I often talk to people about the importance of “feeling what they feel”. First off, know that I know that this (and so much of what I say) is far easier said that done. It’s hard to even really know what that means when we’ve spent our whole life pushing those feelings away and feeling we don’t have a right to them.
You are carrying around all of this weight with you all the time; feeling sad, hurt, abandoned, unworthy, unloved, angry, lonely, inadequate, lost, not good enough. Then someone (or maybe it’s you) tells you that it could be worse and you just need to get over it, or some other version of “you’re feelings aren’t valid”, and you pile on heaps of guilt and shame on top. Did it make the feelings go away? Did it make them easier to carry? No, instead you still feel all of those things but now you also feel bad for feeling those things.The only thing that you succeeded in doing, is making it harder to carry the weight.
From the time we can start to communicate, we are told that our experience is wrong. A toddler falls and starts to cry… “oh you’re fine shake it off”. They’re scared…”you have no reason to be afraid”. As we grow up these messages get even stronger “don’t pout”, “get over it”, “if you’re going to be upset, go to your room (aka go away from me)”, “you should feel lucky”, “think how much worse others have it”, and on and on. We are inundated with the message that our experience isn’t valid.
I go back to an argument early on in my marriage. I can picture it clearly, what room we were in, where he and I were standing, the flood of emotions…Interestingly, I have no recollection of what the fight was about but what I do remember was telling him how hurt I was and him telling me “you have no reason to be hurt”. I don’t remember what I said or did at that point but as I look back now, all I can hear is myself saying “First off, I DO have a reason and second off, even if I didn’t, well guess what I still feel it and it matters.” Even if there isn’t a reason (which there always is), it still wouldn’t change that that feeling exists.
Takes me to a funnier memory in which I woke up from a dream in which my husband had cheated on me or left (I can’t quite recall) but I was livid. I knew it was in a dream and it wasn’t real. So I found my husband and I named it, “look, I had this dream, and I’m really angry at you. I know you didn’t do anything wrong, it isn’t rational, and I’m not really angry at you in this moment but I am mad at the you that did that to me in my dream. I will get over it but if I seem weird, that’s why.” He of course looked at me and laughed (he knows me pretty well by now) and asked if he could give me a hug. Did I have a “reason”, not in the rational sense but did it change that I was angry? No. Had I not told him and tried to push it away saying “I shouldn’t feel this way”, my guess is, I would have taken it out on him in other less glamorous, passive aggressive ways, likely without even meaning to. What we feel is what we feel, it can’t be logic-ed away (by the way, I’m good at making up words, bear with me). It just is. So let it be.
The only way to NOT feel those feelings is to feel them. Saying we shouldn’t only intensified them and caused us to struggle more. It doesn’t get rid of the feelings to put it less than eloquently, we just feel shitty for feeling shitty. So the first step in feeling our feelings, is to acknowledge them, put down the guilt and shame because it doesn’t help us anyway. Like in my above example, I acknowledged, for better or worse, I’m angry. Rather than getting down on myself, it just was. My husband has also done a TON of growing with me, which means I’m lucky enough to have support in those less than rational moments of feeling. And in him allowing me to have it, it passes.
Had he stopped me and told me how ridiculous that was and that because I know it’s not rational I just need to stop feeling it, I probably would have started to feel ashamed, making me feel worse. Hopefully, I could have caught myself and challenged myself to put down the shame/guilt that came from his response and found another outlet. And if I couldn’t check myself around that, I probably would have fallen into some bad shame box habits (if you don’t know what that is, read my earlier post).
The first step in feeling our feelings is being able to validate them, meaning giving ourselves permission to have them and being able to understand that they make sense (even if they aren’t rational). When we do that, we empower ourselves to move through them rather than holding onto them. You can’t let go of what you don’t acknowledge you have.
Let me end with one more analogy to help make sense of that last piece. Imagine that the door out of my office is shut…”but I don’t want it to be shut, it’s supposed to be open. It should be open. It can’t be shut, there’s no reason for it…” As I sit there angry and resentful that it’s shut, when trying to deny that it is reality, can I walk out? No. I have to acknowledge, the door is in fact shut. Once I quit fighting that reality, then I can make the plan to stand up, walk to it and open it. I know this one seems a bit silly, but it makes the point. Fighting a feeling doesn’t change it and we can only figure out what to do next when we acknowledge it’s there and that’s okay.