What messages were you taught about your feelings growing up?
Were you taught that they were something to ignore? To control? To hide?
Perhaps you were taught that your feelings were an inconvenience to the adults around you.
Or that you were strange for having the feelings you did.
I’m not just talking about emotions. I’m also talking about other kinds of physical sensations.
Did your school teach you that the urge to pee is something you should ignore until the “right” time of day? Were you taught that the only real learning happens when you’re sitting at a desk, so you started to feel ashamed of your desire to fidget, move around and wander? Were you teased for blushing, or told to “get over it” if you were nervous, sad or scared?
If your feelings were treated like an irritation or a problem by the adults around you then it’s likely that you learned to treat them that way too.
I was a very sensitive child and I felt things very deeply. I’m sure that the adults around me never intended to make me feel as though my feelings were a problem, but this was the message I picked up over time.
I learned that my feelings of shyness made me “weird” and were something that I had to get rid of if I wanted to have friends.
I learned that the extreme nervousness I felt about tests in school was a problem that needed to be fixed. So I learned to do that by working really, really hard to always be prepared for every test.
I learned that the best way to deal with other children upsetting me or hurting my feelings was to pretend that everything was okay, and I wasn’t really bothered. I repressed these feelings and often felt angry at myself for getting upset, even if someone had been mean or rude to me.
I learned that the adults around me didn’t like it when I was sad or angry so I started to believe that feeling that way was “wrong” and I had to figure out how to always be happy and content.
The strategies I learned to deal with this worked in the short term.
Pretending to be confident did help me to make friends - but I still felt like I was “weird” deep down.
Working really, really hard got me great grades, and developed my confidence in my abilities - but it also left me feeling exhausted and like I was never allowed to rest or be ‘average’ at anything.
Pretending not to be upset when others hurt my feelings kept the peace - but it left me with low self esteem and kept me in friendships which were harmful for me.
Learning how to hide my feelings gave me a reputation as a “good girl” that every teacher loved to teach - but it made me terrified to ever express myself without thinking twice about whether what I was feeling was acceptable to others.
As an adult, these patterns started to seriously impede my ability to live a full and thriving life.
I had spent so long controlling my reactions to the things around me that I no longer trusted my feelings. I didn’t know how to discern between what really made me happy and what were things that others had told me should make me happy. I struggled in intimate relationships because I had no idea how to express my true feelings, and thought that sharing anything uncomfortable with my partner made me a burden to them. I harshly criticised myself any time I felt sad or angry, and carried a vicious inner voice around with me everywhere.
I didn’t know myself at all, because knowing myself would mean acknowledging the parts of myself that I had learned to fear and despise.
Eventually I was forced to acknowledge just how disconnected from myself I had become.
Anxiety, O.C.D. and panic attacks plagued me during my twenties and life conspired to show me that I couldn’t go on this way.
I went to therapy and learned more about how our emotions really work. I started to see just how valuable all of my emotions were, even the ones that felt uncomfortable or unpleasant.
My anger was there to show me where my boundaries were being violated and help me to stand up for myself. My sadness was a natural part of life and feeling it was necessary in order to also feel happiness and joy. My nerves about new experiences or difficult tasks were only a problem if I turned them into one, otherwise they could give me the shot of adrenaline I needed to focus on the task at hand.
And my deep sensitivity wasn’t a curse - it was a blessing that allowed me to see the magic in the world and connect deeply to others.
The difficulty was that even though I had now learned that feeling all of my feelings was an essential part of knowing myself, I had absolutely no idea how to do it!
I had spent so long working to not feel the feelings that I had been taught were ‘wrong’ or ‘too much’ or ‘rude’ or ‘inconvenient’ that now I couldn’t feel them at all, even when I wanted to. And when therapists told me to just ‘feel my feelings’ or self help books told me to ‘sit with the anger’ I felt even more frustrated.
What did that actually mean?!
I didn’t know how to just feel my feelings. I could barely distinguish between my anger, sadness, frustration and confusion. Sometimes I just felt numb.
I wondered if there was something wrong with me. Or if a lifetime of repression had somehow broken me, and I just wasn’t able to feel my feelings any more.
I wasn’t broken.
There was nothing wrong with me.
Feeling my feelings was a skill that I was able to learn through embodiment practices.
Just like learning a car or riding a bike, it was ludicrous to expect myself to be good at it right away. But with practice and consistency I was able to recover the lost connection with myself, until honouring my feelings and listening to my body became an intuitive skill that I use in my everyday life.
I went from being someone who shamed myself for most of the feelings that ran through my body each day, to someone who approaches my inner world with curiosity, acceptance and unconditional love. This has drastically reduced the anxiety I feel in my daily life and enabled me to try all kinds of new experiences.
I’ve stopped trying to ‘fix’ myself so that I’m easier for a future partner to be with, and started looking out for people who genuinely want to know all of me, and have the emotional capacity to make space for uncomfortable feelings in a relationship.
Best of all, as I started making more space for my sadness, anger, frustration and grief, I found that this naturally created more space for joy, happiness, freedom and peace.
Learning how to really feel your feelings can be completely life changing.
If you’ve struggled with this, then embodiment can be a fantastic, practical tool to help you develop the capacity to start listening to your body and make space for the feelings you’ve previously learned to reject to come through.
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