The Art of Feeling Emotions

Emotions. We all have them yet do we allow ourselves to feel them? For far too long emotions have been assigned to femininity and of course, our heavily patriarchal society does not like that. There has always been this idea that women were 'overly emotional' and men 'unemotional'. Now that we as a society are trying to be more open with talking about mental health and as someone who has suffered from depression for a good part of her life, I think we should really start exploring these ideas surrounding emotions.

For about 7 years of my life, if you asked me if I was good at feeling my emotions, I would have confidently said yes. I was depressed. I cried a lot. My heart felt a lot of pain. I was constantly hurting. Thats feeling emotions....right? I would go to my weekly therapy sessions with a list of things I wanted to talk about and I was extremely self aware of my problems such as where they stemmed from and what was happening to cause these feelings of distress. It wasn't until recently when I spent a full week on my own, reflecting, that I realised whilst I was highly self aware of my problems, the one thing I failed to do was to actually feel my emotions. Instead I was intellectualising them. What that meant was every time something triggered a negative emotion, instead of feeling them, I would happily verbalise them to my friends but instead of saying something like "I feel sad", I would try to rationalise the way I felt through reason and logic. I always thought I was just a really open book and was really good at talking about my feelings, however, looking back, I was just really good at intellectualising my emotions and just because I am able to verbalise that does not mean I was processing them. My depression stemmed from many things but I'm guessing my inability to feel emotions would have helped it persist.

So what does feeling emotions look like? Well that week I spent on my own at home, I disconnected myself from the world outside and decided to look at my inner world...something that I hadn't truly dared to do before. I connected with my emotional self and started feeling all these emotions; both positive and negative and started to heal. I spent a lot of this time crying, writing, thinking and ultimately, healing. It was uncomfortable because as humans we are so quick to celebrate positive emotions, yet when the negative ones seep in, we are desperate to repress them and do everything under the sun to not feel them because they are uncomfortable. It isn't until you start to allow yourself to truly feel the uncomfortable negative feelings that you will start to feel the positive ones on a deeper, more rewarding level. After that week, I have been trying to master the art of tapping into my emotions on a regular basis so that I can live my life doing things that serve me.

It is reaching the end of mental health awareness month where people feel like it's more acceptable to advocate for mental health and in particular; men's mental health. I have heard men going "its easier for women to be open about their mental health" and expressing their frustrations towards the way people viewed men's mental health. However, it is clear a lot of them don't really know where their frustrations are angled towards. A little hint: it's towards the patriarchy. We all possess feminine and masculine energy regardless of gender and the patriarchy loves to assign these energies exclusively to female and male. These energies are not binary and absolutely not mutually exclusive. We grew up in a society that tells little boys to "man up" and "grow some balls" instead of allowing them to feel their emotions and celebrate that. It barely tolerates women doing it let alone men. The truth is, the patriarchy has no space for emotions and that is why we as a society needs to dismantle it so desperately. It is plaguing humanity and is causing serious problems in regards to our mental health.

So to all my readers out there I just want to say that it is okay to feel your emotions. It is okay to let things that trigger uncomfortable emotions get to you. It is okay to cry because it is one of the most cathartic ways to process them and if you are hurting, those feelings are valid. Feeling your emotions is one of the many beautiful, fundamental things that make us human and if we stop being so quick to condemn and repress the negative ones, we liberate ourselves and enable ourselves to feel the positive ones in full depth as well. It allows us to access levels of happiness, joy, peace and contentment at a full capacity once we let go of repressing the more uncomfortable, negative ones such as shame, guilt, sadness and pain because after all, repressing doesn't mean they're not there. Once you start to feel, you can start to let go.

Until next time,

Nicole.