People are prickly about their feelings. Understandably. We have so many of them all the time, and so few of them are allowed out in polite society. Often it’s not just “a feeling,” it’s what I lovingly refer to as “a bucket of feelings” all piled on top of each other–challenging to tease out where they’re all coming from and why.
There’s a lot of reasons why clients show up to therapy having great difficulty either identifying what they are feeling, having very little language with which to discuss their inner experience, or frequently, being possessed of great powerful feelings and the paradoxical inability to show them on their faces or in their body language.
The work of therapy is in part the work of putting our minds, bodies, and hearts back together, in relationship with each other, so we can feel whole. So, why, besides being a good therapy client, should you feel your feelings?
Feelings are our early alarm system–feelings appear in our body long before our minds recognize the situation and what it is doing to us. We feel injustice through anger, concern for ourselves and others through worry, uncertainty about safety through fear, connection through love, grief through sadness, and we feel these things very rapidly in our bodies though often we have been socialized to ignore all the signs, the sweat, the heaviness, the beating heart. Our feelings connect our bodies, our minds, and our hearts–they are the connecting highway.
The point of feeling feelings isn’t to act on feeling, but to understand the source, how our feelings illuminate our needs and our hopes and longings. Once we know our longings, we start to know ourselves, and once we know ourselves, we can make choices that allow us to change our lives in the direction of our dreams.
So, that’s why I’m going to ask you how you feel, if we ever meet, and I’m going to ask you to do body scans, so you can learn over time where your feelings show up in your body, so when your body shakes you, you hear and listen.