How To Feel Your Feelings: A Step-By-Step Guide
Almost no one is taught how to feel, process and integrate their feelings.
As a result, we go through life having to resist and repress them.
Everyone you see (everyone!) is carrying around a huge weight of unprocessed feelings and emotions that they have had to resist and repress during their lives.
But when we repress our feelings, they don’t just disappear.
Unable to move freely, these piles of stuck emotional energy lurk in the system and are constantly being retriggered by life, generating anxiety, depression, anger issues, dissociation, panic attacks, addictions, dysfunction, insomnia, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders…the list goes on!
Not only that, in order to cut ourselves off from our negative feelings, we also have to cut ourselves off from our positive feelings: joy, happiness, connection, creativity and so on. We become numb to the good things in life.
Contrariwise, learning to process our feelings jump-starts our engagement with life and with our positive emotions, helping us to feel voluptuously vibrant, joyously juicy and achingly alive!
In this article, I’m going to through how to feel your feelings, step-by-step.
(Note: I use the words ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ interchangeably).
Here are the steps:
Discern the feeling
Feel the feeling
Listen to the feeling
Embody the feeling
Stay well-grounded, well-resourced and properly contained
Reduce resistance
Undo emotional repression
Final thoughts
Let’s jump in!
What Is A Feeling?
A feeling or emotion is a signal from your nervous system that pushes you in the direction of safety and supports you to meet your physical and psychological needs.
Anger helps you stand up for yourself (e.g. if someone is bullying you), sadness helps you to signal to others that you need support, fear helps to push you to safety or motivate you to avoid a threat (e.g. working harder so you don’t get fired!), shame helps to guide your behaviour into socially-acceptable channels (e.g. prevents you from lying to your friends) and so on.
These emotions consist of a powerful physiological energy: e.g. a sudden pit of fear in your stomach, a flush of red-hot anger to the face, a heavy shame in the chest and so on.
What Does It Mean To Feel A Feeling?
Feelings are meant to be felt.
They are designed to arise in our experience, do their job of getting us to safety or get a need met and then—having been fully felt—subside back whence it came.
An emotion has been processed when it has been so fully felt that it reintegrates back into your Being.
The more ‘purely’ you can feel and embody an emotion (i.e. with the least resistance and the greatest amount of presence and acceptance), the more ‘cleanly’ it will move through your system.
When an emotion has been processed it feels like it has been ‘integrated’ into the system and it will dissipate permanently (it may take many rounds of processing for big emotions).
You can tell a given emotion has been fully felt and processed because you no longer become emotionally triggered in that area of your life.
E.g. let’s say you experience shame when you think about an embarrassing memory from school. If you process that portion of shame fully, thinking about that memory again will no longer trigger an emotional reaction, which will have passed through.
But very often, we are unable to fully feel our emotions (for various reasons, see below!).
When this happens, three things occur:
Firstly, the emotion gets stuck in our system.
Unable to be discharged and reintegrate back into the system, the emotional energy is forced down into the body where it resides in the tissues, muscles and fascia.
Secondly, that emotion will keep cycling round and round.
The emotion will always be ‘on’, looking for threats to avoid or opportunities for safety. It will be constantly scanning your life circumstances proactively looking for triggers. (And what it looks for, it tends to find!). For example, if shame is in your system, you will project that onto others and imagine that they think poorly of you.
Thirdly, you will keep behaving on the basis of that emotion - living from the ‘past’.
That emotion—even when you are unaware of it—maintains its influence on your life. It is now always ‘on’, trying to get you to safety and get your needs met.
Say you were in school and you answered a question and got laughed at. Shame arose, but you were unable to process it, because it was too overwhelming.
The shame of that moment will stay with you, holding you back from expressing yourself in groups (say) for the rest of your life! You will act from this past pattern, even decades later.
As we go through life and accumulate thousands of these stuck emotional patterns that are looping in our system, we find that our perception of the present is totally clouded by past experiences.
We see ourselves, others and the world through the lens of these unprocessed emotions, living from robotic, conditioned patterns, with a lack of spontaneity and authenticity.
What prevents us from feeling our feelings?
Why We Fail To Feel Our Feelings
The tricky thing is that there is almost always a secondary reaction to the initial emotion based on how we have been taught to deal with that particular emotion.
These take the form of emotional resistance and repression. And it is this secondary reaction that blocks our feelings from being fully felt (or at all).
