How Do You Feel?

Do you struggle to express your feelings? 🤔

If so, here are some reasons why:

🚫 The British culture prides itself in maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’😐. We like to ‘grin and bear it’ and ‘keep calm and carry on’. Most of us are not taught HOW to express our feelings so don’t have the vocabulary. Many of us were taught NOT to.

🚫 We prioritise what we THINK 💭 over how we feel. We’re taught that feelings aren’t productive and there isn’t really a place for them, so we get used to shutting them down and ignoring them.

🚫 Expressing our feelings can make us feel VULNERABLE 😨. We worry what others might think, or how they might respond. We’re afraid of being rejected by people who won’t understand how we feel or who will give us a hard time about it.

🚫 We deny having feelings like anger and fear as they are painful and threaten our sense of CONTROL 😵.

❗❗❗ HOWEVER, SUPPRESSING OUR FEELINGS DOES NOT WORK ❗❗❗

This is because:

✔️ EMOTIONS ARE SUPER-FAST 💨. They are the body’s physical response to our environment. It takes about 0.1 seconds for our brain to react emotionally and about 0.6 seconds for our thinking brain, our cortex, to register this reaction as a feeling – the brain’s interpretation of the emotion. By the time we decide that it’s better not to feel angry/sad/scared/hurt/shame, our face has been expressing it for 0.5 seconds. Too late; the emotional signal has been sent and it only takes 0.1 seconds for someone else to judge our facial expression. We’ve been found out! Denying our feelings at this stage makes it hard for the other person to trust us.

✔️ WHAT WE RESIST PERSISTS. Suppressing unwanted emotions doesn’t calm us down, lower the emotional charge around a conversation, or bypass a fight. This is because they are super-fast 👆, so we have to work very hard to shut them down once they’re up and running. Trying to do this just makes us even more agitated and tense 😬.

✔️ EMOTIONS ARE PHYSICAL ENERGY. When we experience unwanted emotions and we supress them, the energy DOES NOT GO AWAY❗It remains inside us until it is released. We often release it in other ways including difficulty sleeping, anxiety, depression, anger outbursts, headaches, muscle pain, back pain, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, indigestion, skin rashes, stomach ulcers and impotence.

SO, WHAT’S THE SOLUTION? 🙋

❣️❣️ It’s simple. All we have to do is NAME OUR FEELINGS ❣️❣️

✨ When we name our feelings, we feel more grounded and more in control☯️. And we give the other person the chance to respond and to empathise💞.

✨ The first step in expressing how we feel is by identifying the feeling(s). Choose one or more from these 8 feelings words:
        
Happy 😊  
Sad ☹️  
Angry 😠  
Fear 😨  
Peaceful 😌
Powerful 😎  
Hurt😔  
Shame 😳

✨ Now you know how you feel and can express it! 🤗.

The only thing that truly stops us expressing how we feel is SHAME 😳.