There is a moment of discomfort that comes up for hopefully all of us when you realize you don’t know how to feel your feelings.
For me it happened when I was around a gaslighter who has a lot of insecurities and discomfort around sad and hard things. And while I was having a hard moment in that particular moment in that particular company I realized I didn’t know how to move through that feeling in a way that was powerful and empowering.
I felt stuck, lost, confused and disheartened. I felt something happening deep inside of me, but didn’t know how to address it in the most nurturing way. I was so consumed with the discomfort of this other person that I once again self-sabotaged my own needs and self-care for the comfort of the discontented.
Instead of just being with what was coming up for me I jumped into overtly thoughtful to a fault mode where I was more concerned with making this insecure person comfortable rather than just honoring myself in that moment. As I took all too small breaths I felt my hands getting sweaty, my heart pulsating and a lump forming in my throat. A momentary feeling of dizziness came over me and then I just went right into addressing what was comfortable for him in that moment.
And that my friends was the moment I realized I had not been honoring myself and had not learned how to feel my feelings!
If that sounds familiar, you’re not broken. You’re not emotionally stunted or permanently damaged. You are someone who learned, at some point, that feelings were not safe to have. And you adapted. You got very good at managing, intellectualizing, suppressing, or bypassing emotion.
The problem is that what we don’t feel doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. It shows up as anxiety, numbness, overreaction, physical tension, exhaustion that no amount of sleep fixes, and a vague sense that you’re watching your own life from behind glass.
Learning to feel your feelings is not about becoming more emotional or falling apart. It’s about building a relationship with your inner life so that your emotions can move through you instead of living in you permanently.
Here’s how to start.
Why Most of Us Were Never Taught This
Emotional literacy – the ability to identify, feel, and process emotion — is one of the most foundational human skills. And it is almost never deliberately taught.
Most of us received one of two messages growing up: that feelings were dangerous (don’t cry, you’re too sensitive, calm down) or that feelings were irrelevant (just push through, other people have it worse, there’s no time for this). Neither message taught us how to be with emotion. Both taught us to get away from it as fast as possible.
Growing up I wasn’t really taught about emotions per se. Let’s just say I was emotional and my needs were tended to by a very nurturing mother. I was never told to repress my emotions and I was never made to feel guilty for all of those hard feelings that would rush in from time to time. I was told – “Life Is hard. You have to be strong.” I’ve written extensively about this powerful advice I was given.
It made me feel brave, “strong” and prepared for what would inevitably be a very hard life.
Anger was rear. Sadness was palpable and neediness fell to the wayside with my ability to toughen up knowing that life was indeed hard.
While my Dad never cried my parents were content and there was little drama. There were emotions that were expressed, but my home environment wasn’t ripe with feelings and emotion, but it was safe to express yourself. It seems very normal in hindsight especially all I’ve had to endure in later life.
There were no performances just authenticity. Words and feelings were free to meet the moments. And there was no fear or need to suppress sad feelings so let’s just say I get this idea of needing to feel and feelings rushing in at inopportune moments.
But if you’re anything like others I know you were taught to repress. You were perhaps abused and emotionally neglected and your reality with learning how to feel what your feeling is very different than mine overall.
And it’s ok to not know how to feel your feelings. We’ve encountered enough people who affirmed this way of being for us how obviously struggle in their own right to feel their feelings.
The result is that many of us reach adulthood as highly capable, completely numbed-out people. We can run meetings and raise children and hold everything together, but when someone asks how we really are, we genuinely don’t know.
The good news is that emotional awareness is a skill. It can be learned. It is learned through practice, through patience, and through a willingness to turn toward what we’ve spent years turning away from.
What Happens When You Don’t Feel Your Feelings
Before we talk about how to feel things, it helps to understand why it matters. Because for a lot of us, suppression has worked well enough for a long time. Why mess with it? Right? Wrong!
Emotional suppression has probably wound up costing you big time personally.
I’m sure you’ve experienced numbness in your relationships, your body and even leading to your ability or lack there of to feel joy at times.
I’ve on a rare occasion had my own anxiety or that of another’s along with a bout of chronic tension and even more chronic exhaustion from years of insomnia that often turns out to be suppressed emotions so I want to stress again I get it!
Have you ever had anxiety, chronic tension, or exhaustion that turned out to be suppressed emotion?
Suppressing emotions might be “normal,” it’s not necessarily healthy. Know there is a better way.
When we suppress emotion, the feeling doesn’t actually go away. It gets stored in the body. Research in somatic psychology and neuroscience consistently shows that unprocessed emotions live in our tissues, our posture, our nervous system. The anxiety you can’t explain. The tightness in your chest that never fully loosens. The way you brace before certain conversations. These are emotions that never got to complete their natural cycle.
