You’re Allowed to Feel Your Emotions
Stop telling yourself otherwise
The message we often receive from others (and ourselves), either explicitly or implicitly, is that we should or should not be feeling a certain emotion. If we are feeling sad, we blame ourselves for not feeling more sad for those “who have it worse off than us.” If we are feeling anxious, “it is just all in our head” and we need to “stop freaking out over nothing.” If we are feeling anger, we are “just over reacting to something and just need to calm down.”
We are never allowed to feel and our emotions and this is a problem.
Each time we ignore an emotion, we are missing an opportunity to listen to it, to understand its purpose, to have it color our lives in shades that give life beauty.
The Purpose of Emotions
First things first, you are allowed to feel your emotions — all of them. Anger, sadness, anxiety, woe, joy, loneliness, insecurity, etc.. The list goes on.
Our emotions are powerful experiences that are part of what it means to be human — a life devoid of emotion is borderline pathological. Our emotions are meant to communicate with us, to tell us something is awry or something is actually going well.
We need to listen in order to learn from our emotions and this can never begin if we are constantly sweeping emotions under the rug, bottling them up (until we subsequently explode) or running away from them. Experiencing emotions is part of being human, and there is nothing wrong with being human, it is not something from which we need to heal.
Experiencing, rather than suppressing, our emotions is the goal but it is something we need to learn. In our infancy, we begin learning about emotional regulation from our parents and caregivers. A baby does not know how to regulate their emotions so they look to their loved ones for help. At some point along our journey in life we forget that emotional regulation takes practice and work so we just give up, give in, and get overwhelmed.
Reason Knows Not
All of our emotions have powerful reasons to exist and manifest themselves in our lives. The poets and philosophers are correct in speaking of the heart as a decision making organ. Blaise Pascal in his work Pensées said that “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know… We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.” Although Pascal is speaking philosophically and with the voice of a poet, his intuitions about intuition have been demonstrated as truth. Our emotions are involved in all of our decision making, regardless of how “purely rational” we believe we are acting. In fact, we cannot truly act or make decisions rationally if we are not in touch with our emotions.
“We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.”
Some people grow up with a truncated sense of emotions because they had to stuff “negative emotions” down and not display them or else face some array of consequences (and sometimes they may have had good reasons to do so). Others end up with a stifled sense of emotion because they were never invited by another to express their emotions either verbally or expressively though another medium. Sometimes we are just Running on Empty (which is also the title of a great book on this topic).
Our emotions can be our guides but we can only listen to them if we know how to speak their language, otherwise its babble. And the first step for this process is to open our minds up to the diversity of our emotional experiences by simply allowing ourselves to experience more emotions more thoroughly.
Putting Emotions in Their Proper Place
Emotions are meant to be experienced and expressed, not suppressed or ignored. Our emotions are not what really get us into trouble because emotions are not really good or bad — they are neutral. Emotions are just communicating something about how our internal world is responding to our external world or to a thought, memory, or past experience. In this understanding, there is no way to conceptualize an emotion as “good” or as “bad” — an emotion just is.
Where the trouble and confusion exists is in our behavior. The way we respond to an emotion. Sure, anger can make us do something we regret or get us into a whole array of other issues but it is the behavior, not the emotion, that is the culprit in this. We can have bad or less-than-helpful behaviors but not bad emotions.
There are things we should feel angry about. Injustices in the world should fire us up about things that need to be changed. Anger here is the proper human response.
There are things we should feel sad about. Sadness communicates the loss of something we care about. We ought to feel sad about the loss of a loved one. We ought to feel some sadness when a friend moves away or a relationship ends. In fact, I would be more concerned if someone didn’t feel sadness at one of these events occurring.
There are things we should feel anxious about. Anxiety, in manageable doses, is meant to spur us into action — without it we would never get anything done. Anxiety is meant to play a part in motivating ourselves by giving us a sense of urgency.
Of course, this is all about balance. When sadness, anger, or anxiety become the only emotions we can feel, we need to seek out help from a professional. But a life without any one of these emotions lacks a powerful aspect of what makes us human and what makes life worth living.
A Life of Balance
The way forward in life is not a life devoid of emotional experiences. The way forward is also not a life of only experiencing emotions in overwhelming ways. Talking with a mental health professional can help you further navigate these waters and be able to regulate emotions when they do become overwhelming. Emotions can become overwhelming when we have gone years without listening to them — sometimes that is the only way that they can get our attention.
The way forward is a balance of our emotional experiences and our emotional expressions. When we are listening to both our emotions and our thoughts, we can act in accordance with our values and who we want to be. When we have gone a long length of our life not listening to our emotions and only acting reactivity to them, we are prone to acting outside of ourselves and who we are striving to be.
Finding balance by experiencing and understanding our emotions is the better way forward. Maybe the only way.
