What are you feeling? Do you know? Children are known for having lots of feelings. Were you raised to stifle your feelings, or to feel your feelings?
We are born with a full range of emotions. But as we grow up that range doesn’t always stay the same. That range can be diminished. In fact, we can even lose our emotional connection to ourselves so we don’t know what we’re feeling, or no longer feel our feelings at all. This is a great tragedy.
QUESTIONS
So what’s the big deal?
Isn’t it better to have less emotions? Isn’t it better to NOT feel your feelings?
Doesn’t feeling your feelings turn you into an emotional child in an adult body?
ANSWERS
It is true that children are emotionally volatile. We see their feelings through big displays and oftentimes in places that make us feel uncomfortable. However, feelings and emotions are not the problem. It’s what we do (or fail to do) with them, that becomes the problem.
Children are not born with the understanding of what to do with their emotions. All children know is that they feel something and then they react.
But following their reactions come the responses they get from their parents or caregivers. This shapes how they deal with their feelings going forward.
DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER
Emotions are a gift from God that have a function. They serve a specific purpose that can be a strategic resource. Feelings are an internal form of communication. What they’re doing is delivering a message to you.
What you do with message is up to you. If you’ve been in the habit of shutting them down, you have been “shooting the messenger.” Doing this robs you of their message, reduces your emotional range, and brings harm into your life.
Don’t shoot the messenger. There’s a better way.
DO THIS INSTEAD
Instead of shutting down your feelings you can learn how to skillfully respond. Doing this is developing something called emotional intelligence. It is done by engaging your emotions with intention and integrating thinking with the feelings. This skill is powerful.
Children are not born with this skill and are unable to develop it fully as a child. A child needs to be taught how to feel their feelings and process them, as well as mature in their brain. A parent with emotional intelligence that teaches their child EI not only serves the child they serve the world at large.
An emotionally intelligent person is powerful.
THINGS GO WRONG
Without emotional intelligence as children grow up they learn to limit or shut off emotions. There are three ways this happens:
Trauma does its damage quickly. EN does its damage slowly. Combining the two becomes a perfect storm.
Without help, the child becomes an adult with a limited emotional range, lack of emotional awareness, or loses touch with their emotions all together.
When things go wrong it robs you of a thriving life.
KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DEALING WITH
You’re fortunate if you were raised to be emotionally intelligent. The term didn’t become popular until around 1990.
Chances are that if you’ve made it this far reading that you have trouble feeling your feelings in some way. See if you relate to these:
- Limited emotional range. Consider the range as 1 to 10. The full range goes from one extreme, bliss (10) to the other extreme, despair (1). The emotional range gets limited by stifling the emotional extremes. This might sound like wisdom but it robs a person of a thriving life.
- Lack of emotional awareness. Being emotionally aware is knowing how you feel. It’s being able to put words to your feelings and express them.
- Losing touch with your emotions completely. This takes lack of emotional awareness to the deeper level. When you lose touch with your emotions completely you’ve shut them off. This is extremely harmful to your health.
No matter what you’re dealing with there’s hope.
An emotionally intelligent person is powerful. Click To TweetWHAT YOU CAN DO
If you’ve struggled with feeling your feelings, or shutting them off it’s important to internalize some truths.
- Your feelings are not bad. They are not wrong. They are not terrible. Or any other negative thing you may have connected to them. They just are. They need listened to, and processed resulting in an optimal decision of what to do about it.
- You are not what you feel. As a child we believe we are what we feel. This is normal child developmental thinking. But as an adult we can separate our feelings from our identity. For example, instead of saying you are bad, say you are feeling bad. You are greater than what you’re feeling.
- Feelings aren’t permanent. They don’t embody who you are. Reacting to them instead of listening to them can have negative results.
To become more emotionally aware requires paying attention to how you feel.
This doesn’t mean being self-focused all the time. It does mean taking a few minutes to pause and ask yourself how you feel and give it a name.
What if you don’t know what to call how you feel? Become a student of emotions, learn names of feelings. I have had to do this myself and have a list I’ll share with you.
Naming your feelings reduces anxiety. I have a whole story about how this helped me.*
WHAT NOW
Grab the tools you need:
- Journal to increase emotional awareness
- List of names of feelings
- *The story where I named my feelings: A Bird Named Payn
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THANK YOU for this! So helpful and encouraging.
I’m very happy to hear that. Thank you for taking the time to tell me.