Unprocessed feelings also drive our behavior in ways we don’t always recognize. Chronic suppression can look like emotional distance in relationships, perfectionism, people pleasing, compulsive busyness, addictive behaviors, sudden disproportionate reactions to small things, and depression that doesn’t seem to have a clear cause.
Feeling your feelings is not indulgent. It is maintenance. It is the thing that keeps everything else from quietly falling apart.
Why Feeling Your Feelings Is So Hard (Even When You Want To)
Here is what makes this particularly complicated: sometimes we genuinely want to feel. We know it would help. We sit down to journal or cry or process, and nothing comes. We are so practiced at suppression that the emotion doesn’t know it has permission.
Other times, the tiniest edge of a feeling sends us straight into overwhelm, and we shutdown or spiral before we’ve actually processed anything.
Well much like you we all have our moments. I’ve found that depending who is around me, my environment, the circumstance has everything to do with how I let myself or keep myself from expressing emotions. If I’m in the company of someone cold or insecure with their own sensitivities I take the liberty of squashing my own feelings for their safety. It’s selfless, I know.
But there are a few moments in life where I spiraled completely out of control with zero regard for the discomfort of others, but simply so grief stricken that the only thing before me and enveloping me were my overwhelming emotions.
Most recently I had a total breakdown in the store while standing in the self checkout. I was just hit with a wave of grief and the next thing you know I had tears streaming down my face and neck and all I could do in that moment was honor what I was feeling. I gave up the goods and walked straight into the bathroom. Collected myself and left the store to cry in the safety of my car.
So again I assure you I know all too well what it’s like to be drowning in feelings, but not always knowing how to best manage those unexpected little visitors from time to time.
Both patterns make complete sense. Suppression is protective — it kept you functional in situations where falling apart wasn’t an option. Overwhelm happens when the system has been holding so much for so long that the moment it gets a crack of permission, everything rushes through at once.
Learning to feel your feelings is really about finding the middle path between those two extremes: being with an emotion without drowning in it.
How to Actually Feel Your Feelings: A Step-by-Step Practice
This is a body-based practice, not a mind-based one. Trying to feel your feelings by thinking about them harder usually doesn’t work. The body is where emotion actually lives, so that is where we begin.
Step 1: Create the Conditions You cannot feel your feelings on the run. You need a window of time, even just five or ten minutes, where you are not performing, producing, or taking care of someone else. Sit down. Put the phone face down. Let yourself arrive.
Step 2: Check In With the Body First Before you ask yourself what you’re feeling emotionally, ask your body. Close your eyes. Scan slowly from your feet upward. Where is there tension? Where do you feel heavy or tight or hollow? What part of you is bracing?
Emotion always has a physical location. Grief tends to sit in the chest and throat. Anger often lives in the jaw, the fists, the stomach. Fear tightens the shoulders and contracts the belly. Anxiety hums in the sternum. When you find a sensation, stay with it instead of immediately trying to explain it.
Listen in to this episode of the Blossom Your Awesome Podcast on mind, body, spirit regulation.
So as we progress with learning to feel our feelings let me ask you – where does your emotion live in your body?
For me it’s in my stomach and at moments in my heart and while I’m at it I’m going to add shoulders as well.
A lot of my stress lives and houses itself making itself very much at home in my shoulders. My pain and grief takes up permanent residence in my heart. While my anxiety is mostly felt in my stomach. I notice how I feel queasy and uneasy when I have stressful or disturbing thoughts.
When I grapple with the weight of loss that’s become my reality after the loss of a young loved one I feel my heart pulsating, sipping beats on a regular basis and when I really tap in – throbbing in agony.
So often I’ve felt things in my body only to discover later those were emotions and feelings giving me real feelings inside my body and causing physical discomfort. What about you? Where do you feel your pain and anxiety?
Step 3: Name It Without Judgment Once you’ve located a sensation, see if you can name the emotion. Not diagnose it, not analyze where it came from, not decide whether it’s valid. Just name it. Sad. Angry. Scared. Lonely. Ashamed.
Research by UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman found that simply labeling an emotion reduces its intensity. The act of naming activates the prefrontal cortex and calms the amygdala, the brain’s alarm center. You don’t have to solve the feeling. You just have to acknowledge it.
Step 4: Let It Move This is the step most of us skip. We identify the feeling and then immediately try to fix it, distract from it, or intellectually explain it. Instead: stay.
Breathe into the sensation. Let it expand slightly if it wants to. If tears come, let them. If you feel the impulse to move, tense and release your muscles, or shake, let that happen. Emotion is energy and energy needs to move. When you give it permission, it usually does — and then it shifts.
Step 5: Ask One Gentle Question After you’ve been with the feeling for a few minutes, ask it one question: what do you need me to know? Not what caused you. Not how to make you go away. Just: what are you here to tell me?
