How To Feel Your Emotions (Especially If You Don't Know How)

What does it mean to feel your emotions? How do you do that?

In a nutshell, feeling your feelings is the art of decoding what’s going on with you beneath the surface. Beneath the smile. Beneath all the doing and distractions that you could bury yourself in as an attempt to avoid what’s really going on emotionally. Beneath the part of us that’s not being truthful when saying, “I’m good,” “I’m fine.” “Everything is great,” when it’s really not.

It’s easy to get in the habit of ignoring or disconnecting from our inner world, especially if past situations have brought up big, intense emotions. If we’ve experienced a past situation that brought up emotions that were too much for us to handle at the time, we might have picked up the habit of shutting off emotionally in order to self protect. If we didn’t have the skills or support to cope when hard experiences presented, it’s a natural response to shut down and numb out emotions that are too painful to feel.

The issue with this tactic is that shutting down emotions consistently can become a bad habit and lead to a permanent disconnect from our emotional state. Many problems will arise with this way of coping as a permanent solution. Lost relationships, strained relationships and a disconnect from yourself are a few to mention. If you want to live a life that’s filled with meaningful connection and a solid relationship with yourself, it’s important to hone the skill of expressing how you feel. Both to yourself and others.

The skill of expressing ourselves can be challenging and is not something that we all do with ease. To go further, unless we’ve put some time and energy into building a foundation of “Self,” our expression will be limited. “Self” meaning the relationship between you and you, which aligns with your ability to connect to your inner truth.

If we’re not in tune with who we are and how we feel, then expressing how we feel to others will be nearly impossible. Have you ever drawn a blank or became tongue tied when someone was trying to engage in a conversation that involved exploring and expressing your emotional world? If this has happened once or twice you sound pretty normal and human to me. However, if going blank and having nothing to contribute consistently when your emotions are being called toward self expression, it could benefit you to learn practices to help you express yourself with more clarity and confidence.