Feeling your feelings

I used to hate feeling my feelings! I found them horrible, icky, and sometimes they felt really unsafe. But avoiding them meant they got stuck in me. Or they popped up unexpectedly, which was super annoying.

In my mental health journey, I had to learn to feel my feelings, so that I could release them and move on.

It’s something a lot of us struggle with: how do we feel our feelings? How do we feel okay to let them run through, without getting completely stuck? 

There are lots of different ways to do this, so here are some of my favourites:

Note: These are a few ideas that can be tried, but they won't suit everyone - especially if you are in crisis. If you feel very unsafe around your feelings, and are struggling with behaviours like self harm and suicide, please seek professional help and be careful with feeling your feelings. If you start to feel unsafe, you may want to move on to a distraction or call a friend. Be gentle, and be safe :)

The 90 second burn:

One theory is that if we only feel a feeling, it takes about 90 seconds to burn out. This is based on Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s research, which says that if we allow a feeling to pop up, label it, observe it quietly and let it leave, it only takes about 90 seconds to run through us.

Isn’t that wild? For those of us avoiding our feelings, it sounds unbelievable. 

What can keep a feeling stuck, is telling a story about it. When we start telling ourselves a story: ‘I feel sad because of the past, or because this thing happened to me this week…’ we pull ourselves out of the emotion and into our thoughts. This means we aren’t feeling it deliberately anymore - we are just pushing it away. It will continue to linger as we tell ourselves the story.

But, if we label the feeling: ‘I feel sad’

Observe it, let ourselves feel it, without going into a story

Without responding to it or acting on it

And watch as it peaks, and then lessens over time

It will usually burn through and leave us. 

We have to let it leave! Sometimes we use stories to keep it there - ‘I just felt sad because of this, or that’. But letting it leave naturally, and moving on to something else, means the feeling has been experienced as it needed to be.

It may take practice to feel in this way. And once we get the hang of it, we may need to do it repeatedly over time - often we have a lot of stored sadness or anger, so feeling it multiple times will be necessary to get through what comes up for us. But over time, we may make our way through these feelings until they are less powerful.

Drawing our feelings:

Some of our harder feelings can be stored in the right side of our brain, which works more with images than words. So to access and express our stored negative feelings, we can draw an image of what’s happening for us. 

It’s better not to focus on drawing a great picture! I use stick figures, scribbles and black squares to explain my feelings to myself. The scribbling has the added bonus of being a great body expression of anger, confusion or fear.

We can also gather images or colours to express the same thing. 

By using images, we can raise our awareness of what is happening for us, and experience our feelings.

Body feelings:

Using our body can help us express some of that emotion we have bottled up. Some people love exercise or dance to express what’s happening for them - but any movement can help. 

For example, a great way to express anger is to throw cotton wool balls into the bath! They’re a safe thing to throw, and we can do it as furiously as we like. You might love to punch a pillow, or bounce a ball. You might try fidget toys to express anxiety and nervous energy, or go on a walk to process adrenaline.

By experimenting with movement, we can start to release some of that feeling from our body.

These are a few ideas, but I always love hearing more. If you have a favourite way of feeling your feelings, drop me a line at cosytherapy@gmail.com

Warmth and wishes,

April