Feel Everything.
We humans don’t like pain. We avoid it whenever we can. In fact, it’s even a part of our biology; touch the hot stove and we’ve pulled our hand away before we’ve had any thought at all. It’s automatic. The same goes for our emotions. We seek feelings of comfort and stability and run from those of vulnerability and uncertainty. We just want to feel good all the time. And many of us try; we scroll our phones to disconnect from pain or stress, use substances like alcohol, food, or drugs to numb us from anything uncomfortable. We try and avoid situations that might cause us discomfort. Some of us even diligently work to preemptively avoid future pain, obsessively working out or eating the perfect diet to avoid our inevitable aging, decline, and death. But it doesn’t work. Emotional pain, discomfort, and stress eventually catch up with us. What is there to do?
Somatic Energy Therapy suggests another path. It contends that our ability to feel happiness, joy, and fulfillment is directly related to our capacity to feel pain and discomfort. In other words, you can’t feel the good stuff without also being willing to feel the bad stuff too. This has to do with what it means to feel emotions in the first place. When it comes to emotions, our brain and body are just not that precise. We can’t be open to feeling pleasant emotions but then try and close ourselves off to feeling the unpleasant ones. When we close our self off to feeling pain, we close our self off to pleasure, as well.
More than this, because at a very basic level our emotions are felt sensations in our body, when we close our self off to emotional pain, we also disconnect from our body’s experience, turning us into a floating head of sorts. We think our way through life without feeling much at all. And this is what many of us do – think our emotions, not feel them. But it’s not because we’re bad or bad wrong; it’s because feeling our emotions in ways that are healing and helpful is not easy to do.
This is how I often first find people as they start therapy with me, stuck in their heads thinking their feelings without actually feeling them. Not surprisingly, they are also depressed or anxious, maybe addicted to something to keep themselves numbed out, trapped in obsessive or racing thoughts, or constantly overwhelmed by emotions that keep breaking through their avoidance. Naturally, many people hope that therapy will somehow help strengthen their avoidance so they can finally feel good without having to feel bad. When I share with them that our work is actually about helping them learn to move towards their pain in ways that feel grounded and safe it often comes as a big surprise.
When I explain why being able to enjoy our lives takes our willingness to also feel our pain, however, it does make sense. When we feel emotional pain honestly, without judgment or resistance, it’s energy can move through us, integrating within us and releasing from us, simultaneously. In this way, allowing the flow of our emotions is not unlike other flow that is necessary for our body to remain healthy. Blood flow, breath flow, and digestion flow all must keep moving so we can keep living. If they stop, bad things happen. And it’s no different with our emotions. Okay, avoiding our emotions isn’t going to kill us – I’m not saying that - but I’ve found it can risk creating a bunch of problems. In fact, Somatic Energy Therapy contends that emotional suppression may be at the heart of conditions like depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems.
But what does feeling our honest emotions really mean? Should we all be like little kids, uncontrollably feeling everything that comes up without any regard for what else is going on? You’re standing in the grocery store, a wave of deep sadness shows up inside, and you should start balling because that’s the healthy thing to do? Not exactly. But this is the first question I get when I offer this idea to my clients. We easily imagine that the opposite of emotional suppression is emotional reaction, where we have no filter. I want to suggest to you, however, that there is a middle way. That is feeling our emotions consciously.
Children feel their emotions UN-consciously. They are walking down the road, something happens either internally or externally, and they express their emotions before they even know what’s happening. This is part of why children need what’s called co-regulation. Co-regulation is the process where a trusted adult helps a child feel their emotions in ways that allow their emotions to move through them. Validation, comforting physical connection, and especially slow, regulated breathing, is all part of co-regulation, so that the adult’s nervous system can literally help regulate the child’s nervous system. When this happens over and over again the child eventually learns to automatically self-regulate their emotions. Unfortunately, I’ve found that fewer and fewer parents know how to do this, which naturally produces more children who grow up to become adults that avoid their feelings.
