Permission to Feel Your Emotions
“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.” — Mark Twain // 🌙
We often hear messages such as, ‘happiness is a choice’, ‘become a master of your emotions’, ‘it’s a curse to feel everything deeply’, or ‘never let your emotions overpower your intelligence’. These messages falsely imply that we can decide to have voluntary control over our wiring and biology. Never true. When we have to convince ourselves to feel happy, that is not happiness; it’s suppression. When someone presents us with joyful news, we don’t need to first think about feeling joyful, we feel joyful. In contrast, when someone presents us with heartbreaking news, we feel heartbreak. The emotions always come first. Their presence is out of our hands.
When we try to convince ourselves that we should feel something other than what we actually feel, not only do we continue to feel what we are running from, but we begin to feel even more anxiety because we’ve placed a deadline on our emotions. The thought, ‘I need to feel happy already; something must be wrong with me since I don’t by now’ becomes stronger and more difficult to not think. ‘Control’ isn’t any sort of mastery of emotion; it’s mastery of ignoring emotion. Our emotions’ only wish is to be acknowledged and felt. They are desperately stating ‘please just say I exist!’ and once we say ‘Yes, I see you sadness’ ‘Yes, I see you uncertainty’, or ‘Yes, I see you isolated’ they find their places within us. The more we try to push them away, the tighter their grip. Acknowledging them is the only path to examining them, but we have to acknowledge them first. While difficult and confusing to navigate, the more we can do this, the better we become at communicating what we’re feeling to ourselves, and to others. There are no wrong feelings. There are no bad feelings. Because they all come, no matter our efforts or our wishes. It’s never a curse to feel it all so deeply; it’s a gift. To feel it. To know it. To understand it. It’s incredible bravery. It’s the core of self compassion. It’s knowing your heart. It’s knowing your soul. And, most of all, it’s being who you are. ❤#permissionslips
