“And How Does That Make You Feel?”

Ahh, the classic therapy question “how does that make you feel?” You may roll your eyes when you hear this or recall scenes from movies or shows of a therapist repeating this question incessantly. While we can make all the jokes we want, there is a reason it is one of the most commonly asked questions.

We can be pretty disconnected from our emotions; they take a backseat to let responsibility, obligation, or productivity. We are taught to power through, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, or “save it,” as if emotions can just be silenced or ignored. We invalidate sadness or disappointment. We dismiss hurt and insecurity. We avoid the inconvenience of annoyance or guilt. We disapprove of apathy and jealousy. We ignore judgment or hesitation. We scoff at optimism and confidence.

Listening to our emotions is vital. Emotions send us important messages about our needs. But instead of observing how we feel, we tend to think about what a situation demands from us. So, rather than feeling, we react. However, if we truly take the time to check in with our emotions, we can thoughtfully respond, rather than compulsively react. When we are attuned to how we feel, we enhance our present moment. When we welcome feeling and make peace with our emotions, we increase our awareness and introspection.

So what does being out-of-touch with our emotions actually mean? What are the risks of not being in touch with our emotions? Why should you even care?

When we don’t feel or attend to our emotions, we bottle them up. Like shaking a soda bottle, the carbonation builds up, and once there is a small pressure release, it all comes out uncontrollably. You may be thinking, “well, if I just keep it all bottled up, nothing happens.” Sure. But we are not as simple as a soda bottle, and we can’t assume that we can keep our emotions closed off. One way or another, something in life will make us feel. Maybe you lose someone in your life, it unlocks the floodgates, and you find yourself coping with difficult emotions you had never acknowledged. Maybe you go through a breakup or a big life transition and find yourself trying to stay afloat amid disappointment, fear, or even shame. Allowing yourself to feel your emotions in healthy doses keeps you from being faced with an immense amount of unprocessed feelings that overwhelm your faculties.

When we are not in tune with our emotions, we are not in tune with others’ emotions either. This can keep us perpetually disconnected. We may have surface-level interactions with others, but we do not know how to dive into the depths of emotion. To connect with someone else’s deep emotions, you must know how to connect with your own. We must have and feel our emotions to have and feel empathy for others’ emotions. Many people have an easy time showing up for the good moments, but shy away when things get hard. In reality, truly deep and lasting connections require that we embrace the good and the bad moments, the best and the worst emotions. Connecting with your own emotions allows you to connect with others. You can sit with them in the midst of depression or anxiety, you can guide them through heartache and uncertainty, and you can relate with them on your shared experiences of challenge and growth. If you are unavailable to your emotions, you will be unavailable to those in your life. So, embrace those emotions and see how it deepens the connection in your relationships.

Feeling our emotions in the moment allows us to process our experiences in real time, rather than having to revisit them years later and try to retrospectively feel our way through those things. I understand we do not always have the time to take a break in the middle of an experience and just feel, but we usually can take a couple of seconds to check in with our body, feel the tension or heaviness, identify the emotion we are feeling, and decide how that influences our next move. The more we do this, the better we can incorporate the act of feeling into each moment without it derailing the task at hand.

You may be asking yourself, “Okay, you’ve convinced me, now how do I do that?”

The first step is naming your emotion. A lot of understanding our feelings is having the vocabulary to identify how we feel. We know through things like play therapy and body language that naming the emotion is not the only way to feel it. However, if you find yourself analyzing or reacting rather than feeling, vocabulary is a good place to start. Look up an image of a feelings wheel or a list of emotion words. Look up definitions, increase your awareness, and knowledge of the vast emotions that exist. We are not limited to madness, sadness, and happiness. We can learn what isolation feels like in our bodies. We can understand the warning signs that we are starting to withdraw. We can bask in the warm sensation of creativity or awe. You are experiencing so much more than you may realize. Get in touch with those emotions to enhance your life experience.

Next step, breathe into the feeling. Shut your eyes, check in with your body. When we don’t feel our emotions, they remain squished in the crevices of our mind, suffocating and gasping for air, unable to be processed or felt, and there it remains until they are given the space they need to just be. Our emotions, fortunately or unfortunately, demand to be felt. So close your eyes, place your hands on your stomach, or heart, or wrap them around you like a loose hug. Take a deep breath in and out, just focusing on the emotion that you are making room for. Providing this space will let the emotions work their way through our systems. At times, this might be more than a breath; it may mean taking a moment for yourself to cry out the overwhelm, or a 5-minute walk to process the anxiety and regulate your nervous system. And when those happy emotions come around, don’t hesitate to let yourself dance with joy.

The biggest key to identifying our emotions and feeling them is remaining in the present moment focus. You create distance between you and your emotions when you find yourself focusing more on the future or the past than on the present moment. So be present. Let yourself observe your surroundings. Let yourself appreciate all the sensations in your body. Let the thoughts flow without holding too tightly to any of them. Name whatever emotion you are feeling, and breathe into it.