Do You Feel Your Emotions as Well as You Think You Do?
Perhaps You Just Feel the Water that Flows Over the Top of the Dam…
“But I’m really good at feeling my emotions…I cry all the time…”
“I’m really good at feeling emotions…in fact, I’m an empath…I feel too much, and am often overwhelmed by others’ emotions…”
“They are very sensitive…very emotional…maybe too sensitive…”
Teaching people to increase their somatic (bodily/physical), emotional awareness is a big part of the therapy I have conducted for decades with people in my professional practice. Often I encounter individuals who tell me that they are sure that they are very good at feeling their emotions, as they say for example: ‘I cry really often…’ or ‘I feel sadness a lot’. Or they make statements that suggests that they feel profound big feelings often (as in daily) throughout their lives. While this could mean that they are indeed skillful at feeling their feelings as they arise, if their lives are not truly full of big, precipitating, singular, daily challenging events to explain such large emotional responses all the time, then they could indeed be less skillful at feeling their emotions than they believe.
A Spectrum of Freedom and Skill in Feeling Our Emotions
We can think of a spectrum of health and skillfulness in feeling our emotions, with one pole being the ability to feel one’s emotions fairly freely in the moment, with little conditioned hindrance or repression. At this end of the spectrum in what we might call the “freedom pole”, our emotions are allowed to arise and be felt fairly completely in the present moment, and so are resolved and quickly leave us — because that is all emotions really want — to be acknowledge and felt physically, experientially.
At the other pole — perhaps called the “repression pole” — people are highly conditioned to fear their emotions and so more completely repress and avoid acknowledging and feeling them. Here, emotions keep rising and falling back, unfelt, only to resurface repeatedly later:
It is this process that involves repression and resurfacing of incompletely felt emotions that can lead to a belief that one ‘feels’ ones’ emotions well because they arise so often, and yet in reality the emotions are not being felt ‘well’, because they are not being felt fully and resolved — and therefore they keep returning.
Emotions that are Never Felt Never Leave Us
Many people may have heard through popular psychology writings/culture the phrases “The Body Remembers”, or “The Body Keeps the Score”. These sayings codify an accepted truth and wisdom in somatic and emotional intelligence psychology that emotions that arise continually throughout every day, in everyone’s body, never leave our bodies until they are felt.
Below we will discuss more fully what it means to truly ‘feel’ our emotions, because most of us are trained to intellectualize about them mostly, rather than to physically feel and acknowledge them. Suffice it to say at this juncture, that because we don’t feel our emotions successfully as they arise, they do not leave us, and remain in our bodies to just resurface again later repeatedly. We can misconstrue this reoccurring arising and repressing as our being very ‘sensitive’ or ‘attuned’ to our emotions, when ironically the opposite is often probably true.
You Can’t Be Too Sensitive or Empathic
There is a potential irony in our culture because we have developed a mental construct where we believe that some individuals can be too sensitive emotionally, or too empathic. The irony lies in considering something that may be hard to entertain especially if you have labeled yourself in this way. Consider the possibility that we have all been taught to be insensitive to our own inner emotional lives, and insensitive to the physical, phenomenological appearance of emotions in our own bodies. Take this to its most extreme logical conclusion, and we arrive at seeing that many people have become very practiced at repressing many of their own emotions, and so are carrying around large reservoirs of unfelt emotions. There is a limit however, to how much the body can hold onto; further, there is a more natural wisdom and innate intelligence of the body that is always asking us to allow emotions to arise and be felt.
What results over time with this repression is an upward pressure to feel the unfelt emotions, such that our conditioned, self-constructed dam holding back our experience of emotions is eventually breached*. If the ‘water’ of emotion is continually sloshing over the top of the damn because we are always trying to ‘dam up’ our emotions, then we might erroneously believe that we are actually an emotionally aware person, when actually the opposite is truer. This is the irony. In such a case we are being ‘too insensitive’ to ourselves in an ongoing basis, not ‘too sensitive’ — even while outwardly we are expressing big emotions (the overflow) very often. If, however, we merely felt our emotions as they arrived continuously in small bits throughout our day, there wouldn’t be these large outpourings of backlogged emotions, so visibly expressed (or inwardly felt as suffering).
* This dam is armor of an energetic/physical type that exists as a barrier usually at the top of the chest at the heart chakra, or the throat at the throat chakra. It is the principal reason we learn the abnormal practice of chest breathing from a young age, as opposed to the more normal belly or diaphragm breathing we are born with — all attempts to hold back the energetic rise of emotions from south (root chakra) to north (brow and crown chakra) required for full expression of emotion.
