Feeling emotions was sooooooo hard for me! By the time I started this work, I’d repressed my emotions so much that I was basically numb. I was one of the only people at my own wedding who didn’t cry. I felt incredible guilt to see my husband tear up, and I was just a well of emptiness, even though I knew I was really happy that day. Unfortunately, a side effect of repressing the negative emotions is that you don’t get to feel the positive ones. And I didn’t feel anything.
To a large extent, the JournalSpeak itself is now how I process and feel the emotions. But sometimes they were just so strong, and I didn’t know what to do. I started working with a somatic therapist specifically to learn how to feel emotions, and I’ve since read many books on emotions. These are the major things I learned that helped me feel and process the emotions:
1) Naming the emotion: It was so weird how effective this was, but just saying something like, “I’m feeling shame,” or “I feel angry,” or “I feel grief,” was sooooooo effective. I haven’t looked into why this is the
case, but it’s a tip I came across in many different sites and books, and learning to name my emotions was a turning point for me.
It can be a good journal exercise too. Just start the entry with “What am I feeling right now?” Or at any point during the day, if you feel a symptom, ask yourself “What am I feeling right now?” (I got that tip from
Dan Buglio
.)
Even weirder, I might ask my symptom to tell me what I’m feeling! If I’m getting the first spasm of a migraine or a twinge of pelvic pain from endometriosis, I learned to ask that twinge what I was feeling, and the damned thing often
answers (I did have to do JournalSpeak and somatic meditations for a while before that worked). And then the symptom goes away (more on this later).
There are a lot of resources that give lists of emotions, but to start I like this basic list: anger, fear, sadness/grief, joy, pride, shame/guilt.
As I experience and read more about emotions, I’m also beginning to suspect that they’re far more complicated than accepted science suggests. One of the things I’ve realized is that the act of JournalSpeak is essentially “naming” those
more complicated feelings.
For example, on the day I’m writing this, I took my 12-year-old beagle for a walk. He has problems with his back and hind legs, and in a moment of excitement he ran across a grassy space and and his hind leg slipped in a hole he
hadn’t seen. What I “felt” was: Ah!-is-he-injured?-he’s-walking-but-limping-do-we-need-to-go-back?-is-he-hurt?-what-do-I-do?-how-can-I-help?-is-it-better-to-let-him-walk-this-off?-OMG-that-was-so-scary!-what-if-he-got-hurt-for-real?-OMG-is-it-safe-to-keep-walking-him?-he’ll-be-so-disappointed-if-he-can’t-go-for-walks-anymore.
There isn’t a single word or nice category of emotions for the “feelings” I had in response to that episode, and none of them quite fit into a nice category of emotions. One might say I felt fear or anxiety, but mixed with that list
above was also love for my dog, anger at the people who should have known there was a hole, grief that he’s getting old, etc. All of those other feelings would have come out if I were actually doing a JournalSpeak session about that
episode. (Btw, he’s doing okay now.)
So, even if you find yourself at a loss for defining the traditional emotions, allowing yourself to have a full, unfiltered reaction during a JournalSpeak session could be a way of “naming” what you’re feeling.
2) Silently acting out my emotion: I found it surprisingly helpful to close the door to my bedroom or even a bathroom and punch at the air, pretending I was hitting someone I mad at. I would go through the motions
of screaming in rage or in fear, punching at the air, pretending to shove someone back, or shaking and cowering in fear while holding my arms out to protect myself.
I would do this without actually making a sound, so no one outside the room knew what was happening. As you’ll see below, sometimes I made efforts to actually scream out loud, but I found the silent motions to be just as, if not
more helpful than the real screaming.
Early on, the silent air punching was something I’d do when I was mad at someone I was journaling about—I’d imagine them in front of me and hit at them (the air) as hard as I could (later, as you’ll see below, I switched to a real
punching bag, but the air punching and kicking is still helpful when I’m not at home).
I also had an interesting experience on an international trip, where I was incredibly overwhelmed by work and the different cultures and the foreign languages and the uncertainty. I started to feel a migraine coming on while I was
in the shower before a big meeting. So, standing in the shower, I allowed myself to just shake and cower in fear and take all of the protective physical actions my body instinctively wanted to take. I followed that with an ibuprofen
and a 20 min deep relaxation, and the migraine never formed. At no other time in my entire life has an ibuprofen and short relaxation done a damned thing to even minimize a migraine, let alone prevent one, so I credit letting my
body go through the actions of feeling fear and trying to protect itself with releasing that migraine.
3) Screaming for real: In total privacy, I allow myself to scream as loud as I could in fear or to rage out loud, screaming “fuck you” to the imaginary version of the person who had pissed me off or just screaming
at the top of my lungs like a little kid. I live in a suburban neighborhood, so if I’m alone at home, I might do this at home. I also often scream at the top of my lungs in the car.
When I first started screaming out loud, I didn’t find it as helpful as the full but silent bodily reactions described in #2. But over time I found real screaming to be necessary. It’s probably worth trying if there are emotions
you’ve repressed and there are places you can go where you can safely scream as loud as you want. Again, if you don’t have places where you can scream out loud, then you’ll likely get a lot of benefit from going through the motions
silently.
