Feeling your feelings doesn’t have to feel overwhelming or scary…

Most of us were never taught how to feel our feelings or sensations. We were either encouraged to push through, suppress, numb or distract ourselves, stay positive, be grateful, or move on.

So when emotions show up - especially the messy, uncomfortable ones, it’s easy to think:

“If I let myself feel this… I’ll drown in these emotions.”
“If I open the floodgates, I won’t be able to close them again.”
“If I feel my feelings, I’m scared I’ll get stuck or completely fall apart.”

But here’s the truth:

Emotions, feelings, sensations - aren’t here to drown us. They’re here to move through us.

When we learn how to feel and process them in a healthy, doable way, emotions can seem less like a tidal wave and more like smaller, gentler waves.

So… What Are Emotions?

As humans, we are inherently emotional creatures.

There’s nothing wrong with you for experiencing emotions, and having emotions doesn’t mean you’re ‘too sensitive’. Emotions might be uncomfortable and unpleasant or overpowering, but they aren’t bad.

Emotions are simply energy in motion (e-motion).

They are our body’s way of communicating with us. Emotions are reactions and expressions that occur in our bodies to give us some feedback - often in response to our environment, people, situations, etc.

Emotions are just energy in the body that sometimes becomes stuck and needs to be discharged, worked through and released.

Sometimes, we can be so shut down, numb, or frozen that it might seem like we don’t experience emotions or we feel ‘nothing’.

When we ignore, suppress, repress or override our emotions, that energy doesn’t disappear; it stays within the body. And when we disconnect from our emotions, we lose connection with ourselves, our heart, our desires and needs, our innate wisdom, and our aliveness.

If you have been experiencing numbness, shutdown, depression, freeze, or have lived your life suppressing/ignoring your emotions, know that this is really common and it’s not something to blame or shame yourself (or anyone) for. There is a lot of bodily intelligence behind why it may have been challenging to connect with your emotions.

Often, our emotions continue to self-perpetuate (or loop on repeat) until they are held, digested and experienced. This is where Somatic work comes in to help you grow your capacity to be with your emotions and process these stuck emotions.

Feeling Our Feelings: Why It Matters

So many of us were never taught to healthily feel our feelings or process them. It’s often not something we were taught in school, and quite often our parents or caretakers may not have known how to manage their feelings, either. Through cultural, societal and gender conditioning, we can often be taught to shut down or limit our emotional range.

For many of us, we tend to relate to our emotions by avoiding them (i.e., intellectualising, numbing out, distracting ourselves), or we might overidentify with them and find ourselves drowning in them.

So many people tend to live and experience the world from the neck up, often disconnected from (or sometimes terrified) of going into the body.

Maybe you’ve been used to retelling your story and experience over and over in talk therapy sessions, and maybe you’ve found some relief from talking about your challenge, but haven’t found a sense of resolve.

Working with emotions or stories that bring up strong bodily sensations or emotional reactions requires us to step outside the mind and come into the body and the felt sense of the experience - because the imprint of these experiences are stored in the body.

Emotions serve as information about our internal state. They can help guide us toward what matters to us, our values, and help us understand how our environment impacts us.

When we learn to distinguish and discern our emotions, allow them to be here and express them in healthy ways, we can better connect and relate with ourselves, each other and our life.

When we connect with our emotions, we can build emotional resilience, nervous system stabilisation (aka nervous system regulation), boundaries, connection, authentic expression, and trust in ourselves and the world.

How We ‘Feel the Feelings’ and Somatically Process Them through the Body

I’m sure you’ve probably read or heard someone say that you just have to “feel your feelings”, or someone’s asked you, “How does that make you feel?”. Maybe you’ve tried to feel your feelings, but you’ve ended up feeling more emotions or stuck - I’ve been there too.

The practice of coming down into the body takes practice.

Quite often, especially at the beginning of working and experiencing Somatics, it is essential to experience this work with a practitioner.

Somatics is an experiential and embodied process; just reading or learning about somatics only takes us so far.

Often when we try to ‘feel our feelings’ by ourselves, we can quite easily get caught in labelling, judging, overanalysing, getting lost in the story, or getting stuck in our thoughts or story (our head).

Somatics is the practice of listening to and working with the body to invite in the emotions, parts of ourselves that we’ve pushed away - and to understand them, feel what they feel like in the body, and allow them to move through and metabolise emotions and unprocessed somatic residue (i.e., stuck and incomplete sensations/emotions from the past).

In a Somatic Exploration Journey session, I don’t prescribe a practice to help you resolve a nervous system response or emotion, as this can bypass the experience and emotions you're having in the moment.

Instead, I guide you to connect with sources of support to help stabilise your nervous system and build your capacity to be with the emotions and sensations that you are feeling in the moment, helping you stay present with them. It is normal for this to take a number of sessions to build a steady foundation before we can explore or process your emotions more deeply.

This support and foundation are important to build your capacity to tolerate the emotion and stay present with them; without this stability, we can easily become overwhelmed or triggered by our emotions.

When you have the stability and capacity to be with the emotion, without getting overwhelmed, we can begin to allow the emotion to move through or express itself in the way it needs to - without fixing or needing to ‘get rid’ of it, or necessarily needing to understand why it’s there. Instead, staying present and following the body’s impulses and cues on how this sensation wants to be met, moved through, and digested. And integrating from the experience.

This process is not one to be rushed, and it’s not about getting to a big emotional catharsis or reaction in a session.

It’s about learning to be present with our emotions in a steady, stable and resourced way, and transmuting them into greater self-compassion and emotional resilience, and coming back to our authentic expression.

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

If you’re a sensitive soul or a deep-feeler, maybe you’ve experienced how overwhelming, scary, confusing and heavy the sensations of emotions can be.

Maybe you’re tired of carrying the weight of them and need some supportive space to feel and metabolise the emotions. Being held and guided in your Somatic journey to meet and unravel the knot of emotions can make all the difference.

Being sensitive, having feelings and emotions colour your experience of life and are part of your aliveness and being human.

When you learn how to feel and process your emotions in a steady and stable way, they become your internal compass, not a weight weighing you down.

If you’d like support in somatically processing your emotions I’m here to hold that space with you in a Somatic Exploration Journey (or experience this with Reiki).

Book a Connection Call if you’d like to chat first and ask any questions. Or if you’re ready - Book an Introductory Somatic Exploration Journey session.