Let’s dive into resistance and repression.
Resisting Feelings
Often when we were small, we experienced intense feelings, but we didn’t have a clue how to deal with them. Children cannot regulate their emotions by themselves, they need the supportive presence of an adult caregiver to help them process them.
If we didn’t get that support (our caregiver is absent, not paying attention, not able to hold space for us, etc.) we had no choice but to resist the feeling.
If we were to have felt it fully it would have simply been too overwhelming for our nervous system.
This becomes a pattern that we take on throughout our lives. Whenever an intense feeling arises, we resist it: we jump into our heads where we try to solve it logically, we numb out with alcohol or Netflix or whatever, we distract ourselves by any means necessary.
This is a totally innocent and necessary survival strategy. But it creates the template for a dysfunctional relationship to emotions over the course of our lives if we never learn to process emotions.
Repressing Emotions
Repression is when we unconsciously push down an emotion that wants to arise.
We do this to maintain the attachment, security, approval and acceptance of others.
The number one need of a human child is for attachment. Whatever it does, it MUST do everything it can to keep the flow of love, acceptance and approval coming from its caregivers.
And all children will manipulate their own emotions in order to secure that attachment.
These emotions (particularly intense, negative ones) are so often perceived by our parents and caregivers to be something ‘bad’.
When we start crying or get angry, they will try to ‘fix’ the emotion, saying things like “oh, don’t cry, it’s OK”. They feel uncomfortable in the presence of our emotional intensity and so will try to change our emotional state with cajoling or convincing. Even worse, they will actively shut us down by getting angry at us or threatening us.
The message we receive as children is, “you are unacceptable when you are feeling sadness” (or anger or whatever the emotion might be).
This is deeply threatening to the child!
In order to maintain our attachment to our caregivers, we must unconsciously repress the emotion that threatens that attachment.
That means that we shut it down unconsciously as soon as it arises. When anger (for example) is triggered, we push it down before we even know that it is present.
For example, if someone insults us we may instantly freeze. This freeze response is actually to hold down the powerful anger that would otherwise arise but that is too threatening to allow.
And we don’t even realise we’re angry! We just feel ourselves freeze.
As we go through life this becomes just how we relate to our emotions: we deny them before we even know they are there!
Consider the following: you don’t know what emotions you are repressing.
You might think that you aren’t angry or ashamed or fearful and so on. But this is precisely the purpose of repression: to keep these emotions completely out of your consciousness so that they don’t threaten your attachment and safety.
It works precisely because you are not aware of it!
This is why it’s so tricky and can be hard to work with. But as we start to bring up and process these repressed emotions, it can feel a huge relief to feel these heavy emotional burdens—that we didn’t even know were there—start to lift.
How To Feel Feelings
In this section, we get to the meat of the topic: how to stop resisting our emotions and how to actually start feeling and processing them safely, cleanly and deeply!
Let’s jump in!
1. DISCERN THE FEELING
The first step is to become aware of what is actually going on emotionally in your direct experience.
Not the label, story or judgement of the feeling. The actual physiological energy of the feeling itself as it manifests in space-time!
Most of the time, we are stuck in our heads trying to resolve a feeling that we are completely disconnected from.
Instead, we want to drop out of the mind and come into our body and ask yourself questions like:
What feeling am I feeling right now?
Where am I feeling it?
How intense is it?
What are the characteristics of this feeling?
How big is it?
What colour is it?
Is it moving or static?
Does it have a defined shape or is it more nebulous?
Is this feeling familiar?
Do I feel any resistance to this feeling?
Is it OK that this feeling is here? (‘no’ is an acceptable answer!)
What to do if you can’t feel anything
Many people starting out with this work have adopted the coping strategy of dissociating from their bodies, numbing out to the emotions and sensations. It simply feels unsafe to be in the body. This is very common and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. But it presents an obstacle to processing our emotions.
In this case, I would start off with some very gentle practices to slowly start getting in touch with your body:
Simple touch: place one hand on your heart and one on your belly, feeling the warmth and the pressure - just notice what sensations are there
Humming: breathe in deeply and start to hum a low-tone on the exhale; feel it vibrate through your body and use this vibration as a gateway to your sensations
Yoga: this ancient practice is a great way of getting in touch with your body
For more ideas I have 115 different exercises in my Nervous System Regulation MEGA-TOOLKIT. Check it out!
