How to Safely Feel Your Feelings

There’s a lot of advice floating around that in order to move past stuck places or move through hard times you must feel your feelings.

There is some truth to that.

Stuck emotion is problematic. it can leave stress-energy stuck in your nervous system which has been shown to cause many health conditions, physical and mental.

Autoimmune
Migraines
Digestive problems
Chronic Pain
Anxiety
Depression
PTSD
Chronic Dizziness or Nausea

While you don’t want your feelings to stay stuck, it is important that you take into account the state your nervous system is in when you’re feeling your feelings. If you are in a state of overwhelm, anxiety or feeling stressed out, this is not the time to “feel your feelings” in the way of a huge rage where you beat your bed with your pillow or screaming and crying your head off for hours. These types of practices are clearing, but they can also be extremely re-traumatizing not to mention exhausting. If your nervous system hasn’t built up enough regulation to handle that incredibly powerful force of your anger or sadness, it will only leave you depleted and wasted where you may need days, weeks, even months of recovery time.

Interestingly, this is also true for enjoyable feelings. If your nervous system is already holding a lot of stuck emotional stress, having a huge amount of joy, connection, touch or sexual experiences can also feel like too much, causing you to check out or feel triggered in other ways.

In Somatic Experiencing, we start the work of “feeling your feelings” by learning to feel good or neutral. This is a process of listening to the physiological sensations of good and neutral in your body. Certain exercises or tools can evoke a feeling of safety and your body will give you specific spontaneous signs that you’re settling into feeling good again. Being able to marinate in these neutral or good sensations is a big piece of the work. As you FEEL into feeling good, you build your ability to handle more. We work on this quite a bit in the Settle Your sh*t workshops because this is the foundation of clearing stuck emotions. (Next workshop is this Saturday, Feb 27th)

Here’s what’s super interesting about this step. As the nervous system starts to feel safe and good again, your old defenses start to go down and the old emotions surface. That’s why it’s so hard to meditate, be still or relax. All the old stuck stress shit from your childhood and past experiences comes up because now there’s room for it to move. It’s at this time that it’s safe to feel those feelings BUT… only a little bit at a time. In a similar way you slowly build up to more weight at the gym to get stronger, we will slowly and gently release emotion.

When you follow your body’s lead with this and go slower, you are able to move through old stuff with ease and reclaim your life energy, your health, and your humanness. Over time it’s easier to feel your feelings because your nervous system is primed and strong enough to do so. You won’t have to work so hard at changing habits because your nervous system patterns are different. Lots of stuff gets easier including moving through intense or subtle emotions when they arise.

Ready to heal at the foundational level of your nervous system?

Connect with me for a complimentary 30-minute chat

Register for an online Somatic Movement Class

Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop