Written by: Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The most radical thing you can do in this life is to allow yourself to feel. In a world where it’s so easy to distract, avoid and dissociate from our emotions, it’s radical to allow ourselves to just feel.
To be honest, even when I began to really start doing “the work” on myself and exploring personal development, I think there was part of me that desired and even expected that eventually, I’d become immune to experiencing pain, negativity, doubt, fear etc... like I would reach this end point where it would just be unaffected by. I think maybe that’s the dark side of this industry, some of us pursue it thinking there is an endpoint to this journey or it will bring about some form of human perfection or superhuman abilities we’ve been aspiring for. We begin the journey trying to escape the very things that make us human…but after some time, we might come to realize that the whole point of the journey is learning how to embrace the very things we’ve been running from—how to be imperfectly human and still love all of yourself—we call that the paradox of transformation.
Truthfully, the goal of doing the work is not to avoid feeling these things but to allow ourselves to feel them and know that they won’t break us or hold us back. To allow ourselves to experience pain, failure, letdown, disappointment, and hardships without taking them personally and without making them mean something about ourselves. Stripping away the stories frees us from staying locked in our emotions and our minds with negative and ruminating thoughts. Recognizing that feeling doesn’t make us weak or less likely to be successful and that being able to feel pain, loss and disappointment and still live life with your heart and mind wide open is one of the strongest and bravest things you can do.
Feeling is something I do very well…maybe too well. I’ve always said that I’m like an open book, unable to hide anything. As an empath and a highly sensitive soul, I have often joked that I feel for others, the things they won’t allow themselves to feel. The truth is that I spent most of my life believing that I felt “too much.” That I was “too sensitive” and “too emotional”—at least that’s what other people told me. I saw “feeling” as a burden and lived most of my life thinking that it my biggest weakness as a human being, that I felt too much. I carried a lot of shame around this. I thought that feeling too much somehow held me back from living a whole life…my parents even tried to deter me from a career in psychology by saying I was “too sensitive” and would burn out if I pursued jobs like that. Instead of teaching me how to get grounded, how to hold boundaries, and how to move through my emotions, I was told to try to keep a lid on my emotions, avoid vulnerable situations and that there were certain places or situations where I shouldn’t allow myself to feel my emotions, and especially for them to be seen.
What ended up happening is that I felt that there was something wrong with me…like I was wrong. Society only added to these feelings, playing on my emotions through media and marketing. And therein lies the problem…there has often been a lack of awareness and understanding of how to process and manage emotions in a healthy way. Too often they’ve been seen as uncomfortable and inconvenient, something to be put away, hidden, and kept at bay, lest they interfere with our life. But what if that is wrong, what if allowing yourself to feel a full spectrum of emotions is what it’s like to live a whole life. What if we stopped looking at emotions as the problem and started looking at them more curiously as a symptom of a problem? —a piece of information that carries with it an important message of how we need to care for ourselves in a moment. There isn’t a person in this world who can say that they fully lived and didn’t experience the full range of their human emotions. We can’t control the ups and downs and ebbs and flows of life, and so we can’t avoid the myriad of emotions that accompany them—and that’s not the goal. Mastering your emotions isn’t about controlling whether and how you allow yourself to feel your emotions but learning how to sit with those emotions when they come up without shame, judgement or resistance.
5 Tips for Working Through Your Emotions:
Stop Trying to Avoid or Change Them
You can’t logic your way out of your feelings or try to change them with a “fake it til you make it” attitude. You feel how you feel, and you’re entitled to feel however you do—anytime, anywhere. As I’ve said, one of the biggest problems in society is that many of us have been taught to hide, cap, squash, distract, and dissociate from our feelings, especially when they might be inconvenient or cause others discomfort: Heaven forbids you display your feelings in public, bottle that up and take it home to feel alone, right? That’s the message many of us received. And then, to add insult to injury, we were taught that we could buy or consume our way into feeling better. That something “out there” could make us feel better. But that’s not true. Feeling better requires just that—feeling.
Emotions are two things: Energy and information. Energy needs to flow, just like water. Imagine for a moment that our bodies are like intricate pipe systems…when we’re triggered by something, it’s like our brain pouring water (emotion) and a message in a bottle into the pipes. If we’ve spent our whole lives blocking all the pipe’s exits, the emotions and the messages are unable to flow, and they get stuck in the body and either stored, sometimes creating dis-ease, and/or build up until the pressure causes the pipes to burst.
We humans try not to feel our emotions — one of the most common ways is through avoidance. Some of us learn to find distractions in things like watching TV, scrolling on our phones, being around other people, obsessively exercising, working too much, and other addictive behaviors. If we find ourselves in one of these patterns, then one of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is: What are you distracting yourself from? What are you avoiding feeling? Maybe you’re avoiding feeling bored or lonely or sad?
