Your feelings need to be felt – Not thought

It is more helpful to describe your feelings by colour and shape, than to give them a name. Because giving your feeling a name too soon may put it in a wrong box. And feelings are not meant to be put in boxes – they are meant to be felt.

I worked with my therapist for years to learn a vocabulary of my feelings. I went through cycles of other somatic work in order to understand them. Gain a handle on them. Control them. And after all that work eventually it came down to that: feelings are here to be felt. Not thought. Just like the waves of an ocean – they come and they go, only to come again – and only to leave again…

And just like the ocean: you are not the waves that stir its surface.

I was afraid to feel my feelings, so afraid that I resorted to a variety of numbing tricks – just so I wouldn’t have to feel the cold tingle of fear and the black hole of despair within me. The stories I was telling myself AS A RESULT of suppressed feelings, were far scarier and more grim than the reality they came out to be – and definitely far away from the ease of just letting them flow through my body.

In my other interview on somatic work with Stephanie Kittell, she mentioned how emotional response only lives in your body for 90 seconds. But if you don’t allow yourself to feel it – this can get stuck in your body for years and come back as illness – physical or mental. That underlying hum, or a knot in your stomach that doesn’t quite go away… it just needs some room to be felt.

So how do you do that?

Without knowing how to identify feelings occurring, you are bound to feel confused, overwhelmed – paralysed and sometimes be out of control to respond to a situation that triggers an emotional response. And this can really cause some damage.

In this episode I’m sharing some of the easy ways I use to feel my feelings – including language and a reflection on addictions.