More than a Feeling

What messages are your emotions sending you right now?

If you’ve spent any time around young children you will be left with no doubt as to how they experience their emotions. They typically make how they are feeling pretty obvious to all.  There is nothing quite like hearing a preschooler chuckling to themself at something they find hilarious and equally nothing quite like anger or frustration expressed as a toddler tantrum.  Young children innately express how they are feeling, but at some point in our childhoods, most of us receive some version of the message that we need to ‘control our emotions’.  To laugh a little less loudly, to temper that excitement, to tone down that anger and to manage our sadness.  Learning to regulate our emotions and how we express them is an important social skill and necessary to ensure that we have positive and healthy relationships as adults. But what happens when we become so proficient at managing how we are feeling that we barely feel at all?

For many years I managed my least favourite emotions with one simple strategy - I ignored them. Sadness, anger, hate, jealousy and fear were not close acquaintances and I intended to keep it that way. Until something happened that made me question my approach. At a family funeral several years ago I found myself unable to enter into the shared grief with my loved ones.  I was present, but I was numb to all that was going on around me. I had the uncomfortable realisation that this detachment was disconnecting me from others. A seed of an idea was planted in me that day, that has taken some time and attention to grow - What if ignoring my emotions was not actually protecting or serving me at all?

The word ‘emotion’ literally means energy in motion.  Emotions are meant to move. They are not meant to be bottled up, contained or controlled.  In fact, all emotions give us messages and are trying to help us in some way.  When we allow ourselves to experience our emotions, they come and go. When we think of our feelings as useful feedback, all emotions become helpful.

As it turns out,  not acknowledging our emotions doesn’t actually make them magically disappear.  It has been my experience that stuffed emotions have a sneaky habit of multiplying and then moving in. They are expressed in some way, often internally in our minds or our bodies, even if we choose not to notice them.  That clenched jaw, those tension headaches, muddled thoughts, lingering negativity or that increasingly short fuse. Outwardly expressed emotions, when done so with compassion towards ourselves and others, seem to have the opposite effect.  Sometimes just voicing, crying or journaling how we feel suddenly takes the weight and power of the emotion away and allows it to move on.

That day at the funeral I began to understand that by choosing to shut down some of my least favourite emotions, I had also shut down my ability to express joy, happiness, wonder and excitement. We lose so much of ourselves when we deny the full spectrum of normal human emotions and natural responses to life’s challenges and celebrations.

So what if we tried a different approach and began to see our emotions as an important and extremely valuable tool in our personal toolkit? What if we understood our feelings as messages, rather than something that needs to be managed? What would our lives be like if we leant into them, named them, and acknowledged them?  And then let them go.

Ponder…

What emotions or feelings are you experiencing right now?

Name them out loud. “I am experiencing sadness”, “I am feeling grateful.”

What messages are they trying to tell you?

When you are ready, decide how are you going to continue to experience this emotion or choose to let it go.

Tuning into our emotions can be tricky, especially if we have ignored them for years. Coaching allows clients the space and time to greater explore their feelings and provides them with the tools to notice and understand what they are telling them. If this is something you would like to further explore, one-on-one coaching could be the next great step for you.