Why do we avoid our emotions? Because feeling them is hard and uncomfortable and sometimes even painful so we’d rather just delay, avoid, resist, or otherwise try to bypass the feelings altogether, but the effort is futile and better spent dealing with it. It can be difficult to acknowledge negative feelings. One of the most common fears is: If I allow myself to feel this, the feeling will stay—it’ll swallow me up, and I won’t be able to escape it, but this is not true. Actually, in my experience, the opposite is true. One of the most powerful things I learned in my coaching mastery certification is: "What we resist persists”, and that if we allow ourselves to experience the emotion and allow it to be present without resistance, it often only lasts 60-90 seconds. Nothing truly last forever and emotions are also impermanent, so they will pass through if we allow them to. Most often, our emotions serve as a sign calling for our attention, they carry important messages that need to be acknowledged. Most of the time, these emotions are just looking to be validated—to be seen and heard and to receive care and support. When the need is met, the feeling moves through naturally.
Re-parent Yourself
Many of us have been taught in our life that we can’t trust our emotions, that it’s unsafe for us to feel our feelings, or we were made to feel judgement and shame about our emotions. We were raised with beliefs about which emotions were acceptable and unacceptable, when and where it was allowed to have them and to what degree. We may also have certain associations with emotions — that anger equates to violence or crying equates to weakness or helplessness. These labels and meanings that we’ve applied to these emotions were the way our young minds might have learned to make sense out of our experiences with emotions while we were growing up and may still consciously or unconsciously play out in our lives today, particularly if we have our own intimate relationships and/or children. We often find that our relationships are mirrors—like windows to what needs to be healed within us. Often what triggers us is closely related to how we witnessed and/or experienced emotional situations while growing up. Regardless one of the most important pathways to healing and mastering your emotions is releasing judgement and shame and instead giving ourselves the kindness and compassion that we would like to have witnessed or felt from a caregiver in those experiences. Remember that our emotions are like involuntary knee -jerk reactions, there is no particular way “should” or “shouldn’t” feel in a situation, it’s all very subjective based on our own unique experience.
Another way we may feel shame, guilt or judgement around our emotions is when we find ourselves identifying with them, you might say something like: “I’m sad” but YOU are not sad; it’s just an emotion you’re experiencing at a moment in time. Instead, you could say: “I’m feeling sad”. Conversely, you might be able to identify that there is only part of you that is sad, and maybe another part that feels - relieved feeling one emotion does not negate the other. Both emotions can be present at the same time, and both should be felt as they are both important and they both carry messages.
Cultivate awareness + presence
Awareness is one of the most fundamental tools; without awareness, we’re just walking through life on autopilot with no control over our thoughts and reactions. Instead, try to ask yourself: What situation triggered this emotion, or when did it start? Sometimes the answer is obvious, but sometimes it’s not so obvious. Next: What must I believe or what story must I be telling myself to feel this way? The answer might surprise you. The story is the meaning we unconsciously make of a situation, often based in assumptions, generalizations, faulty conclusions that lack evidence, or past experiences colouring present ones. For example: If you’re alone in a moment you might say you feel lonely, and perhaps you feel that way because you believe that “nobody wants to spend time with you”—when we uncover a story it’s an opportunity to form some inquiry around it and most often we will find we have no evidence to support our story but rather just a fear or insecurity that has highjacked our brain
While we should not judge ourselves for having emotions or judge the emotions themselves, we can choose to view them as either helpful or unhelpful. For example: Yes, I made a huge mistake but “feeling like a failure” is not a helpful or empowering feeling. Instead, what’s more helpful would be a “Yes, and” statement, you could say: “Yes, I really messed up AND, it doesn’t mean anything about me. I’m human. Sometimes I’ll mess up, sometimes I’ll make mistakes but it’s part of learning and growing”. Give yourself permission to feel bummed about it for the day or night and just be in your feels and then vow that tomorrow you’ll persevere—you’ll give it another shot or try to fix it. We always want to work to separate truth and fact from stories. Another example: Believing that “Nobody ever listens to me and nobody cares what I have to say” is neither accurate nor helpful. Some people do. Maybe not these people in these particular circumstances, but not “nobody.” When you can paint a more objective and accurate picture of the situation, then you can choose a more compassionate and empowering belief. It’s okay to feel upset; you deserve to be heard and cared for just as much as anyone else. Now here is where the empowerment comes in: you can choose how you decide to handle it from here. You currently have a choice to say: A) I am worthy of being heard or cared for, and I need to let them know (share your feelings, create a boundary etc.) or choose to truly let it go. Sometimes, the story hurts us more than the situation itself, and once we speak or acknowledge the story, we can just let it go with greater ease. Other times, we might find that this is a situation that repeatedly occurs or a boundary that is repeatedly crossed which certain people, and we can choose to take a more self-supportive action.