We Are All Empaths
We all have the ability to discern each other’s emotional states energetically, beyond our awareness through visual body-language cues. This is universal. Imagine that it is like we are all emotional ‘tuning forks’ that can resonate to the vibrating tuning fork of someone else’s emotional state. We can indeed ‘tell’ or ‘feel’ another’s emotional state when we are with them. If we are emotionally healthy and free and have not been carrying around too much unfelt emotion, we can identify another’s emotional state, but, we also know what is “our” emotion and body, and what is “someone else’s” emotion and body. However, when operating out of a place of habitually fearing our experience of emotions, and thereby a fear of the experience of our bodies, we do not know how to discern between “ours’ and “theirs” when these emotional states are noticed in a moment (After all, we have disowned our own emotions as not even belonging to us. We believe they are caused by others’ behaviors outside of us. We have forgotten that they originate in our own bodies). At this moment, in the presence of someone else’s emotions, we become ‘reminded’ of the emotions within us that we have been attempting to repress, and this can begin an anxiety response as the unfelt emotions again attempt to be felt.
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To reiterate, if we are very emotionally healthy and know our own emotional selves well, we can easily discern between our and someone else’s emotional states. If we are not storing an inordinate amount of unfelt emotions in ourselves just pressuring to be felt at the slightest tickle from someone else having emotions, then we have no problem being around others with even big emotional experiences. However, if we aren’t emotionally self-aware, we can be easily activated by the presence of someone’s else emotions (not directly, but as a reminder of what is barely repressed in ourselves). At this point, one can run to their head and thinking mind to get away from the arising emotion in themselves (arising in the torso physically), and the content of mind will be (erroneously): “I am feeling their emotions (directly), I am an empath…this is hard… their emotions are happening at me….”
The irony is that someone calling themselves a special ‘empath’ may actually be highly insensitive to their own emotions. If we are insensitive to our own emotions, we are walking around carrying a lot of unfelt emotions that are always on the verge of expressing themselves despite our best efforts at repressing them. In this highly reactive state, all sorts of emotional cues in the environment act to remind us of what we are already holding within ourselves and threaten to cause us to acknowledge our own emotions to ourselves (which we avoid out of fear). Yet, part and parcel of our wish to not own our own emotional states, we would rather intellectually hold that we are hyper-sensitive to directly feeling ‘others’ emotions’ (as if we have no agency in this) and so are special ’empaths’.
I suggest, non-judgmentally, that we can prefer the more interesting and noble and ‘special’ story that suggests that we have special powers that others don’t have, and so call ourselves ‘empaths’, rather than seeing a possibility that we have been taught to fear our own selves (as we all have to varying degrees), and that some of us merely have more to learn to come home back into our own bodies to feel our emotions more fully. Clearly, the problem is not people being too sensitive, but rather, many of us being insensitive to our own emotional states. We all have the potential to be ‘empaths’, whether we manifest this begins with being empathic to our own emotions inside ourselves.
Visualize a Big Ball of Sad that you Refuse to Hold and Keep Bouncing like a Hot Potato
Let’s take a moment to look at what it looks/feels like to approach and then move away from our feelings as we have been taught and conditioned to do. Since we have all been conditioned this way to some extent, we can all be served by practicing to improve our skillfulness at feeling our emotions more fully in the moment.
Consider sadness. Now think of sadness as a big red ball of energy that someone feels in their torso, somewhere in or around their heart and belly. For the human who is not conditioned to fear their emotions, this is just felt physically as it appears in the body without judgment of good or bad, but merely noticed physically, experientially. If you were to vocalize how you experience it, it might be: hot, cold, red, blue, thick, thin, rolling, throbbing, spinning, vibrating, lit up, dark, etc. One can sit with this experience, and in the relatively short time it takes, the experience eventually recedes — and thereby the emotion has been felt (this I all that emotions require to resolve themselves — acknowledgment experientially, physically, as an experience).
But for most if not all of us in this culture, having been conditioned to fear the emotion of sadness, this experience of a ball of energy arises in the torso, and then metaphorically we tap the outer surface of the ball (phenomenologically we barely register the experience), then we run to our heads to talk about ‘why’ we have this experience of sadness. We do not sit with and feel the sadness. We just barely touch the outside of the emotion. We do not enter fully into the ball of emotion fully and sit with it. With sadness, as with fear/anxiety and most other emotions, we barely touch the emotion before running to our heads to talk about it, and so it never resolves, and so the emotion never leaves us. This is the repression.
We keep carrying around these energetic balls of emotional energy, tapping the surface occasionally, but never really braving going beyond the surface and digging deep into the center of the ‘ball’ of experience.
