The First Step to Understanding Your Emotions

The First Step to Understanding Your Emotions

Runaway thoughts can lead to an array of emotions. Navigating our way through our emotions can be confusing and challenging. Some emotions seem to never quite leave us alone.

In this post, we will be talking about acknowledging our emotions and listening to what they are trying to tell us.

Our emotions are important, they are complex and their main goal is to tell us something. 

They communicate with us all the time, whether we are trying to work, study, sleep, exercise, cook dinner – they don’t give us a heads up, they show up wherever and whenever. Your responsibility is to know how to live your life and continue to do the things that you love, alongside those emotions.

Acknowledge

First, we should acknowledge that our emotions stay with us throughout our lives and are always available to us. You will always have fear and sadness from time to time, but it’s important to notice when you are experiencing these feelings chronically. For me, learning that I have anxiety and depression and that they would never go away completely – was something I had to take a moment to process.

When I realized that anxiety and depression, and consequently feelings of fear and anger and sadness would be staying with me for the long haul, it made me think of other emotions that I felt on a regular basis. Other negative and sometimes debilitating emotions would be consistently present in my life and it seemed that I would be with them more often than I would see friends.   

I evaluated these feelings and sat with each of them. I took my time and acknowledged every one, looking each emotion square in the face. There was no judgment, there were no expectations. 

After 20+ years of fighting feelings like toxic shame, anger and fear – I simply wanted to acknowledge them.

Whatever emotions you’re feeling, facing your inner turmoil is the first step in the direction of taking responsibility for your mental health, and consequently – your life. It is a step into what feels like a big, scary unknown place where we risk feeling really bad. 

On this journey of healing, you’re going to go through more pain. You’re going to revisit themes in your life that make you feel bad, but you’ll reframe and neutralize them so they don’t hurt you anymore. If you take the journey and stay for the whole ride, you will have ups and downs and feel pain and relief and everything in between.

It’s a wild ride that requires persistence and commitment, but it’s worth it on the other side. 

It’s not about giving up, we don’t want to allow our inner negative thoughts and fears to run the show. It’s about surrendering to the fact that we have pain and trauma, acknowledging it, listening to it and hearing what it is trying to tell us. 

If you learn to work with your inner feelings associated with past trauma, you will eventually release them. 

Your inner feelings of fear, anger, injustice and heartbreak are all in there. If you listen, they will tell you what they need in order to be remedied. We just need to give them a chance to speak. 

Think about the thought associated with the feeling, how it makes you feel and ask yourself what it is trying to tell you.

Give In

This is the part where we surrender to our feelings and accept that they’re not going anywhere. This is the part where we acknowledge our negative feelings  and simply allow them to be there without resisting. 

You are never going to not have feelings, feelings are a part of being human. It’s about getting reacquainted with your feelings and making a safe space for them to exist. Resisting is not the answer, we need to simply reframe how we think about our feelings and detach from them. 

The best way that I have learned to detach from these emotions is to visualize them as physically separate from myself.