2. FEEL THE FEELING
The next step is the tricky one :). Feeling the feeling!
This simply means that you put your attention on the actual energy of the feeling itself in your direct experience.
Imagine that the beam of your attention is a ‘finger’ and that the feeling is a warm ‘pie’. Try to put your ‘finger’ in the middle of the ‘pie’! . And just keep it there, being curious about the pie and getting to know it a little bit.
American Pie style :).
This means opening yourself to the presence of this energy, doing your best to allow it to be there, exactly as it is.
There’s nothing to ‘do’ here. We simply be as present as we can with this part of ourselves.
If it feels too much to dive right into the heart of the feeling, start by putting your attention at the edges of the feeling (like it’s a beach ball that you’re holding) at a distance that feels safe (it will still feel uncomfortable, but hopefully manageably so).
You may experience a lot of resistance to the feeling (attention jumps to thoughts, tension in the body, dissociation and so on). See points 5 and 6 for how to work with this!
3. LISTEN TO THE FEELING
This is where we really start to treat our feelings with respect: listening and dialoguing with them and getting them moving, expressing and coming alive!
We simply ask the feeling questions, listen to the response and use that as a guide for how to be with that feeling.
I always find it helpful to start by simply acknowledging the feeling. Just saying, “Hey, I see you. Welcome. I’m here to try to help you as best I can.”
Once the relationship is established, here are some great questions we can usefully ask:
What do you need?
If you had a voice, what would you say?
If you could make a sound, what sound would you make?
When were you created?
Why are you here?
What are you trying to protect me from?
Who or what are you about?
You will find that the voice of a feeling often reflects a lost or abandoned part of you (often from childhood) that did not have its needs met or didn’t have the support it needed.
It’ll say things like “I’m afraid” or “I have to get out of here” or “I fucking hate you!” or will reflect deep unconscious negative beliefs about ourselves like, “I’m worthless” or “I’m unloveable”. Or you could get a sound like “argh!” or “waaaah!”.
Similarly, you might hear what it needs or is trying to achieve: “I don’t want to get laughed at” or “I need space”.
Hearing these words from our emotions gives us an opportunity to be with them in the right way. Either by giving them what they need (a hug or words of support) or by giving us a clue as to how they can be more fully embodied (see next section!).
Often just acknowledging what these emotions are wanting to say is enough to reduce resistance and help them move through.
The trick to this is to stay out of the narrative mind and instead dialogue with the actual emotion itself.
You can tell if you are in your narrative mind because responses tend to be quite long-winded and ‘explainy’ (“I think that I feel like…”), it tends to use a lot of justification and convincing.
Conversely, you can tell when you are speaking to your emotions, because the responses you get are short, to-the-point, very heart-felt and you really feel the message land in the body.
4. EMBODY THE FEELING
This is where we take feelings feelings to the next level.
Often it’s not quite enough to just sit still, quietly feeling a feeling. That can still be a subtle resistance or repression, as if we are holding it at arm's length.
Although we are willing to touch on a feeling, we aren’t willing to allow it to fully be here and take over our being.
Think about how a three-year-old feels a feeling. They don’t just sit there and go, “oh, there’s some anger”. They really live it!
By embodying an emotion I mean fully allow anger (say) to be present in our system and to use our body and voice to allow it to move through spontaneously and authentically, e.g. by letting our fists clench, our jaw tighten, maybe punching a pillow or yelling “fuck off!”.
Here are a few questions to get you started down this road:
How does this feeling want to move?
If no one was looking, what would this feeling do? Cry? Stamp? Hide?
If this feeling could make a sound, what would it be?
If this feeling was a seed, how would it grow?
The trick is to feel intuitively into how this part of you wants to express itself and to do your best to allow that movement. You can do anything: run on the spot, get in the foetal position on the floor, imagine pushing someone away and so on.
When we start to move into embodying our feelings that is when we most commonly start to experience resistance and repression. It can feel very unsafe to start to let anger or fear or sadness really move through our bodies.
This is totally normal (well, for people in our society!) and not a bad thing at all. It’s just your nervous system trying to protect you. Just notice it. And read on for how to deal with it :).
5. STAY GROUNDED,
RESOURCED AND CONTAINED
While feeling our feelings it is critical that we remain well-grounded, well-resourced and properly contained.
