I am at a watershed moment in my life. I am moving from intellectualising everything to feeling it. It’s painful, rewarding, and beautiful. We must gently reunite with the feelings our inner children had to stuff down and try to bury because it hurt so much when we were young. Our inner parent allows our inner child to be felt, heard, seen, grieved, and resolved. This restores our ability to feel and express our feelings. It’s the key to healing. It’s taking a very gentle sledgehammer to the concrete bunker around our hearts that was built to survive the suffocating onslaught of our traumatic childhoods.
Feeling is healing
Identifying and feeling our feelings is a vital part of healing. Where there is loss, there will be tears and anger. Feelings are cues and signals to tell you what you need and how you need to change your thinking. Feelings are ‘comments’ on the quality of your deep inner thinking. It is the repression or distorted expression of emotions that makes people mentally ill.
The repression or distorted expression of our feelings began early. The characteristics common in dysfunctional homes don't meet emotional needs. Dysfunctional homes are cold, undermining, lacking in empathy, blaming, criticising, drama-filled, destructive, dismissive, mocking, smothering, and inappropriate. We needed empathy, understanding, nurturing, appreciation, acceptance, affection, and love. And we didn’t get it. The emotional abandonment common in dysfunctional homes leads to shame, which the inner child carries today as excess baggage. Accessing and thawing our inner child's frozen feelings requires gentleness, love, and patience.
While someone's emotional unavailability today can trigger our inner child's fear of abandonment, their painful feelings stem more from the past. If it’s hysterical it’s historical. A loving parent can remind our inner child that they are not in the same situation. People will be emotionally unavailable at times in our adult lives. Our inner child has a loving parent now, and that parent is you, and they need help understanding they're not being abandoned in these situations.
Giving your Self permission to feel
So then, how do we “feel” our emotions and stop repressing them or expressing them in distorted ways? How do we become more emotionally available to our inner children? We can give our inner children permission to break the “Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel” rule. We can tell them it's OK to have your own feelings. Helping them distinguish their feelings from another person’s feelings helps us be more grounded and responsible for ourselves. Similarly, we can teach them it's OK for people to have their own feelings.
Building a feelings vocabulary
Dysfunctional homes, as well as many cultures, rarely focus on feelings. Instead we learn to focus on thoughts instead. Do you have a tendency to over-intellectualise instead of feeling? It is no wonder that feelings might be confusing or hard to name for some of us. Some of us saw caregivers rage but then deny their anger. Others watched parents or relatives use feeling words in ways that did not match the definition of the words. These inconsistencies made identifying feelings difficult and this persists as adults.
When our needs are met, we tend to experience pleasant emotions such as peaceful, playful, and gratitude. As we fear our feelings more often, nuances get clearer. When our needs are not met, we tend to experience unpleasant emotions, such as sadness, resentment, anger.
Distinguishing judgements from feelings
As we begin to speak about our feelings more, we might think we're expressing a feeling when we're actually sharing a judgement or interpretation. This can happen easily because the expression “I feel” is not always followed by an emotion. For example, we might say, “I feel ignored”, which is our judgement about someone's behaviour. We're saying someone is excluding us. It would be more accurate to say “I think you're ignoring me”, which is different than saying “I feel sad because you haven't responded to a message I sent three days ago”. When we express judgements to others it can sound like blame and put them on the defensive, they are then less likely to want to listen. No-one likes blame.
Judgements and stories reinforce our tendency to live life from the viewpoint of victims and distract us from tending to our inner family members. We get trapped in the role of ‘reactor’ versus ‘actor’ when we focus on what we think others are doing to us rather than on what is happening inside us. Blaming other people prevents us from taking constructive action and from growing. While another person's behaviour can trigger our emotional response, our feelings come from our needs. Plus, our judgement might not be true, and we missed the opportunity to better understand what happened. Perhaps the person feels overwhelmed with a personal issue and hasn't had a chance to respond to us. This applies to in person interactions, as well as calls, texts, and emails.
To begin translating judgements into feelings recall a time when someone seemed to be ignoring you. Tune into your body. You might notice anger, frustration, fear; perhaps you feel a tightness in your chest. Next, pay attention to the words you use to express your feelings. If they suggest that someone is doing something to you and imply blame, they are most likely judgements, not feelings. Statements beginning with “I feel that…” or “I feel they…” tend to be judgements not feelings. It takes some practise to recognise our judgements and translate them into feelings, but doing so moves us into the solution. When parts of us gets triggered, we can use any judgements that arise as signposts to reach our underlying feelings. We can slow down to do a reparenting check in, do some journaling, or take a mini-mindfulness break and meditate. If we're having trouble connecting to our feelings, we can reach out to a fellow traveller or Enlightened Witness. The chart below shows some common judgements translated into feelings and needs.
