Use Your Hard Feelings: The Quick Start Guide
Your Monthly Reflections Guide from The Messy Human (a paid perk that's free for everyone this month!)
Emotions are useful feedback coming from your body, which provides insight and evidence into how your experience is affecting you.
Many of us were raised in such a way that we were taught our feelings were not always valid.
“Stop crying.”
“You’ll be fine. It’s okay. There’s no need to be upset.”
“This isn’t a big deal. Calm down.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
“You can handle this.”
Any of those remarks sound familiar? Oftentimes as children we are comforted not by an adult who first validates what we’re feeling as understandable, natural, or true, but instead sees it as a problem to be solved.
Even if we did grow up with a good emotion coach in our lives, there are many other messages coming our way from our culture, schools, community organizations, friends, other people’s families, churches, and more, which may tell us our feelings aren’t valid.
People raised as male are often discouraged from accepting sad, vulnerable or hurt feelings. People raised female are often discouraged from accepting anger, rage, and disappointment. There are so many more layers and intersectionalities to this, of course, but it’s worth realizing it’s not your fault if you find it hard to feel the hard things.
Luckily, as adults ourselves, we have the opportunity to tell ourselves something different and open up new pathways for our behavior and new possibilities for our life and work outcomes.
Different ways we could validate our own emotions include:
“It’s okay to feel this way.”
“I know these feelings may not be 100% reflective of the situation at hand, but it’s still perfectly natural that I’m feeling this way.”
“It’s normal to feel angry right now. I didn’t like how I was treated.”
“Of course I’m sad. I had high hopes and now they are gone.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me for being emotional about this. It’s part of the human condition.”
Why Emotions Matter
Emotions guide us through our inner experience. They let us know when we feel good or bad, when we’re joyful, curious, scared, angry, or sad. They hint at how things in our experience are hitting on an inner level. How we’re experiencing the world around us.
Our inner experience is incredibly important to our health and wellbeing. As I’ve covered in previous posts and articles, emotions are biologically driven, and some of the chemicals they send shooting through us are not so great for our bodies. Others are most excellent.
Chronic stress is a driver for heart disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, anxiety, depression, muscle tension, weight gain, digestive issues, sleep disruption, memory problems, and trouble focusing, among other things. It is an example of how repeated exposure to certain emotion driven hormones derails our health. Frequent anger and sadness also come with harmful side effects. The biology of each emotion comes with real impacts on our brain, body, and health.
But this is not to say we shouldn’t have these emotions. We simply can’t avoid that, as human beings. It’s more of an indicator that we need to learn what to do with them.
Whether you’re someone who “can handle stress well” or “suffers under its constant weight,” you still need to know how to learn everything you can from whatever stress does arise, and put this information to use.
Why To Work With Emotions, Not Against Them
It’s well established fact that you can’t get rid of emotions by trying to ignore them, bottle them up, sweep them under the rug, or try to change them through mental machinations.
The best way to “get rid of” emotions is to welcome them and let them be. They get the chance to make themselves known, and then the biology of our bodies flushes them away, typically in about 90 seconds. I know this may seem surprising, given how long a fit of rage or bout of sadness can go on, but that duration happens because our thoughts can re-trigger our physical emotional reaction again and again, and not because the initial biological response has continued.
When you let emotions be what they are, you’ll see that some emotions simply need to be witnessed, others want to be held in a safe container, and some seek validation. Whatever the emotion needs, it’s worth taking note and then providing that for yourself.
Your Reflection Guide on Emotions: Quick Start Edition
What is an emotion you tend not to allow or to validate for yourself? Here is a link to a feelings wheel to help you explore.
Do you find yourself hiding your anger, even from yourself, trying hold desperately to a state of calmness in the face of upsetting experiences?
Do you tend to overlook sadness, writing off what happened in your life as not worthy of hurt, as not a big deal, or as something too little or shallow to be allowed to create ripple effects in your emotions?
Do you tamp down on feelings of embarrassment, as if admitting to them would be your failure, instead of a chance to set a boundary about how someone treats you, or give yourself more grace to make mistakes and be a human being like the rest of us?
Other challenging emotions to explore include disappointment, fear, hurt, guilt, shame, vulnerability, hope, loneliness, and beyond
Can you name the emotion that you often avoid? Write it down.
How does it feel acknowledging this fact? Jot down some notes about what you’re learning about yourself, your desires, your background, and how you want to show up.
Now, take a moment to list out some of the useful insights that this feeling might be trying to tell you when it arises. See if you can explore multiple angles to each emotion, from external actions to internal mindset shifts. Consider how you may benefit from acknowledging this emotion.
Anger may be trying to tell you to set a boundary, to stand up for yourself, to speak about how someone’s action has made you feel, to leave a situation if you cannot be heard or your boundary respected, among other things. It might also be telling you that you have a rigid idea of how things should be, and you may want to consider whether there is a more fluid, flexible, or tolerant way to allow others to be how they are, without letting it affect you.
Sadness may be telling you that you have experienced a loss (even a small one counts), and that you may want to go easy on yourself as you grieve it. You may want to give yourself space to register what you lost, what you miss, and what you might do to fill the gap, if anything. Other times all you can do is be gentle with yourself and give it time for the pain to lessen.
If you discovered some useful insights, possible actions, and potential benefits from the hard emotion that you often shy away from, jot these down on a notecard, your phone, or somewhere you can access them easily, so that the next time that emotion arises for you, you can review the list, validate the feeling, and make a mindful response.
Next time you experience this feeling, see if you can become aware of it, name it, notice your experience and what is happening to you right now. Then:
Remind yourself it is perfectly fine to have this feeling. It’s natural.
Consider how this experience is affecting you and why.
See if you can select a beneficial action step with which to respond.
To leveraging your hard emotions for growth, better life outcomes, healthier relationships, and beyond.
-Marisol
A beautiful treatise on EQ. Thank you.