Feeling your feelings is the most difficult part when handling your unpleasant emotions, at least for me it is. There are a lot of people in the self development space telling how one should have such an amazing life that they don’t care if they are treated badly or misunderstood. Then there are people saying you have to do your thing “regardless of your emotions” to stay consistent. AND on top of that, there are also people telling you to “feel your feelings”… No wonder I didn’t know what was the right way to approach the topic, because all of this contradicted advice was leaving me so overwhelmed and confused. Eventually, I started chasing feeling good and being unbothered all the time. I assumed feeling my feelings meant that I should recognise my emotions and analyse them to know what had caused them. I wanted it to be enough to look at the situation that triggered me only from an objective point of view, so I just tried to rationalise the situation and ignored how it really made me feel.
Not wanting to feel my emotions
I was actually really good at recognising my emotions and analysing what caused them. But I was always trying to find a solution for them way too early. I didn’t want to feel sad or especially angry, because I thought that I shouldn’t be easily affected by anything negative in order to live my daily life effectively. So I bottled up my unpleasant feelings and tried not to show them. I think this was happening not only because I was just trying to be unbothered and act maturely, but because I have always been sensitive and I cry easily, and that has made people close to me uncomfortable in the past. But nowadays I live alone so there wasn’t even anyone around to get triggered by my emotions and I was still trying to jump straight to finding a solution. And even if I lived with someone, I still believe that hiding your emotions is not the way to go. Of course, nobody wants to make other people feel uneasy, but if you are not allowing yourself to feel and show your emotions, you are making yourself feel uneasy, by trying to be someone you’re not.
I am very sensitive. Trying to act like nobody can get to me or that it doesn’t bother me when I’m misunderstood is me neglecting myself. At the same time I was very frustrated and hurt if other people didn’t take my sadness or anger seriously, but then I went ahead and did the same thing to myself. Maybe I wanted someone else to be able to handle my emotions first, before I could look at them as something valid enough, for me to be able to accept them. But the truth is, you can’t make anyone else react to you in a way you want and you can’t force anyone to support you, so don’t make that an excuse to not support yourself. If it’s making you feel bad that other people can’t handle your emotions, what are you doing dismissing your own feelings? It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to be there for you but yours. Start being the person who can accept your emotions. That being said, I do still recommend finding people who are able to support the authentic you, if you don’t have them already. And getting rid of people who can’t, if that’s necessary and possible.
How to let your emotions out and live with them
This is actually very simple. If you are angry let yourself be annoyed. Maybe don’t go around picking up a fight with people, but at least once you are alone, swear it out. You can trash talk people just to let the emotion out even if you don’t really mean what you say. This is just to acknowledge the emotion of anger and giving it a way out. As someone who genuinely does look at things pretty objectively, I didn’t allow myself to do this for the longest time, since I thought this was very immature. And some people may argue so. But for me, doing this is only about how I feel. I know trash talking is not the objective interpretation of a triggering situation, but it isn’t supposed to be. Your emotional and rational side won’t always go hand in hand and they are allowed to have different opinions of the same situation. And you can be able to listen to both sides and even agree with both. You are allowed to both experience your life from your own point of view and also understand the bigger picture.
I used to feel like I had to be in a good mood to get anything done. I think that suppressing my emotions made them only grow and that’s how they ended up so unbearable that I in fact did need a brake to collect myself. This links to the self development phrase “do it regardless of your emotions”. I think that belief implies that you should just ignore your feelings and get things done. Now that I allow myself to feel all my feelings, I would like to rephrase the belief to be “do it with your emotions”. I have now noticed that once I freely allow myself to feel sad or angry, I am actually not paralysed. I’m still able to go through my routines. Maybe your emotions don’t affect your ability to get things done as much as you think, once you just let yourself truly have them. In fact, anger might actually give you some extra boost if you learn to take advantage of it. Sadness on the other hand might require slowing down a bit, but depending on the level of it, it doesn’t necessarily have to paralyse you. The point is to trust yourself to know, when you really need to take a step back to be fully present with your emotions, and when you can let them be with you while focusing on your daily routine.
How feeling freely affected my relationships
While I was always trying to be in a good mood myself, I came to notice I didn’t have much patience with other people if they weren’t in a good mood. Like I was always trying to find a solution for my own unpleasant feelings too early, I also did the same thing with the people close to me. I was the annoying friend trying to rationalise through the situation that triggered my friend, and trying to fix the situation, when in reality, maybe my friend only wanted to vent their feelings. But that made me uncomfortable, because I truly am empathetic. I wanted to feel happy, and if other people around me are not feeling happy, that means I won’t feel happy either. Of course I tried to be sensitive when my friends opened up to me, but I was trying to avoid letting the atmosphere get too dark to my liking. I was trying to be understanding, but at the same time my brain was already working, thinking of ways to tell how to fix the situation.
Now I understand that sometimes people just want to vent and the solution can be found later. And since I don’t have to be in a good mood all the time to get through my life, I’m not triggered by other people’s unpleasant emotions either. Allowing myself to feel my feelings has made me able to accept other people’s emotions better as well. They don’t feel threatening to me since I don’t have the need to always be in a good mood anymore.
Key takeaways
If the above resonated with you, here are the key points I hope you took away from this post (:
- The identification of the trigger and the analysis of the situation is not the same thing as feeling your feelings, and that’s why you have to give yourself the opportunity to be just as petty, sad or dissappointed as you feel like.
- Being sensitive by nature and then trying to act like nothing or nobody can get to you is you dismissing who you are. Become the person who can handle your emotions.
- Letting your emotions out by showing them is not immature. It is you letting your authentic self be seen and you respecting your point of view. You can still have your rational side look at the triggering situation objectively and act based on that, as long as you let yourself also have the emotions you feel, and don’t push them away.
- Allowing yourself to not feel okay and happy all the time will make you a better listener to the people close to you.