Common judgements translated into feelings and needs
Emotional pain needs and deserves to be felt and acknowledged, not solved. If we don't feel our emotions when they occur, they will keep coming back until we feel them. By feeling our emotions when they happen, we can avoid acting them out in ways that lead us to feel shame afterward. Learning where our feelings are located in our bodies can help us feel our feelings rather than think about them. To begin to identify how feelings affect you physically, notice where in your body you feel them when they arise. Get curious and notice their temperature, how they move, their shape, and how they change. Doing so can help you identify and differentiate the emotions you feel.
With practice feelings become more fluid
Young children from healthy homes are given space to feel their feelings. They can go from tears to curiosity to joy in seconds. Feelings can return to this more fluid nature, no matter our age. It will require us to pause, identify, and be with what our inner children are feeling. This becomes easier the more we practise. Mindfulness can help us remember to pause and check in. Our critical parent and inner teenager might react when we become more aware of our feelings and try to keep our inner child's vulnerable feelings out of reach. However, our loving parent’s patience and love helps our inner family members trust that it's possible, safe, and healing to feel again.
Feeling your feelings with trusted others
Allowing ourselves to feel our emotions in the presence of an attuned person can make our feelings more bearable. It's what we needed as children. Yet we might feel uncomfortable expressing certain feelings in another's presence. We learned how not to feel in a social context in our families, so it makes sense that learning to feel in new ways today might need to happen in a social context too. Feeling our feelings in the presence of a fellow traveller, Enlightened Witness, or therapist can make the process easier. Another person's presence and reflective listening can help us stay focused and clear. We can learn to work through feelings with others rather than sit in them alone.
When we begin to feel our feelings and experience compassion from others we might feel grief about having carried our pain alone. Realising how long we might have been isolated with our feelings is one way we measure our loss. When we see this it's important to be gentle with ourselves and know it is part of the journey to a fuller life. As we begin to feel more fully and deeply, others can help us learn to celebrate this blossoming of ourselves. Recognising our own successes and where we no longer act in dysfunctional ways is an important loving parent task.
Dr Gabor Maté says that healing doesn't occur until we are heard. So, voicing your feelings to compassionate others or an Enlightened Witness is a crucuial phase of our healing and development. This does require courage, and it's why I have set up my vulnerability group 'VOICE for men' where we share our feelings in a compassionate safe space. It is very cathartic and healing. It's time to pull the cork on those feelings and let your voice be heard.
Connecting to your needs
As with feelings, we often learn from our dysfunctional families to ignore, downplay, or feel ashamed about our needs. This leaves us without the skills or vocabulary to talk about them. If our caregivers shamed us for expressing, or having needs, this might have led us to deny them for fear of being too needy. However there's a different big difference between having needs and being needy. Everyone has needs; They identify what we require to be healthy, safe, and fulfilled. Responding to our own needs in healthy ways is an important part of reparenting, recovery, and healing in general. It requires time and practice, but eventually we become skilled in doing so. All human beings share core needs. For example, all human humans have a need for sustenance, safety, and love. Everything we do is an attempt to meet a conscious or unconscious need. Needs point us towards what will make our lives happier and healthier and help us find strategies to fulfil them. When our needs are met, we tend to have pleasant feelings. Unmet needs tend to trigger unpleasant feelings.
Learning that our feelings come from our needs can help us become ‘actors’ who find ways to meet our needs rather than ‘reactors’ who judge and blame ourselves and others when our needs aren't met. Realising that others can trigger our feelings but that they can't make us feel a certain way can be a very empowering revelation. We can identify what need of ours is met or unmet in a situation, rather than attribute the cause of our feelings to others. If we value our needs, it's more likely others will too. The inner child might not know or trust that it's OK to have wants and needs. They might feel uncomfortable requesting what they need or even acknowledging a need. We need to learn to ask for what we want. This is why becoming our own loving parent is so crucial. We can help the inner children let go of false beliefs such as “It's weak to have needs” or “It's selfish to ask for what you need”. Our loving parent can help the inner child cope with their feelings and tell them “Your needs matter, I will find healthy ways to meet your needs.” When the inner child has self-worth, honouring our needs, making requests, and not taking someone’s “no” personally becomes easier. Inner children who don’t have self-worth struggle with a “no”. Ultimately, the more we reparent the more we trust that it's OK to stand up for our needs and set boundaries.
These are the emotions that I have covered for you in my series on emotions (click on the link to be taken to them):
Click here for my article on 'Emotions':
Click here for my article on 'The History of Emotions':
Click here for my article on 'Emotional Emaciation and Emancipation':
Click here for my article on 'Halting the Flight From Fully Feeling':
Namaste.
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Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.