One of the best ways to learn to manage our emotions is by checking in with ourselves regularly. Do several check-ins with yourself in a day. Question the truth of them. Look for exaggerations or overgeneralization in your statements. Notice any automatic negative thoughts. Notice it all, without judgement. Ask yourself what you need at this moment and be mindful of things like hunger and tiredness, which can impact your mood.
I know this one is obvious, and it’s also easier said than done but there are several ways to do this but focusing on breath and presence is the most important thing. Meditation can help us train our mind and our focus so this can be very helpful for awareness. The more we can stretch the muscles of our focus and awareness, the more naturally we can build consciousness and be able to witness our inner dialogue.
Use Your Body to Move It Through
Once you do the inner work, it’s great to move the energy of the emotions through your body and change your energy—some of the best ways to do this are through movement. Go for a walk, dance, exercise, and physically shake it off. But even if you can’t do something physically active because you don’t have the time, space, or energy there are still ways you can use your body to move the energy through. A body scan meditation can be a great tool to check in with yourself about how you’re feeling emotionally. Take a few minutes to breathe and feel into your body. Imagine shining a flashlight on each part of your body, one piece at a time and noticing how that part of your body feels. Our body often provides subtle and not so subtle clues to how we’re feeling since, as I mentioned, emotions can get stored in the body. If you notice clenching, tightness, contraction, pain, swirlies or jitteriness, that’s a good indication that you may need to investigate what you’re feeling. Accept the sensations—breathe into them. Ask yourself if I could give a voice to this part of my body, what would it say? Speak from that place and trust what comes up. Perhaps a pain in the back or shoulders might say, “I’m tired of carrying all this pressure, or I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders.” If you have a tightness in your throat, perhaps it would say, “Nobody ever listens to me, nobody cares what I have to say.” Notice the story in these statements. Alternatively, you can use breath and nervous system regulation techniques to soothe yourself—you might try butterfly breathing, putting a hand on your chest, singing and/or humming, giving yourself facial massage and/or earlobe massage,
Find a supportive environment
Some environments can be supportive of working through emotions. It’s great to find someone, like a coach or a friend, who can hold space for you. It can help to vent, cry, be hugged, or connect and socialize with others in a safe and supportive environment, but being around people who have invalidated, mocked, suppressed, or neglected your feelings in the past may make it hard to fully allow and process those feelings. What environment is best and most nourishing to you as you work through the feeling? Trust your instincts in finding the strategy that works best for you. Some people need to power down, sleep and recharge before they process while others need to take a more active approach. Many people find it supportive to be out in nature—this can also help regulate the nervous system. Use nature and the elements as much as you can; there have been numerous studies on the positive benefits of nature and how it contributes to better overall health, including your emotional health. You can get physically grounded in nature through touch, or if you can’t physically get out in nature you can listen to nature sounds on headphones and visualize being out in nature, perhaps in your favourite spot. Imagine laying your troubles at your feet and the waves washing up over them and carrying them away. You can also try moving processed feelings and energy through with water, take a bath or shower, drink lots of water afterward.
The above is my no means a comprehensive step-by-step process or list, but rather a guide to help you get started. First and foremost, I hope that it helped you view your emotions and your past experiences with a different lens and helped you learn another way to manage your emotions. I now know that I don’t feel “too much” I feel exactly as meant to, and I embrace it. Maybe you should too. Your feelings aren’t holding you back; they’re a sign that you’re living a FULL life. All those emotions that you’re moving through are part of the human experience, they’re part of life. Now I see my feelings as an invitation to investigate what’s happening—an invitation to empower me with a different story. And I’m now able to look for the information within the emotions to guide me through, since all parts of ourselves are deeply intertwined, your emotional health can play a big part in your overall health and sense of wellness. I think we all desire to live a full and healthy life—and part of doing that means embracing our humanness…accepting that as life naturally ebbs and flows, our emotions will too, and that it is both normal and natural. While allowing and processing your emotions is not an easy task, it can drastically improve your emotional health and your overall health by extension.
Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Nicki is a women’s empowerment coach and the owner of Sunflowers In Sunshowers, a company that focuses on helping women flourish through holistic and transformational life coaching. She is passionate about the work she is doing to help women love themselves wholly and live their life more fully. After experiencing a “quarter life crisis”—she struggled with her identity, life direction and overall life satisfaction—this was her awakening. She began a healing journey of self-discovery and uncovering which led to dismantle her pre-conceived beliefs and re-define not only herself but her vision of “the good life”. This journey eventually led her to realize her calling as a life coach and pursue a certification as a life and health coach. Her mission is to help women heal from their past conditioning and misunderstandings so that they can uncover their authentic selves, step into their power and create their vision of “the good life” too. To date, she has had the privilege of helping women all over the world from London, England to Portland Oregon.
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