Why is it important to express your emotions?
Wading into the waters of how you be can feel terrifying, or it might be a mystery. I can’t tell you how many people I have counselled who genuinely don’t know how they feel, don’t want to feel or are unable to access their emotions. Though there are lots of exceptions, most of those clients are men and I’m still curious if this is a cultural shaping or a biological one. That said, there are many women who are out of touch with the more dark side of who they are and how they feel for various reasons. Quite often all of us mistaken thoughts or beliefs for emotions such as: “I feel like he was wrong”. It’s important to use the correct language around thoughts and feelings in order for us to be sure that we are indeed accessing emotions.
“Why are emotions so important and can’t I just not feel?” Haha…I’ve been asked this many times. Why can’t I just stay numb or why do I only express myself through anger or rage? These are both coping mechanisms when the nervous system feels taxed or overloaded. It’s either better to check out completely or to bottle it all up until I can’t see anything but rage. Rage allows us to emote and also isn’t as vulnerable as the other emotions its covering up such as feeling rejected, sad, lonely. We don’t like to admit to feeling these other emotions and in a lot of ways our social media culture doesn’t like to recognize them as acceptable.
Why is it beneficial to be able to express emotions? Psychologist David Caruso tells us that emotions are information. They tell us when our boundaries have been crossed, when we’re not comfortable with a situation, where our child wounds are and what we need to heal.
Emotions direct us toward our goals, give us feedback about how we are currently treated in our relationships, where we need to do the work and more.
If you don’t shy away from inner work, checking in with how you feel from one moment to another is a great start. And if you shy away from the valleys, and try to stay only on the peaks, well, good luck with that. Eventually life does feed us lessons that we may or may not be ready for.
Accessing our feelings also fine-tunes our communication AND helps us understand where the headwaters of what we say are located, meaning where does our perspective originate from, what childhood wounds etc. In that way, we don’t have misunderstandings and see our own reactivity.
In short, shying away from feeling the deep stuff and going for it prevents us from the best communication possible, which prevents us from having better intimacy in any relationship. Its not about choosing to feel, you’ll always have emotions, its about discovering the best way for you to get in touch with you in order to live life more fully and with no regrets.
