How to feel feelings: An ACT-perspective
For a long time, I felt like I couldn’t escape my feelings; so, when someone said, “you have to feel your feelings” or “learn to sit with the discomfort,” I couldn’t understand what I was missing. I thought I was in touch with my feelings. But having emotions is different from feeling your emotions. Whether you’re someone who is in a constant whirlwind of emotions or you think you’re in an emotional draught, learning to feel your feelings can deepen your self-understanding and lead to more meaningful decisions.
Emotions vs. Feelings.
Although I often use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ interchangeably, I only recently started looking into how they differ. An emotion (n.) is a physiological experience that gives you information about the world and feeling (v.) is your conscious awareness of the emotion (1). To feel an emotion is to know you have an emotion (1). The more we practice feeling our emotions, the better we become at addressing them before they blow up and demand our attention in our most dysregulated state. At that point, we are facing “BIG feelings.” Big feelings can sometimes lead to an intense, overpowering experience that calls us to reflexively act in order to protect our most vulnerable needs and instincts.
We were taught to be afraid of our emotions.
For a long time, I told myself, “I’m too emotional. I have to think more logically.” It never occurred to me that I didn’t know how to feel my feelings. Karla McLaren describes, “this disconnect between emotions and feelings stems from the constant, repetitive, and relentlessly anti-emotion training we get, where emotions are allegedly the opposite of rationality (1). We’ve conflated emotional impulsivity with emotional unawareness. It’s led us astray from feeling – teaching us to give our emotions the cold shoulder.
Reasons we avoid our emotions:
We don’t know what to do with our emotions.
We were taught if we “sit” with an emotion, we’re “dwelling” on it.
We’re worried about looking “weak” or “not being in control.”
We have low distress tolerance.
Ultimately, we get “caught up in our feelings about a feeling” due to our biases, cultural beliefs, and past experiences (3).
Emotions are the language of our body.
Since emotions serve as information, learning how to notice and decode our emotions can help us:
Take care of ourselves better
Make more meaningful decisions
Connect and bond with others
Communicate more effectively
Direct us toward our values
Inform us of our boundaries
Guide to help you feel your emotions:
1. Name the emotion.
I feel angry.
I notice fear.
I hold sadness.
2. Notice its sensation.
Where do you feel grief? In my shoulders? In my chest? In my gut?
What does this loneliness feel like? Cold? Heavy? Tight?
What does this humiliation look like? Small? Young? Slouched?
3. Listen to the feeling.
What story does it want to tell me?
What does it need?
What’s important to it?
4. Use Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) processes (listed below) to support your practice of feeling your feelings.
ACT Processes for Feeling Feelings.
Experiential Acceptance
Acceptance of emotions is the willingness to experience both pleasurable and painful ones, allowing them to come and go. This is in contrast to trying to remove, avoid, or change emotions. For instance, if you notice feeling nervous before an interview, you don’t have to stop feeling nervous in order to go through with the interview or to do well. You could just get in your own way by trying to fight your emotions.
Emotions trigger reflexive action to meet immediate goals and avoid or satisfy the feeling in the moment (4):
Preparing for an interview → Notices nervousness → Judges emotion → Cancels interview → Nervousness decreases → Avoidance reinforces → Goal is unmet
They are not designed to move you toward your longer-term goals (i.e. getting a better paying job). Sitting with the discomfort of your feelings can help keep you aligned with your long-term goals, instead of pushing you away from what you want:
Preparing for an interview → Notices nervousness → Makes space for feeling → Nervousness may or may not decrease → Goes on interview regardless → Goal is met
Contacting the Present Moment
Contacting the present moment can help us slow down and connect to sensory experiences. This can be especially helpful if you find yourself struggling to gain awareness of your emotional world. Some exercises include:
Notice x – using your five senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing)
Mindfulness of the breath – inhale cool air, exhale warm air
Body scan – noticing your body part by part
Contacting the present moment can also help orient us to what’s in our immediate control, unhook from past experiences, and let go of worries about the future.
Cognitive Defusion for Emotions
Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings. Feelyourfeelings.Feelyourfeelings.Feelyourfeelings.
I’m looking at the words above thinking, “Is that really how you spell feel? It looks weird.” Words resembling ‘feel’ begin to flood my mind, “Peel. Eel. Seal. Meal. Deal.” Moments ago, I almost spelled ‘spell’ as “speel.” As I read the phrase “feel your feelings” over and over again, it begins to all jumble together. It all becomes nonsensical, losing its meaning.
What if we could approach intense, overwhelming feelings similarly?
Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage.Rage…Sage…Page…Wage…Range…Strange…Change.
Cognitive defusion is a practice of noticing your thoughts as a process rather than getting caught on the content. Defusion can also be applied to emotions, sensations, and experiences to help you unhook from the stuckness of unworkable internal experiences. As we notice above, our thoughts and feelings exist only to the extent that we assign meaning to them. Therefore, we can let go of the struggle with our internal experiences by observing emotions simply as emotions rather than acting through their lens or relating to them as objective truths or trying to challenge them or assigning blame to their presence.
Self-as-Context
Self-as-context is the process of “observing the self” that holds thoughts, feelings, and sensations. As such, you are not your anxiety; you are experiencing the sensation of anxiety. Your emotions do not define you.
Values
Values clarification is the process of identifying what’s most important to us in our lives. Understanding your values can help you address emotions in a meaningful way. Emotional unawareness, which sometimes presents as experiential avoidance, can lead us away from our values. While emotional awareness can allow us to make choices toward our values.
Committed Action
‘Committed action’ is where it all comes together. This is where we align with our values while potentially experiencing discomfort. In ACT, we believe pain is the flip side of our values. Maybe you’ve heard, “you care where you hurt, and you hurt where you care” before. Our ability to “feel our feelings” or “sit with our discomfort” comes in handy when we’re taking action toward our values.
References
https://karlamclaren.com/is-it-a-feeling-or-is-it-an-emotion-revisited/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201409/overcoming-your-fear-feelings
https://www.motivationalinterviewing.org/sites/default/files/valuescardsort_0.pdf
https://www.kimegel.com/blog/2022/3/22/how-to-feel-your-emotions-if-you-dont-know-how