Feel Your Feelings
Hello everyone,
I hope your week is off to a great start!
Today, I want to share something that took me most of my life to learn:
It is crucial for our well-being that we feel our feelings.
Feeling our feelings can be a tough and scary thing to do, which is why many of us don’t do it. It is tough and scary because we might not have learned how to go within and recognize what is going on inside us. Further, it could be that we haven’t given ourselves permission to feel whatever we are truly feeling, and we may not have a safe space to process our feelings and are afraid that we will be judged, belittled, or not accepted.
As some of you know, I spent a great deal of my life feeling extremely angry. What I know now is that I literally only allowed myself to feel anger, and I used my anger to cover up all my other underlying feelings.
Needless to say, I was not a happy person.
And one thing is for sure; if you had asked me all those years ago to feel my feelings, I would have told you – after getting angry that you even asked in the first place! – that I was feeling my feelings and I WAS ANGRY!
Thankfully, after many years of suffering, I found a safe space to do my inner work and gave myself permission to feel my feelings. As it turns out, I have recognized that I wasn’t angry at all. Instead, I was actually disappointed and embarrassed, and in some situations, I was heartbroken.
I know now that I was doing my best navigating through life with no tools in my toolbox during all those unhappy years. In addition, I had a minimal feelings vocabulary (only anger), and, most of all, I was too scared to feel anything beyond anger. Going any deeper than that would have hurt too much.
Anger was the mask for everything else I was too afraid to feel. Taking off the mask of anger has allowed me to feel more alive in myself, be more honest, and have a deeper sense of empathy and connection with others.
Take a minute to think about your own experience.
What is your go-to feeling that is safer than all the other feelings that are alive in you?
For you, it could be guilt. Maybe it is shame or sadness. Or perhaps you are scared like I was. When we go deeper and get past our safe, go-to feelings and give ourselves permission to feel our feelings, we truly get to experience what is alive in us, which is the first step toward healing and creating happier lives for ourselves.
Feeling our feelings will be the topic of discussion during this month’s free book club on Sunday, March 20th, from 1:30 to 2:30 PM (MDT) simultaneously on Zoom and in person.
Our book for this month, as well as for April and May, is Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett Ph.D.
We will be discussing Part 1 this month, and if you haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, no worries! We’d love to have you join us anyway. Send us an email if you need the Zoom link.
Wishing you a wonderful week,
Ada