Recently, I’ve begun feeling my emotions in my body rather than intellectualizing them. The relief I felt from connecting to my emotional body was immediate and I couldn’t help but wonder how different life would be if I wasn’t forbidden from feeling.
I grew up as the crybaby of my family. I was too dramatic and my feelings were never valid. I was never worth an apology. So I shut down. I weaponized my own brain to learn to speak over the feelings I was taught were useless. It worked for the most part until I got the urge to cry. Sometimes I knew why I was crying, but often the only thing I really knew was that I didn’t want to be alive.
When I started therapy at nineteen, I opened up for the first time. I half expected her to tell me the issue was me and that I needed to work on not being so dramatic because my family loved me. But she didn’t say that. For the first time in my life, someone told me that the way I grew up wasn’t okay. A weight lifted off my shoulders and I felt seen. Finally being heard in that moment was my first real victory in the void I was accustomed to.
Since then, I’ve been working on allowing myself to feel as honestly as I did when I was a toddler. I’ve gone through many phases in this healing process. I suppose all a step closer to the truth so that I could gradually rebuild the safety and trust with myself that I would need to truly take care of my emotions. I learned how to quiet my mind so that I had space to acknowledge my emotions. But I started noticing that every emotion felt overwhelming.
I noticed it clearest every time I felt excited. I would feel so much pure joy that I would get overstimulated and trigger anxiety (I also discovered most of my anxiety was actually suppressed anger). I had no idea how to process happiness or any emotion for that matter.
I started working on digesting emotions in ways that benefit the female nervous system (which is INCREDIBLY different than the male nervous system) and I had a lot of breakthroughs that helped me understand how my childhood impacted me deeper than I could’ve ever imagined. However, the most beneficial thing for me from the practices was that I was allowed to feel without needing to know what I was feeling or trying to pry into it.
Sometimes understanding would come to me naturally as I simply allowed the feeling to exist. Other times, the feeling would go away without explaining where it came from. In either case, I was so proud that I had created a safe space for my emotions again. Unfortunately, it didn’t ease the overwhelming force I felt with each new emotion, but I kept affirming that it’s safe for me to feel since I didn’t know what else to do.
While scrolling on TikTok I came across a therapist who was talking about people who intellectualize their emotions and she said that it’s important to feel where the emotion is in your body and pay attention to it. The next time I felt that overwhelming joy, I took a moment to feel where it was in my body. Instantly, that joy was no longer overwhelming, but peaceful. The feeling was all over my body, like I was floating in the clouds or in pleasant waters. There was nothing to be afraid of. I had processed true happiness for the first time.
As I continue with this practice, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that this is what guardians are supposed to teach their children. How to feel healthy emotions without feeling so overwhelmed you spiral into a tantrum/mental breakdown. Who could I have been if I was taught to focus on the way sadness twists my innards and shortens my breath? If I had truly felt how real my feelings were to my body, would I have been gaslit into believing those emotions didn’t matter? Would emotional stability have allowed me to skip some painful lessons?
These are all questions I don’t need the answers to. I’m happy to be who I am and where I am today. It’s not ideal that I may have needed to lie to myself in order to survive my childhood, but being able to be honest with myself now is more than I could’ve ever asked for back then.
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