Are You a Feelings Feeler or Stuffer?

Do you allow yourself to feel your feelings or do you stuff them down and try to ignore them?  With negative feelings, the more we resist them, the worse they tend to get, and if you’re not allowing yourself to feel and process, there’s a good chance you feel bad a lot longer than is necessary (and potentially expressing yourself in unhealthy ways).  

Feelings are messengers, they aren’t just random (although some are habitual), so learning to check in to see what they’re trying to tell you and processing them appropriately will not only help you understand yourself so much more, but work through not-so-pleasant emotions and feelings faster and in healthier ways. 

By the time you have a feeling about something, you’ve already had a thought, which created an emotion, which then formed the feeling. So, it’s not so simple as “oh feelings come and go” – there’s a bit more to it. If you want to understand your emotions, you must start paying attention to your thoughts.

If you want to become more emotionally regulated, it’s important that you learn how to properly identify and process, especially if you’re a stuffer and you tend to explode after you can no longer hold it all in! It’s so normal to not know how to identify or process feelings or emotions, but it’s so important to learn.  Leaving them repressed or keeping you reactive or struggling is obviously not healthy or helpful.  And if you’ve read this far, you can’t make the excuse that you just didn’t know how😉. 

Tips for Managing Your Emotions Rather Than Suppressing Them

• Acknowledge them.  This simply means noticing and identifying them, which is often all it takes for them to begin to subside.

• Accept them.  You don’t have to like what you’re experiencing, but accepting it helps you to stop resisting.  Accepting that you’re human and feeling human emotions can take away any of the shame or self-doubt you experience on top of the uncomfortable emotion.

• Embodiment.  Focusing on your breath or where you feel the emotions in your body helps take the focus off the feeling and regulate your nervous system and any physical sensations you’re experiencing. 

• Let them out.  In a healthy way, of course.  If they don’t dissipate with the steps above, you need to find a good way to let them out, spend more time understanding what they’re telling you, or do more work on your thoughts.

Let’s do some coaching to go deeper on identifying your thought patterns, the emotions and feelings you experience, and learning new ways of understanding and processing them!

Info@TheRebelMystic.com