This question changes your relationship with your emotions from adversarial to curious. Feelings are not problems to eliminate. They are information. They are trying to tell you something about what you need, what you value, what you’ve lost, or what you’re longing for.
Something to ponder are emotions that we’ve been avoiding. What are we being told? What is avoiding these feelings doing to us and how is it slowing any possibility for healing?
You don’t have to address it. Just reflect on them. That will suffice.
Trust me this is a lifelong process and finding yourself knee deep or drowning in emotions is perfectly fine.
I’ve been in the middle of drawing out my grief for the nearly two years now only to find there is an endless yarn of pain that seems to keep unrolling itself into my heart, into my soul and doesn’t really cease.
Take comfort in know that your still-in-progress journey is far more powerful than a clean, resolved story.
If it’s any consolation take comfort in knowing your story may never be resolved.
So let me ask you – What emotion have you been avoiding, and what do you think it might be trying to tell you?
- You don’t have to have the answer. Wondering out loud is enough.
When Feelings Overwhelm You: What to Do Instead of Shutting Down
Sometimes a feeling arrives too fast and too big, and the practice above just isn’t enough. You don’t need to white-knuckle your way through overwhelming emotion. Here is how to regulate first so you can feel safely.
- The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique: name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste. This brings your nervous system back online.
- Box breathing: inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system and signals to your body that you are safe.
- Cold water on your wrists or face. This stimulates the vagus nerve and interrupts the overwhelm response.
- Name the feeling out loud, even just to yourself. “I am feeling overwhelmed right now.” The act of witnessing yourself reduces the charge.
- Remind yourself: “This feeling will not last forever. It is moving through me. I can be with it without it becoming me.”
For me personally I go outside – whether it’s a short jaunt in the neighborhood or a long kick back in the grass it’s a great way to slow down and allow things to come up without the overwhelm. It might not be perfect, but hey it’s a small step in the right direction. We’re figuring it out.
Breath work has always been my go to. In for 7 out for 8 can do wonders for the soul in times of stress.
When you’re feeling overwhelmed it’s ok to pause. It’s ok to feel helpless and do nothing. The whole point is to be ok with not being ok. That’s the first huge step to processing the hard stuff and healing even if just a little.
The Feelings We’re Most Afraid Of
Not all feelings are equally hard to have. Most of us have one or two emotions that feel genuinely scary. I’m talking about the ones we’ll do almost anything to avoid. For many women, that emotion is anger. For others it’s grief, or longing, or shame.
The feeling I find I’m most afraid of is truly sitting with deep grief. It’s so palpable and so crippling that I walk with it, hold it and house it, but seldom do I really allow myself to fully feel it cause I’m afraid it will just overtake me and leave me in total disarray and despair.
My body numbs. My head swells. My breathing speeds up. My heart begins to race and my stomach starts turning in knots that make me feel like I’m going to throw up quite literally. Sorry I know. T.M.I., but honestly perhaps you feel all or some of this too so you know exactly what I’m talking about.
And while no one has told me this feeling was wrong or dangerous my own self-protection mechanism keeps me at bay with these feelings I still haven’t learned to manage.
Perhaps if I let myself feel it I might release a little of it? I’m not sure. The wound is so deep it feels truly frightening to allow it to be felt with any sincere depth still. Perhaps you have a deep wounding that has been gnawing at you as well.
Whatever yours is, I want you to consider the possibility that the feeling you’re most afraid of is the one most worth meeting. Not because pain is good, but because the amount of energy it takes to keep a feeling suppressed is enormous. And on the other side of it is usually something you’ve been longing for without knowing it.
Anger often has your self-respect hiding inside it. Grief has your love. Fear has your truest desires. Shame holds the parts of you that most need to be witnessed and accepted.
You don’t have to dive in all at once. But moving one inch closer to the feeling you’ve been running from is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself.
A Practice to Try This Week
Here’s something simple you can do starting today: Once a day, for just two minutes, ask yourself three questions and answer them honestly.
- What am I feeling right now in my body?
- What emotion is underneath that physical sensation?
- What does this feeling need from me today?
You don’t have to fix anything. You don’t have to have a breakthrough. You just have to check in. Over time, this two-minute practice builds an entirely new relationship with your inner life.
And let me just put a big pretty bow on this by saying I’m slowly leaning into my own advice. I’ve been allowing myself more and more to sit in the depths of my despair.
Is it uncomfortable? Yes.
Is it pleasant? No.
“I am still learning this. Some days I catch myself mid-shutdown and can turn around. Some days I don’t catch it until later. But I keep coming back to it because…”
What keeps me going is the good old adage – is know that simply leaning in a little is better than not. There’s no rush. No finish line. No end goal. Just a simple – taking it one day at a time sort of strategy that will offer you some sense of hope and growth.
That is my wish for you.
