
Not to mention, emotion, stress and trauma can and do get trapped and stored in the body. You’ll find that people with mental and emotional health struggles also have higher incidences of chronic physical diseases, or at the very least be familiar with how your head, neck or shoulders hurt at the end of a long, stressful day. It’s necessary to let these trapped emotions escape, for your own physical health!
A case for ignoring how you feel
That being said, there is the other side of the coin. Especially if you find you have a past of trauma or abuse, you may struggle with emotional disregulation. (Or you simply may never have learned the necessary skills to self-regulate your emotions.) Just like any good and necessary thing, too much is possible. And when we have too much emotion, it can take over our lives.
You may find “normal” things terrifying, impossible or often ruined by a surge of unbearable emotion. This is a problem. It’s the trigger, not the emotion, that starts to create issues. Another way of putting this is that everyone has feelings. And what you may be feeling, while very real and valid to you, may not even be about the thing that is in front of you right now.
Peeling back the layers
This is where a lot of inner work, therapy, and trauma work begins. (Take a glance at this post if you’re wondering about therapy.) We see that there is some sort of disregulation, and we work backwards. You are not broken, but your thinking system likely is. Especially if you’re responding to events in a way that makes you feel embarrassed or ashamed later.
And a big barrier to this kind of work is the fact that one of the first things you have to recognize is that you are not responding in an optimal or rational way. But it is a necessary thing to accept. Because it is the first step to building a more resilient self.
A CBT strategy (beyond ignoring)
If you’ve never heard of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT for short), it’s a therapeutic system that works through how your brain responds to life situations and what actions you take due to it. And one of the things that you may find yourself doing in CBT is thought-mapping.
What you’ll do is you’ll start with your feeling. Then you work backward, what was the thought that you were thinking right before you felt that way? Now this thought, once you’re able to find it, may bring you in a lot of different directions. You may be able to see that it isn’t true, or at least, not entirely. (You can learn more about how to handle untrue thoughts here.) You may see that it is true, but there is something you can do about it. (If you need a little kick in the pants to start getting things done, read this.) Or, as is the case with many thoughts, you may realize that it’s in a sort of emotional, psychological code. And this is one of the most exciting things to realize, because then you are in the very scenario that I’m talking about, which is, as follows.
The thing that has caused you to be so upset in this moment is not actually the thing you are upset about. This may seem bad at first, or like an indictment on your intellectual ability or lucidity, but it’s really not. After all, it happens to everyone sometimes, to one degree or another. But once you get past the startling realization, you get to a second one; in this moment, you are actually free from that big and scary thing.
It’s not an immediate fix
This feeling or freedom, while not unpleasant, doesn’t fix everything in and of itself. You will still have to do work on that wound that got dug up. (If you need help building a safe space to work on that, read this post.) But you may start to see that there’s more leeway in this moment than you thought there was. You have options that you didn’t know you had. You are more capable than you felt. In a way, in this moment, how you felt about that situation just isn’t valid anymore. And you can, yes, for now, ignore it.
It’s not either/or
The funny thing about this is that when you get down to the nitty gritty, it isn’t that one camp or the other is right, and you need to choose. It’s actually that you have to acknowledge your feeling to get past it, and get to a place where you can ignore it, at least, to do so healthfully. These two ideas about feeling your feelings and moving on past them resiliently need to feed into each other, although they feel like opposites.
When you spin your wheels in disfunction and disregulation, your only option is to flip into numbing and ignoring. When you ignore for too long, you have meltdowns and tantrums. It’s only natural. But the truly wonderful thing is that we can weave these two truths and strategies together in a healthy way, as in CBT or DBT (a different system that is more sensory and cognizant of the body than the cerebral CBT), or we can do it in an unhealthy way. The wonderful part of all this is that once we know, we get to choose. And we have to keep choosing, even when it gets tough. Because ultimately, your life is the product of these choices.
Feelings: friend or foe?
Ultimately, we can’t consider feelings a good or a bad thing. They’re simply a thing. If we fear them, they run us. If we put them up on a pedestal and let them make our decisions, they control us. Feelings are signposts. And it’s up to us to learn to read our own accurately, and take the right steps forward. Thank you for reading!