Most People Don’t Know What It Feels Like to Cry
The above may sound like an odd, bold statement, but hear me out. We are so strongly conditioned in this culture to not cry excepting in a very few ‘acceptable’ situations. Most people, when they actually do allow themselves to cry, or cannot stop themselves from crying, do not fully sit with the experience of emotion in their bodies that is occurring with the tears. The emotion accompanying tears could be sadness, grief, happiness, relief, awe, or many other emotions that can accompany tears. Challenge yourself to check this out for yourself. When tears start, people almost immediately run to their heads and thinking minds to talk about ’why’ they are so sad (or any other emotion). The head is far from the body where the emotion is arriving (heart or gut), so in our conditioned fear of emotion (and tears), we would rather be in our heads intellectualizing than feeling our emotions. Being in the head and thinking mind geographically gives us distance from the physical experience of the emotion, and thinking distracts us further from actually feeling the emotion.
Over three decades, hundreds of clients have told me: “You’re right…I found out you’re right…I hadn’t really known what it was like to really be with my tears or crying…” Try this exploration for yourself the next time you feel tears coming. It will be challenging, but it also can be a revelation.
Intellectualizing About Your Emotions Is Not Feeling Them
The hardest paradigm shift to make towards health and feeling your emotions more fully is understanding how intellectually talking about your emotions is not in any way a ‘feeling’ of your emotions. This is hard because so much of Psychology in the last hundred years has been focused on cognition and intellect, and not on the phenomenological experiencing of emotions. We have been taught to believe that running to our heads to talk about the historical circumstances present when we ourselves generated our own emotions will somehow cause these emotions to resolve themselves through this intellectualization alone. It will not. Emotions not felt will never leave us until we actually feel them. Talk and thought alone will not resolve them.
If talk therapy does give some relief, it is only because as people talk about past circumstances they almost accidentally allow themselves to feel physically, somatically, little bits of the stored repressed emotion from the past experience as they relate it. However, since the focus remains on the cognitive and intellectual and memory elements in this therapy, the somatic releases are small as the client continues to unconsciously attempt to repress feelings throughout the retelling and intellectualizing. Therefore, cognitive therapy and its focus can be terribly lengthy and inefficient in finally processing all the historically trapped emotions, because again, the physical feeling of emotions is not intentional and the given focus, and the allowing of physically feeling one’s emotions becomes more incidental or accidental.
We Are Confused About What Feeling Means
We have become confused about what feeling means. Truly feeling your emotions means dropping your awareness into your body and being with how emotions are expressing themselves physically in the body in the moment. For example, if one begins to feel anxiety, and one brings awareness to the chest and/or belly, one can perhaps notice a tightness in either area, and in the muscles one might feel energy building or moving. One might notice a sense of ‘energy’ which might feel like a ‘buzzing’ or ‘swirling’ or ‘vibration’ or some movement if one looks closely for subtlety. One might have a sense that the chest feels more ‘closed’ rather than ‘open’. One might notice that they feel ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ inside. If one steps away from being literal and relaxes into metaphor to allow an exploration of what is taking place in the body, one might say that it feels ‘red’ inside (or green or blue at other emotions or times). Or perhaps ‘lit up’ or sometimes ‘dark’.
The act of directing attention to your torso, and gently asking yourself what you feel physically, either literally or through metaphor, moves more of your consciousness down from your head and thinking mind and into your body where your emotions arise and manifest. By learning to be alongside them geographically, physically, you are effectively ‘accepting’ them, and this is the true ‘feeling’ of them. With this true feeling of them, they resolve and leave the body. The arising and then the proper feeling of each emotion is the full life cycle of the emotion.
Unfortunately, we very often arrest the life cycle of an emotion at the arising stage, and the emotion is then stored in the body indefinitely until we are ready to finish with actually physically feeling it. No amount of intellectualizing about the emotion — where it came from, what situation was present when we generated the emotion, etc. — will resolve the emotion.
Our Culture Needs to Revalue Emotions as Vital for Mental Health (and Physical Health)
When we realize as a human race that we have lost something important by learning to devalue and repress our emotions, we can then find our way back to reintegrating this intelligence back into our natural flow of awareness. Emotions are not an inferior, evolutionary, animal ‘throw-back’ that we should repress because they interfere with proper ‘rational, logical, clear’ thinking. Emotions are a vital part of our fuller intelligence needed to navigate life, as so much of life is a-rational and stands outside of rational spheres of understanding. Further, emotions are a natural healthy part of our constitution as human beings, and our attempts to circumvent them only results in great suffering and even physical ailments and illness. When we come to these realizations, we will find that the process to feel more fully again is not as hard as we believe, and is only limited by our mind-created ‘fear’ of what we think it would mean to feel more fully again.
