Working through our feelings together.

Some practical tips for getting back to feeling okay.

Like all of you, I am feeling a lot of things this week: dismayed, discouraged, disgusted, disillusioned, sad, scared, angry, hopeful.

We are meant to feel.

As I’ve said many times before, and will say many times again, all feelings are okay. They are all allowed.

Maybe you don’t buy it. I don’t blame you, if not. After all, most of us have been subjected to some pretty narrow and messed-up views on emotions, through religion, school, authority figures, etc.

Most of us are taught that only some emotions are okay: Don’t be sad. Don’t get angry. Don’t be jealous. Don’t be TOO happy.

That stuff becomes deeply ingrained and hard to move past. But it is possible to unlearn things.

How you view and work with your emotions is one of those things that is very much worth unlearning.

Consider this: Everything in the human body is intentional. Every part and function has a purpose. So, why, then, would we be able to feel this broad range of emotions if we were actually only “supposed” to feel some of them? Exactly. It makes no sense.

Consider this, too: As beings, we could feel looooong before we could think. So, as much as we like to think of ourselves as logical beings who happen to have pesky emotions, we are, in fact, emotional beings who happen to be able to think.

Yeah, emotions are not going anywhere.

We’re meant to feel all our feelings.

We have a job regarding our emotions.

In fact, as humans, we have THREE big responsibilities when it comes to our feelings, responsibilities that cannot be fulfilled if we repress or avoid the emotions that come up.

1. We need to feel our feelings in healthy ways.

I’m sure I’m not the first person you’ve heard say that we should feel our feelings. But have you ever been told HOW to feel your feelings? That was the issue for me. People would run around saying, “Don’t repress your emotions! Just feeeeel them!!” and I’d think, “Okay, cool. But, uh, HOW?” Because, on one end of the spectrum, you have completely ignoring or repressing the emotion but, on the other end of the spectrum, you have having a full-on meltdown when they are out of butter at the grocery store or throwing your computer across the room when it freezes. Repressing isn’t good but those actions are also not really advisable. (By the way, repressing your emotions is bad because emotions don’t just disappear when you ignore them. They get stored in your body and cause all kinds of problems. More on this in another newsletter.)

So, let me give you some tips for processing your emotions in healthy ways:

Find out more about feeling your feelings by going to my blog!