How To Identify Your Emotions and Get to Know Yourself

What happens when you attach yourself to your thoughts? They run wild and drag you behind them. 

When you don’t have a grip on your thoughts, you are generally more reactive; having less of a grip on your emotions. When you don’t have your emotions in check, you leave yourself open to getting hurt. You could also be more inclined to hurt others. 

Either way, emotions left unchecked will wreak havoc on your life. 

In this blog post we are going to talk about 

1. What emotions are
2. How to identify them
3. How to understand what they are telling you

What Are Emotions?

First let’s start off by saying what emotions are. 

Emotions are the physical response our body has to a single thought. What makes emotions so important, and consequently, so hard to ignore is that they are trying to tell us something. Emotions may be telling us about a limiting belief, whether or not we are safe, if something in our life needs to change, if we’re on the right track – everything. Your emotions tell you everything you need to know at that moment. 

Your job is to listen, and find out what your emotions are trying to tell you. 

This step requires some practice. I, personally, never thought past the initial moments of, ‘I’m having this thought and now I feel x,y,z’. That determination would generally be the end of it. Then, I would wind up trying to distract myself, only to have that same scene play out time and time again. 

When you learn to identify your emotions, you learn a lot about yourself. Understanding your emotions helps you to identify underlying trauma that needs to be healed and released. These are the first steps in identifying opportunities for personal growth.

Give Yourself Permission to Feel Your Emotions

The thing with emotions is, you can repress them, but they always come out eventually. 

The reason why they don’t just go away is because they are important. They are valuable. They contain important information. How you are feeling matters and it’s okay to listen to yourself. 

When I gave myself permission to feel my emotions, that was the first step in a long journey. I started out with anger. I was 26 years old when I first allowed myself to truly feel angry and accept that emotion. Sure, I had been angry in the past, but this was the first time I allowed the feeling and didn’t judge myself. 

That day, I realized that I get angry sometimes and that’s okay. 

Anger is a part of being human. 

That thought led me to realize my perfectionist ideals that I hold for myself as well. I realized that I don’t have to be perfect, because I’m human and all humans make mistakes. I realized no one was expecting me to be perfect. After further contemplation, I realized that these were some of the many stories I was telling myself, and I was the only one that felt this way about myself. 

This narrative was part of the hamster wheel that kept me angry, and also constantly trying to repress my anger, because perfect people don’t feel angry. It was absolutely exhausting.

So, after all of these realizations and super long thought threads, I was able to see things from a different perspective. I was able to objectively look at the stories I was telling myself, and give myself permission to think differently. 

I was able to give myself permission to feel anger because I acknowledged that it’s a normal part of the human experience. 

I also gave myself permission to not be perfect, and I wondered if perhaps ‘not perfect’, was actually totally acceptable. 

I forgave myself for not meeting this perfectionistic ideal of myself and gave myself grace. 

Where Does This Perspective Come From?

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to show emotions because my mom didn’t know how to process her own emotions, let alone mine. It was more convenient for her that way. I was also reprimanded for getting angry, which further enforced the idea that showing emotions and feeling my feelings were bad.

As a result, I ignored them. I ignored my feelings because I learned that it’s more important to make sure the people around me are comfortable. 

Eventually, I was in a season of my life where I was faced with a person that was very challenging to be around. This girl was the worst. She essentially became a passive-aggressive bully to me. She would keep an eye on me, which was suffocating, and mock me, which was infuriating. That experience stirred up a lot of my repressed anger and resentment. 

Eventually I had reached a point where I couldn’t physically hide my anger any more and it just came out. Thankfully, it came out in a completely harmless way in the privacy of my own car. 

I was driving home from work, ruminating and making it worse, when I just started shouting everything I wanted to say. My words were fast and sharp, and my voice ranged from a loud yell to a slow growl. 

I let everything out. 

After that, I couldn’t keep it contained – my anger wouldn’t let me ignore it any longer.  

It was a really beautiful thing. 

That day I learned how anger really feels, and there was so much more where that came from. 

I sat there with my anger and a sense of curiosity that I couldn’t yet identify. I was meeting a brand new side of myself for the first time, and I wanted to know more about her. 

Listen for the Message

Later, I found myself sitting still on the corner of my bed, listening to the silence in the room and waiting for something to happen. I wasn’t aware of what exactly to expect, but I was open. Then, the idea occurred to me to take notice of how angry I was. 

I felt it, I was off the charts. All things considered, I would simply go from fine to about to explode in a moment’s notice. 

This was all internal though, remember, it was bad for me to show anger. As a result, up until this point I felt this huge, raging emotion in solitude. If I couldn’t be alone, I pushed it down and pretended it wasn’t there. 

Why was I so mad? And then I started thinking about all the times I had felt angry. I saw scenes of myself from times where I felt frustration and injustice. I remembered the coinciding times where I repressed those feelings and what that was like for me, not being able to express myself. 

Why didn’t I ever let myself express anger? What did that mean to me? 

It occurred to me: What would happen if I expressed my anger?

It came down to this: I felt that if I showed any signs of anger, people wouldn’t like that, and they would abandon me. 

There it was, I had found the core of my problem. That was when I was really able to get to work. We’ll talk more about how to further analyze the messages your emotions tell you in a future blog post. 

I realized that there was a whole area of my life that I needed to acknowledge. Now that I was open to feeling my feelings, I was ready to identify more and more so I could continue learning. 

Be Open to Learning

I was so excited to finally be able to let go of these unrealistic expectations I had for myself. Expectations I had conjured up, because at some point I determined I wasn’t good enough. What else would I learn? I was excited for more opportunities to present themselves. 

I want you to see the importance of being open to feeling your feelings and simply allowing them to be, with no judgment. Be curious as to what those feelings are trying to tell you and ask yourself questions. The answers lie in the space that you give yourself to hear them. 

By allowing yourself to sit in stillness and silence,  will open doors inside you to worlds upon worlds that you don’t even know about – yet. 

If you would like to learn more about my process for self-discovery and getting to the core of what’s holding you back – I would love to share it with you. I am currently working on a course that offers step by step guidance on how to get to know yourself better, by asking the right questions and showing you the mindset needed for change.

Please check back soon, I can’t wait for you to see what’s next!