The Healing of Feeling: The Power of Accessing, Acknowledging & Allowing ALL Emotions Within Your Experience
There's a theme that's been threading its way so consistently through my coaching client sessions this week that I wondered if it might feel “up” for you right now in some way too.
It's the theme of allowing ourselves to feel whatever we're feeling.
More pointedly, the theme of feeling blocked in some way from:
a) Being aware of what we're feeling
and
b) Feeling free to unapologetically honor and express whatever that feeling is.
Through almost 15 years of holding space for clients' truest yearnings and deepest fears to safely surface in the sacred coaching container,
I've come to see this inability to consciously access, acknowledge, and allow challenging feelings within ourselves as maybe the single biggest inner block to experiencing a sense of integrity and intrinsic wholeness.
And when we feel disconnected from our own inherent wholeness, accessing the sense of unconditional love for ourselves that we crave is likely going to feel impossibly out of reach.
The thing is, we learn as incredibly attuned, vulnerable, tiny babies - before consciousness or words have settled in - the expression of which emotions leads us toward greater care, attention, and affection from our earliest caregivers and which “bonk” off our caregivers, leaving us with a felt sense of disconnection, loneliness, and fear that we won't be able to survive on our own (because we wouldn't have).
So your sweet little baby self learned how to dial up the expression of feelings that led to more connection and to dial down those that left you feeling more alone.
While this is the absolutely most brilliant move our baby selves could have made, over time, the dialing down of those early emotions that registered as “negative” within us can lead to a complete lack of ability for us to know, feel, or find - much less fully allow - those normal human emotions within our adult selves when they inevitably sometimes occur.
We become cut off from a big chunk of the natural spectrum of human emotion.
And the hitch is that not being able to acknowledge or welcome those challenging emotions when they arise within us doesn't mean they don't arise within us.
And those unacknowledged emotions that our being naturally experiences - because all humans experience them - then either leak out in unconscious, uncontrollable, reactive ways; or our body numbs them out to us, cutting off the flow of life force and energy through a portion of our body and being. And our sense of aliveness dims.
The youngest, most vulnerable parts of us learned to shut those “negative” emotions down and exile them away because expressing them would have risked not just our emotional connection but our survival in our most helpless early days.
So in order to move back toward an embodied sense of integrated wholeness within our Selves as adults, we have to start to gradually - in ways and at a pace that feel safe enough to our most vulnerable parts - learn that it now actually is safe and OK to touch into those feelings that felt too hot to touch all those years ago.
Anger, sadness, frustration, exuberance, joy, creativity, tenderness, shame (you'll notice that even emotions that seem “positive” on paper may have registered as “negative” within us depending on our early caretakers' response to those expressions from us based on their own inner bandwidth), etc.
Reconnecting to, and gradually allowing safe expression of, feelings that have felt too scary to “touch” through our entire life takes some courage and trust, to be sure.
But the more we open ourselves back up to the full, natural spectrum of all human emotion, the more rich our life experience becomes and the more reconnected to our essential core Self we become.
And as we reunite with and nurture greater trust and intimacy with our core Self, everything opens up more fully and vibrantly to us in this life.
If this all feels new and daunting (yet compelling in some “knowing” way) to you, start small.
Draw a big circle on a piece of paper. Jot down within the circle any and every human emotion you can think of, without directly applying them to yourself.
Then take a look at those emotions and circle the ones you regularly experience. Notice, which emotions do you almost never consciously feel? Highlight those. Those are a nice starting place for curious exploration through prompts like:
*What in your early life may have led to those emotions being sent underground (for extremely wise, good reason at the time)?
*What feels unacceptable about those emotions?
*How does your family of origin feel about, relate to, or express this emotion?
*What judgments pop into mind about people who experience/express a lot of this emotion?
*Fill in the blank: If I were to let myself feel (highlighted emotion), _____________ would happen in my life.
I'm here to encourage you that the work of thawing out these until-now frozen emotions in your range of experience will, over time, prove to be some of the most enriching, freedom-expanding work you'll ever do.
And if you could use some support in your inner excavation process, my Integrative Mindfulness Coaching process is all about this type of gentle, curious inner exploration. I'd love to hear what's going on for you around all of this. Send a note here to connect.
With Love,