What that means is that—while we are feeling these feelings—our nervous system remains in touch with a fundamental ground of safety. It may be somewhat activated or somewhat shut down, but it is not either completely overwhelmed, on the one hand, or totally shut down, on the other.
Resourcing is absolutely foundational for the healing journey. It allows us to move through life being able to hold and contain difficult and potentially overwhelming feelings. And when we can hold them we can process them.
A resource is an island of safety, support or neutrality in our experience. By building a resource, it helps us be able to BE WITH our experience without getting overwhelmed. So we have an opportunity to process and integrate that experience, healing our emotional wounds over time.
Learn how to do this with the ‘resourcing’ section of my Nervous System Regulation MEGA-TOOLKIT or I have a full video on resourcing that you can check out below:
6. REDUCE RESISTANCE
When you try to feel your feelings you will discover that you are resisting them, because they are fucking painful!
A critical part of processing feelings is working with the resistance to those feelings.
We do this by increasing our capacity to be with difficult and intense feelings. Here are a few ideas for how to do this:
Start at the edge
Rather than diving right into the heart of a feeling, imagine holding that feeling at its edges with your attention. As if it is a beach ball that you are holding with two imaginary hands.
Make the beach ball whatever size is needed such that you can hold it without being overwhelmed. Start there. If you find that that is OK, try going deeper (i.e. nearer to the centre of the feeling). If it gets too much, back off a little.
Pendulation
This involves going back and forth between an intense feeling and a more neutral or supportive sensation (or resource). The latter could be the feeling of your feet on the floor, the sense of the chair supporting you, a warm hand you place on your chest, imagining a safe place or just noticing your breath.
You pendulate by feeling into the feeling for a time and reverting to the more neutral/supportive space. Go back and forth, finding a balance that feels manageable.
For example, you spend 20 seconds feeling the anger in your chest, then spend 20 seconds feeling the stillness around your feet, going back and forth.
Allow the resistance
Paradoxically, one of the best ways to reduce resistance is to discern, acknowledge and allow the resistance fully.
Notice where in your body you feel the resistance. Commonly, for example, people resist sadness/tears with tension in the face or behind the eyes; resistance to anger is felt as a tightness or numbness in the chest. And so on.
Then simply acknowledge the resistance: “I fucking hate this feeling of shame, I don’t want it here. I’m so fed up of feeling ashamed”. And then allow that resistance: fully permit yourself to try to push away the shame or hate it or whatever the resistance wants to do.
By allowing the resistance, it feels seen and felt and tends to relax, giving more space for us to feel the feeling.
7. UNDO EMOTIONAL REPRESSION
This involves integrating those parts of ourselves that are unconsciously pushing down our emotions because it feels unsafe to feel them.
This involves bringing up that part of us that feels unsafe and bringing it some safety and love :).
You can do this by imagining yourself powerfully expressing the repressed emotion in challenging circumstances. So you might imagine yourself expressing anger to your parents, or sadness to your friends, or fear to your co-workers.
Really try to make it real, imagining what you are going to say and how you imagine they would respond. For example, imagine telling your parents, “Mum, Dad, I feel really ashamed right now.” Or being in a meeting and telling your co-workers, “I’m really anxious about the outcome of this meeting and I feel a lot of fear in my belly”.
You will instantly feel the tight tension of repression somewhere in your body: constricting your throat, tightening your chest, holding in your tears and so on.
There are two approaches here:
Love and resourcing: while allowing the tightness to be there, hold it in your attention like a hurt, little child. Bring a supportive hand to the area, rubbing or patting it. Breathe into it. Sway or rock gently. Let it know that you see it and feel it.
Fully allowing the repression: let this part of you fully attempt to hold in the emotion, letting it push it down and hold in. We want to let the repression exhaust itself, rather than trying to make it go away. This is like letting a child that is full of energy run and around and exhaust itself, rather than trying to force it to go to bed before it's ready.
These approaches can also be used in combination.
Final Thoughts
That’s a whistle-stop tour of how to feel your feelings. There are many nuances and subtleties that I haven’t had space to mention here.
Good luck with your journey!
Hi, I’m Ben.
If you want to learn more or need a hand feeling your feelings, I offer one-on-one facilitated somatic healing sessions where I safely and compassionately guide people to uncover and unravel the painful emotions and survival patterns that lie at the root of their suffering.
Hit the button below to set up a free and friendly chat with me so we can get to know each other and see how I might be able to help you.
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Ben
