Our feelings can be uncomfortable. We do not like to experience feelings like sadness, anger, or anxiety. When we have something happen that causes us to feel uncomfortable, we can react in a couple of different ways. One of the ways we may react might be to get rid of that feeling. This may involve us engaging in unhelpful coping mechanisms that give us a temporary relief from that feeling. Another way we may react might be allowing ourselves to feel those feelings and work through them.
There are a lot of times when we choose to engage in unhelpful coping mechanisms such as avoidance in order to not have to feel our uncomfortable feelings. The problem with this is it makes it hard to understand our feelings. We cannot understand our feelings if we are not sitting in the discomfort of them. Avoidance or unhelpful coping mechanisms guide us away from our uncomfortable emotions. The more we do this the more we train ourselves to believe that we cannot cope with uncomfortable feelings.
When we believe we cannot cope with uncomfortable feelings, we immediately disengage and go towards repetitive unhelpful coping strategies. This causes us to rely on immediate fixes, teaching us that we cannot endure distress or discomfort. This makes it difficult for us to manage our emotions in a healthy way as most of our feelings become overwhelming as a result of our inability to understand them.
The more we feel our feelings, the easier it gets to understand them. Creating space to feel our feelings gives us a place to create understanding and awareness into our own personal experience of different emotions. It provides us with opportunity to attend, label, and validate our feelings which increases clarity as well as our ability to tolerate the distress our emotions might cause us.
When we can understand more about what sensations we are experiencing it helps us gain understanding into what feeling we may have. Understanding what feeling we might be having allows us to label our feelings. Through labelling our feelings we bring clarity to our sensations and can make more sense of the feeling of being overwhelmed. We also are better able to meet our needs when we know what feelings we are experiencing. Labelling our feelings leads to our ability to validate our feelings. When we validate our feelings, we allow ourselves to know that it is okay that we feel the way that we do. This creates less tension because we are accepting instead of trying to get rid of the uncomfortable feelings. When we try to bury emotions, they become amplified causing us more distress instead of just disappearing. All of our feelings present to us important information that communicates to us what they need.
We learn what our feelings need through spending time accepting our feelings and sitting in the discomfort of them. Understanding comes through intentional investigation, not through avoidance. Therefore, in order to make sense of what we are feeling, it is important that we allow ourselves to feel our feelings. The more that we do this, the easier that it gets to continue doing this.
Lokadia
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