Most people have difficulty simply being present with their emotions. They use many strategies try to avoid them, such as distraction or denial, or they act them out in some way – for example, by trying to hurt someone when they are angry. These common reactions require disconnection from one’s self. I’m going to discuss how you can relate to your emotions in a different way, one that supports psychological growth and well-being.
The approach I recommend is both simple and difficult: being present with your feelings in a non-judgmental and curious way. Rather than trying to get rid of them, letting them take you over, or acting on them impulsively, you allow yourself to experience your emotions fully while utilizing mindful awareness to observe and understand them.
Because our emotions have personal meaning and are often connected to experiences from our past, they can give us insight into ourselves. For example, we may have a strong emotional response to something because we are unconsciously reminded of a difficult event from our childhood. Mindfully being with our feelings can bring these issues into our awareness and help us understand the true significance of what we’re experiencing. This is how we can start to heal our past emotional injuries.
Being present with our feelings involves an attitude of openness and acceptance towards all parts of ourselves. If instead we judge some of our feelings and try to change them, we are engaging in a form of self-rejection. We may do this because we have internalized the negative way that our feelings were responded to as children; we learned that certain emotions were bad because they were met with rejection from others, or they were simply not safe to have. How feelings were treated in our family and in the larger society causes us to develop beliefs about what we are supposed to feel.
The problem is, if we decide some of our feelings are not OK and try to shut them down, this doesn’t address why they are there or help us understand them; we miss out on the opportunity to work with them and to understand ourselves and our real needs. Actually, when we try to deny a feeling it just makes it more likely that it will build up underneath the surface, causing us to act it out in an unconscious way. On the other hand, allowing ourselves to have our real feelings fulfils the deep need we all have to get to be ourselves.
Experiencing our feelings doesn’t mean letting ourselves be taken over by our emotional reactions. We can allow ourselves to feel our emotions fully, if we are mindfully observing them, without acting them out or believing that they are the truth. When people become blinded by their emotional reactions they are not actually being present with their feelings, nor trying to understand where they come from.
When you have a healthy relationship with your feelings you don’t reject them, take them at face value, or inflict them on others; you welcome them with curiosity and mindful awareness and use them as a gateway into deeper understanding of yourself. If you decide to communicate them to others you do so in a way that takes responsibility for your own experience.
