Are you afraid to feel?
I am continually in awe of clients who come into therapy, despite feeling uncomfortable with or even fearful of their own emotional experiences. What scarier place is there, if you’ve been avoiding your emotions, than a therapist’s office? A place that seems to exude an expectation that clients will experience deeper emotions – in the presence of another person, no less. I sometimes joke with clients who apologize for using my box of tissue, telling them that I shop at Costco, so they can use as much tissue as they’d like. If tissue usage represents emotional experiencing, it’s clear that there’s a lot of this happening in my office day-to-day – and this is often a novel experience for my clients.
There are many reasons behind the fear of feeling. Read on and see if any of these sound familiar to you:
- “I’m afraid that if I start to feel this pain, it’ll never stop.”
- “I don’t want to be a burden on others.”
- “I don’t want to feel weak,” or, “I don’t want others to see me as weak.”
- “If I start to feel these feelings, I won’t be able to function in my life.”
- “When I feel something, it’s too intense and powerful and I’m afraid I’ll do something unsafe.”
- You’ve been punished for showing your emotions, and/or your emotions have been repeatedly invalidated/discounted by important people in your life (parents/caregivers, significant others).
Given the experiences that often underlie these reasons for fearing emotions (e.g., trauma), the response of avoiding emotional experiences is totally understandable. We do need to get through life, and protect ourselves, and sometimes our experiences show us that the way to protect ourselves is by restricting our emotions, disconnecting from them, or avoiding them. In the short-term, this avoidance can reduce our anxiety. However, the potential consequences of avoiding emotions are many and varied:
- Difficulty having safe and healthy relationships
- Increased health problems, or chronic pain
- Increased overall/generalized anxiety
- Poor sleep and low energy
- Inability to experience positive emotions or appreciate positive experiences
- Feeling disconnected from yourself, your body, or the world around you
- Increase in unsafe behaviors (e.g., self-harm)
Consider trying to feel your emotions in safe ways:
- Find a therapist who helps by creating a safe and non-judgmental environment in which to feel safe with your emotions. If you’re not ready for therapy, find a friend or loved one who creates this for you.
- Practice naming the emotions you experience in your day – here’s a list of emotions to help you with the identification.
- Do a brief, 3-5 minute emotional check-in, a few times each day – name your feeling, note what you’re also experiencing in your body and/or what you’re thinking about. Based on this observation, choose one action that will address something you’re observing (e.g., if you’re experiencing nervous energy, go for a brief walk).
- Set aside a particular time each day to open yourself up to your emotional experience; choose a safe and soothing place, limit the timeframe, and follow this with an active or distracting activity (e.g., exercise, seeing a friend, doing household chores, doing a puzzle).
- Practice mindfulness skills to increase your capacity for letting go of emotions and thoughts that are sticky and causing a lot of distress. Here is an example to get you started.
Don’t neglect your emotions – they are part of what make us fundamentally human. You’ll find that connecting with yourself and your emotions will help you feel more connected to others, and actually result in more positive emotional experiences in the long run. It will certainly be worth the investment in tissues.