How Do I Sit With My Feelings?

The question of “how do I feel my emotions?” or “how do I sit with my feelings?” comes up often. We aren’t taught emotional regulation skills in school, and so often our primary caregivers become the role models for how we deal with grief, anger, sadness and other painful emotions. And so the question of “how do I feel my emotions” is an interesting one, and not as straightforward as it seems, as there is often so much unlearning we need to in order to get where we want to go. For some, learning somatic-based exercise (“where do you feel that emotion in your body?”) and grounding exercises for mindfulness feel like they fall short, leaving them frustrated as it feels like the big “aha moment” is missing. For some, the act of mindfully scanning their body for their emotions is too intense, leaving them feeling more overwhelmed than when they started. Feeling discouraged because we don’t know “how” to feel our feelings can be so overwhelming and frustrating.

But…I believe the more important question here is this: What mechanisms do you currently have in place that don’t allow you to feel your emotions?

Let’s talk about some of the ways in which we (and our brain, because it protects us so beautifully), protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable feelings.

What barriers have you built around not feeling your feelings?

Do you reach for a glass of wine when you feel sad or anxious? Do you call a friend to vent or distract yourself because it is difficult to be alone with your thoughts? Do you go to the grocery store or dive headfirst into your job because those problems are easier and more tangible than the ominous feeling that comes with sadness, grief, or uncertainty? Examine your responses to your feelings as they are now, down to the most micro-behavior you can, and you will see that our brain is brilliant at trying to “protect” us from our uncomfortable feelings.

Just one small caveat: Your brain sees uncomfortable emotions as a threat. Your engagement with that avoidance only reinforces and strengths the perceptions of emotions as a threat.

Our brain is built upon 500 million years of mammal evolution, so under the hood (so to speak) you’ve got an ancient survival machine that is EXQUISITE at doing its best to keep you alive. Alive. Notice I didn’t say happy. And it does a pretty amazing job, much to our dismay at times. It does so well at detecting threats in our environment, that it even scans our internal environment for danger, and that includes feelings that raise an alarm such as sadness, anger, grief, and generally any uncomfortable emotion you can think of. So we say “thank you” to our brain for being so wonderfully protective, but also, can we learn to not detect sadness over a breakup as a life-threatening crisis that merits full-blown catastrophic thinking and the immediate surge of adrenaline-cortisol-and other hormonal cocktail that results in us feeling even worse? Redirecting the ancient survival-primed machinery of our brain is possible, but it does take practice. So there’s that.

But when we actively feed into the avoidance and agree with our brain that yes, that sadness or anger is a threat, and I’d rather be eating fast food or going out for a night with friends at the bar than sitting at home with this uncomfortable feeling, your brain will now confirm, based on your behaviors reinforcing that “fight or flight response” that indeed sadness is a threat. And so the cycle continues.

There is a difference between coping skills and avoidance mechanisms.

I know it may sound counterintuitive; you may say, “But Andrea, my therapist told me it’s okay to go for a run when I’m feeling anxious or sad.” There is a difference between a coping skill and avoiding.

A coping skill helps us process an emotion; a defense mechanism subverts is.

External avoidance mechanisms

Are you going for a run because you’ve acknowledged and are fully present with the feelings in your body, and are looking to process them out with some good old fashioned exercise? Great. Are you diving into your work emails after 9pm on a weeknight because it’s easier than facing loneliness or other issues going on in your life? Not so great. A coping skill helps us to work through an emotion we have already allowed in and acknowledged, while avoidant behaviors keep the emotions at bay.

So what’s your weapon of choice when you feel uncomfortable? What are some ways in which you tend to avoid? How can you try NOT to do those things when the emotions come up? (Don’t reach for the snack, the wine glass, the situationship, or the checklists).

Internal defense mechanisms

Another way in which we sabotage our ability to feel our feelings or sit with our emotions is we find ways to minimize, avoid, deflect, or intellectualize the situation. Maybe we grew up in a family where vulnerability or emotional expression was seen as a weakness, and so we tend to intellectualize our feelings, speaking to ourselves about our feelings on a cognitive, cerebral level rather than coming down into our body and feeling it. When we intellectualize, we are no longer emotionally available to ourselves; we detach from the emotional material because it is too threatening. Maybe we minimize, and push the feeling down because that’s what our caregivers did in order to survive. We didn’t see our loved ones carry heavy emotions, and so why should we feel them? And so when a scary sensation or emotion arises, down it goes into the repressed part of ourselves. But these emotions do not go away, they merely transmute out and up into our consciousness in other ways.

There are many reasons why feeling our feelings is just as much about unlearning as it is about unlearning. But you can start today. Start now. Notice and be mindful of what urges rise up when you feel sad. We are strong enough to sit with our feelings; more often than not, we just need to get out of our own way.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi