For when you don’t want to feel your feelings, but you know you need to.

Many of us were not taught how to feel our feelings.  We developed strategies to avoid feeling anything negative and tried to seek out the positive as fast as possible.  The problem with that is that it actually gives an immense amount of power to your negative feelings. 

If you are unwilling to feel sad or scared then you will take desperate, and unconsidered, action to shift your emotional state. Many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it.  Some of us numb - with behaviors like scrolling, shopping, and Netflix binges to avoid the feelings. Others try to act their way out of it by crossing out everything on their to-do list or being so busy they never have time to sit down and feel. 

One of the most impactful transformations for myself in my own coaching journey was becoming willing to feel my feelings. The sentence that changed everything for me was: the point of feelings is to be felt, that’s it.  Oh. It’s so easy and so difficult to do at the same time. 

As I’ve been working with clients I realize I’m not alone.  One of the most impactful parts of working with a coach is learning how to process your feelings in an efficient way.  By feeling them now you take the power away from them being able to control you later. It seems counter intuitive, but actually by being willing to feel your feelings they have less power over you. 

Here’s what one of my clients said recently about her experience with coaching: 

‘’A big one for me was learning how to actually feel my feelings. For me, it is natural to try to rationalize away my feelings. I didn’t want to sit in them. I actually had this idea that I shouldn’t feel my negative feelings at all, that the only point was to get out of them. It is a really novel concept for me to allow fear, allow nervousness. But with Kelsey’s help, I have practiced to allow them to be in my body and not make it a problem. Instead of over-thinking for hours to avoid them, I just feel them and after a while they go away and I don’t even remember what I was upset about.  

After working with Kelsey, I know that I have new ways to address how I feel. My objective is no longer trying to feel ‘less bad stuff’, but seeing that it is temporary. I have more tolerance for those feelings in my body. 

Now I have more control over how I want to feel. Ironically, it’s by actually feeling my emotions.  After I feel them, I can decide what I want to do. I have learned how to reframe my thoughts or how to ask some questions that help me think about things a little differently. It makes me feel a deeper sense of control by knowing that I can allow and manage my feelings instead of trying to avoid them completely. ’’