4) Learning to cry: It was so ingrained in me not to cry, that relearning how has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. For a while, I could only cry in therapy, and even then, it was rare. I occasionally cried during my JournalSpeak sessions, but I could always tell it wasn’t enough and I wasn’t getting to the core pain. It was like my body didn’t know how to form and release tears. This one just took a long time working on. I’m better at letting myself cry now, and I’ve had a couple good, cathartic cries that lasted an hour or so. But those took me a year of doing this work, and it’s still something I’m working on, so I don’t have great tips yet. I’ll add more here if I ever get better at this.
5) I bought a punching bag: Anger was another emotion that I really struggled with. Over the years, I’d learned that I should feel empathy instead of anger and that feeling anger never solved anything (I learned this
same lesson for crying). But that doesn’t mean the emotion doesn’t crop up—it just means I repressed it.
I repressed it so well that I genuinely had absolutely no clue I had any anger in me. When I started JournalSpeak, these really strong angry emotions started bubbling away inside of me, and I just didn’t know what to do with it.
I’d read that you just let it pass through you, and it’s like a surge of electricity going through. Sometimes that was the case, but other times, it felt like a spiky ping pong ball bouncing around inside me and triggering a bunch
of energetic springs in my joints that needed to be released.
I needed to do something physical. I sometimes took it out on my poor keyboard, slapping my fingers against the keys as hard I could, but that didn’t seem like a great long-term solution, and it didn’t help for the strongest feelings
of anger. My therapist recommended taking one of those long foam rollers people use for stretching and hitting it against a couch or a bed. But that didn’t help. I also tried things like punching a pillow, but that didn’t help either.
Finally, for less than the cost of a single therapy session, I bought a 75 pound punching bag that could be hung up in the basement (I also bought a pair of gloves/wrap to protect my hands and wrists). When I got really angry, I’d
go downstairs and start punching.
What I found was that I’d rage at the bag with my fists for a bit, but then I’d need to start kicking. It was like the emotion started high in me and then moved down my body. So I’d start punching and then switch to kicking, and
I’d have to do forward, side and back kicks for a while before I really felt better. I always had to get out a lot more kicks than punches, but it also always had to start with the punches. I *needed* the full-body anger experience,
and it went through me top to bottom.
It’s also worth noting that the idea here was to release anger, but not necessarily to punch or kick as hard as I could. I mean, I often did punch or kick as hard as I could, but the goal wasn’t for me to get stronger or better at
punching and kicking. So for me, the lighter bag was fine (and cheaper and easier to manage).
I also want to emphasize that I needed it because I’m basically incapable of expressing my anger. I’m not sure if the punching bag would be as useful for someone who already expresses (or over-expresses) their anger. If you’re also
bad at expressing anger and want to try the punching bag but haven’t had previous training, I recommend looking up some martial arts and kickboxing videos to learn proper technique so that you don’t hurt yourself. I’d done some martial
arts as a kid, but I still found the videos helpful.
If you can’t afford a punching bag or if you don’t have space for one, doing all of this to the air is also still helpful and a good alternative.
6) Identifying and feeling the core emotion: Sometimes I would feel a feeling, but it didn’t help. That usually meant I hadn’t gotten to the core issue. I’ve been hearing about people who feel rage and who perhaps
take their rage out on others, and who don’t feel better after they do things like punch a pillow or take other safe actions to try to let the rage out. I kind of wonder if that means that the rage is masking a deeper feeling they
haven’t acknowledged yet—like grief or shame.
I’m definitely not an expert here, but if you’re feeling your emotions, and it doesn’t help, it might mean that the emotions you’re feeling are actually your body’s way of avoiding the real, core emotion that the body finds even
scarier.
I’ll get into this more in a later post, but this was always the case for me with depression and anxiety. If I felt either of those two things, that meant there was a core emotion or issue that was festering in me that I hadn’t figured
out how to access yet. It turned out that even the anger I had such a hard time feeling was often masking a much deeper emotion. I’m realizing as I type this that I was only able to have the grief-stricken, cathartic crying episodes
I mentioned above after I’d spent some time releasing a lot of anger into the punching bag.
7) Exercise: Exercise is often touted as a way to deal with emotions. Advice you might hear can include things like: Feeling angry? Go to a kickboxing class. Stressed about work? Go for a jog. Etc.
What I found was that, while my nervous system was way too overactive, and while my core issues were still repressed, exercise made me worse. All it did was add extra stress that my body couldn’t handle.
When I finally got through most of my core issues, I suddenly felt the need to start working out. And at that point, exercise was critical for releasing emotional energy. But I had to get through the other work first and get my nervous
system to a calmer state.
8) Feeling emotions does not mean taking them out on others: I’m not an expert yet on feeling or expressing emotions, but I’m 1000% certain that it should never involve hurting others physically or emotionally. I also suspect that if you’re raging out on loved ones or crying in the middle of work meetings, there are probably other emotions and deeper issues, but your nervous system is using these emotional outbursts as a way of hiding from those deeper issues.