Tried Feeling My Feelings and It Hasn’t Seemed to Help Any

Someone recently asked me a question through email the other day and I thought my response would be helpful for others so I made our exchange into a blog post. I think this is an issue to which a lot of people can relate…enjoy! 

I love your content and I resonate with so much of it. I know that one thing you mention a lot in many different ways is how important it is for us to “clear out the ick” and “feel our feelings” so that we can unclog our spiritual channels to let in all the good feelings that we want. 

As hard as I’ve tried, I just really struggle with how exactly to do that. Maybe I’m too hung up on a “process” – do I just go lay on my bed and cry about things that bother me? (I’ve tried that, didn’t really work) Do I write down all the hurts and and resentments that I’m still harboring from years ago (I’ve done that – didn’t get a lot of movement from it). I just don’t know how to approach it.

I know you tell us not to get hung up on tips and tricks and processes, but I just don’t know where to go from here. I’m the type to push down my feelings and act like everything’s okay, so maybe that’s part of the problem I’ve having. I just feel stuck and don’t know how to move forward and really “feel my feelings” even though I know it’s really important to do. Thanks for your help!

Yes we all tend to get hung up on the ‘process’ of it all since we are used to thinking action is the root of change. And in many cases, there may be specific actions we find very beneficial–a particular journaling exercise, a guided meditation,etc… But at the end of the day, the emotional release coupled with a genuine willingness to release the beliefs and stories creating the feelings is the most beneficial ‘action’ of all.

I know it can be frustrating when it feels like we have done the things people suggest us to do and we still don’t see any movement. I have been there and here are a couple of insights I can share from my own experience…

Even though I engaged in lots of emotional releases, when I was honest with myself, I saw that my lack of ‘progress’ was primarily due to me still holding on pretty deeply to the thinking that created the feelings in the first place–our feelings aren’t coming out of nowhere, there is something in the mind creating them.

 I had to admit that I was still resisting embracing ideas that would help me and stubbornly holding onto ones that wouldn’t because the egoic part of my mind was more interested in being ‘right’ about what it believed, without any regard to the detriment it caused.

I still wanted to look to past experience to justify my feelings and why what I believed was ‘true.’ I had to make a conscious choice–one that is made over and over again and not usually once–to be willing to release what isn’t serving me and trusting this would be beneficial.

I had to decide if I really wanted things to stay as they were.  This is an ongoing process of course and not something we start and then ‘finish’ eventually. It is not some linear thing but with that being said, overall, we can certainly see we start feeling better more consistently over time. There will probably always be stuff popping up for us and that’s okay–accepting it goes a long way in making that easier to deal with.

You mentioned a tendency to push down feelings and you are certainly not alone there. And this is where some honest self-reflection can come in handy. You might find that you haven’t really let yourself feel the negative feelings on their deepest levels.

We may say we feel ‘frustrated’ about something, but we may actually feel a full-on rage about our perceived lack of ‘progress,’ of how things are in our life,etc… I know I had some very deep feelings that I hadn’t quite touched on and I realized a lot of the time I was trying to work through my feelings on an intellectual level, trying to ‘talk’ myself out of them and while there can be some benefit in that, it is typically limited in its effect in that it tends not to last long, and it isn’t enough to transform more deeply-held anger, fear, anxiety and such.

I also found that I had some resistance to truly feeling better because in some ways, I felt my current pain protected me from new pain. I think our mind has one particularly illogical, crazy thought that being happy and feeling good is somehow ‘unsafe,’ that it leaves us vulnerable to God knows what. So long as I was struggling with X, Y or Z, I was less likely to have new problems and new pain arise.

But on a deeper level I knew this wasn’t true, and I had enough faith in that idea that I was able to start really letting stuff go without worrying there was some negative consequence to that.

So, based on my experience, the struggle with this is never about someone doing the ‘wrong’ things or not enough things to change and improve their emotional health. The core issue always seemed to come back to resistance to doing this in some form.