Feeling Your Feelings + Creating New Feelings

As a culture, we don’t do a very good job of feeling our feelings. We push them aside, “eat our feelings”, exercise to keep from feeling… basically anything to not feel hard emotions.

But, what I hope to encourage you with today is that feelings aren’t bad. And they don’t have to be scary, either. You can feel your feelings, feel the discomfort, even, and be ok.

So, take a deep breath. And let’s talk about feeling your feelings.

I think a lot of us can probably relate with learning something non-productive when it comes to feelings from our childhood. Maybe you came from a family where feelings were just not a thing you were encouraged to talk about or express. Maybe there were so many feelings and a lot of drama around those feelings so feelings are triggering to you in a different way.

Growing up, for me, I always felt like I had to be the strong one in the family. And I associated feelings with being weak. I’ve done a lot of feelings work since then, but I’m still learning all the time how to re-write this belief that feelings don’t equal weakness. Feelings are good and can give us information about ourselves.

When I work with my clients, something that often comes up is emotional eating. Emotional eating is essentially just not feeling your feelings and using food to try and suppress & distract from your emotions. So, to stop emotional eating, a big part of what we do together is practice feeling all of the feelings, the hard, the easy, the fun, the not-so-fun. And, one thing that is always so surprising to them is how much faster the feelings and go by when they don’t try and suppress them and actually feel the emotions.

We know, too, that feelings are 1) information and 2) come from thoughts. So, what this means is that we can choose our thoughts and start to move towards new feelings.

What I’m not saying is to rush through the negative feelings. But, move through them, learn from them, and then feel something different.

IDENTIFY YOUR FEELINGS

One of my favorite tools for feeling my feelings is the Feelings Circle. If you aren’t aware of this amazing tool, I can’t wait to share it with you because it is so helpful when you’re working on sitting in any emotion, but specifically hard emotions.

What this tool does is it helps you identify the specific feeling and emotion you’re experiencing, which is the first step in feeling your feelings.

How you use it is you start from the center and identify how you’re feeling and from there, move outward to get more and more specific with exactly how you’re feeling.

So, I mentioned that identifying your feelings is the first step in feeling your feelings. Here are the next steps for you to do to practice feeling your feelings:

EXAMINE YOUR THOUGHTS

After you’ve acknowledged your exact feeling/feelings, the next step is to examine your thoughts. As I mentioned above, thoughts are what lead to our feelings, so here you look back at what thoughts and beliefs lead you to feel how you’re feeling.

CHOOSE NEW THOUGHTS

Now that you’ve examined your thoughts, you have the option to choose new thoughts to feel how you want to feel. And this, to be clear, isn’t coming from a place of certain feelings being bad and we’re just trying to get rid of them as fast as possible, but rather I want you to see that you are never stuck in negative feelings & emotions. You can acknowledge them and productively feel them to start moving through them.

Let’s do an example that will help you see this in practice…

I’m going to use a story of one of my clients (not using her real name here for privacy) to show you how to feel your feelings.

Sarah kept finding herself overeating at night and felt like emotional eating was the problem. So, we started to explore exactly how she was feeling. She thought back to the last time where she overate and discovered that the exact feeling she was experiencing was stressed & tired. From there, she examined her thoughts around feeling stressed & tired and discovered that she was having thoughts like, “I’m so busy”, “Work is so hard right now”, “I don’t have time for myself”, “I feel guilty about taking time for me”. So, what we did next together on our coaching call was come up with some new thoughts around life feeling busy and full right now. She chose “I choose what’s most important for me”, “I value myself & feeling calm in my life” and “I make time for me”. From there, she came up with actions to implement on these thoughts. So, specifically for Sarah, she wanted to make time to exercise a priority so she created a boundary for herself with work to make time to go for a walk 3 times a week. She also realized that she wanted to pick up reading again for pleasure, so she created an evening routine including reading fiction before she went to bed. And, the coolest thing… she stopped emotional eating out of stress and tiredness when she changed how she was thinking and started acting from a place of self-care and respect.

Amazing right!? We have so much more power over our thoughts than we give ourselves credit. And, feelings don’t have to be scary. When you let yourself feel them and see them as information that’s neutral you can move through them so much faster.

Action step:

Put feeling your feelings to practice and use this 3 step approach to move through hard feelings. Where do you see yourself trying to suppress feeling your feelings? What result has that given you in your life?

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And, if you don’t want to do this work alone and want to get to the root of your relationship with food to feel more calm, confident, & empowered in your life, I’m here to help. Learn more about my signature 1:1 coaching program HERE and schedule your free consult call.