Feeling emotional pain consciously means feeling the literal sensation(s) of the emotion in our body – the energy of the emotions - while also, at the very same time, slowing down our breathing, feeling our breathing, and grounding our body. So, if we find an intense unpleasant emotion showing up and:
Bring our focused attention to the sensation(s) of the emotion happening inside our body,
Slow down our breathing and breathe with the emotion,
Ground our body to the planet,
Allow the sensation(s) of the emotion to be just as it is - to move or change or even stay exactly the same, without resistance, control, or judgment,
And stay with this process until the sensation dissipates on its own,
…we’ve just felt an emotion consciously. When we do this, now we’re engaging with our body in a way that opens us, not only to our emotional pain, but to pleasant feelings as well.
Is this the only healthy way to feel feelings. Of course not. This is merely what I’ve found to be helpful. It’s the place I start with my own clients, but it’s not always the place we stay because what’s most important is attending to what each individual person finds helpful. And healing isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Now, there are a few parts of this that may not make any sense at first. Emotions are sensations felt inside your body? You can allow them to be as they are? Everyone talks about breathing, but breathing with these sensations actually does something? And what is grounding? These are all valid questions that are somewhat outside the scope of this article, but I’ll try to address them in other articles and more comprehensively in my upcoming book.
The short answers to these questions, however, is, “Yes,” “Yes,” “That’s my experience,” and “Grounding is connecting with the planet for support and stability.” When we bring our focused awareness and intentional slowed-down breathing to the felt experience of our emotions in our body, while grounding, we can connect with ourselves in the same way we needed our parent or caregiver to connect with us when we were a child. We self-attach and become our own safe place to feel our feelings.
This doesn’t mean we don’t need each other. Psychology has a sneaky history of covertly suggesting that we can be happy, healthy people just in relationship with ourselves – and that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. I am suggesting, however, that when it comes to feeling emotional pain, we can learn to feel it consciously and live a lifestyle of emotional health through feeling everything.
Well…almost everything.
The truth is there may be feelings you just can’t feel no matter how conscious you are. This speaks to the fact that we do need each other quite a bit. Some emotions, perhaps because they are just too painful or they come from experiences just too traumatic, cannot be felt when we’re alone. Getting close to these emotions, no matter how practiced and grounded we may be, is just too overwhelming for the body making us inevitably resist, avoid, and run for the hills. With these particularly painful emotions we need a trusted other to be there with us as we move closer to our pain. This person doesn’t necessarily have to be a therapist, but they do have to understand that the work is moving towards pain to feel it in a conscious way. Too often people who care about us naturally want us to avoid our pain too. They don’t want to see us suffer. So, it takes someone who knows how important it is for us to feel our pain but also knows how to be with us, so we don’t get overwhelmed.
Not unlike how living a physically healthy life involves both how we live – our lifestyle - and occasional interventions by a medical or medicinal professionals for specific problems, living a healthy emotional life involves if and how we feel our feelings, as well as having healing experiences with a trusted and “trained” other.
One more important point to bring up is that learning to feel your emotions consciously doesn’t happen overnight. It’s easy to read this article and think you should be pushing yourself to feel your feelings. But that’s not it. That’s likely either going to make you frustrated that you can’t seem to find any feelings to feel, or it’s going to make you overwhelmed by feeling way too much. And you may already know which way you’d go. That’s why we need to move slowly, letting our body be our guide. This means perhaps setting a timer for 2-5 minutes and start with just feeling your breath. What are the sensations of your body breathing? Next you might feel your feet; what’s your connection with the planet? Slowing down, staying with where you’re at, not pushing or rushing, and taking breaks is all part of the process.
Lastly, as always, is anything I’ve written in this article actually true? For those of you familiar with my writing and practice, in general, this may be familiar, but it needs to be said and said again. What I’m offering here are ideas based on my experience. Sure, I’ve had quite a few experiences by now, but that doesn’t mean I know the truthfor you. Only you can decide that. Therefore, please take these ideas and see how they fit with your own experiences. If they work and make sense, great. If they don’t, chuck ‘em.
You are the best judge of what is right for you and my intention with all of my work is to help people connect with their own truth and listen to it. At the same time, we only know what we know, so we need other’s ideas to try on in order to grow. But only if they work for us.
Thanks for reading,
Jake