The Importance of Feeling Our Feelings

It’s a curious fact of our psychology that some of our greatest upsets come from not allowing ourselves to register how upset we are. Beneath states of anxiety and depression, irritability and moodiness, there often lie sufferings we haven’t properly looked at – and therefore haven’t attended to with necessary care – because they don’t fit our ideas of what properly deserves our time and sympathy. We get into serious psychological trouble by minimising the seriousness of our troubles. Much of learning how to process your emotions begins with recognising that even subtle pain deserves attention.

We know in broad brushstrokes that we should allow pain to resonate. If someone close to us has died, we know we should take time off to weep; if we have been sacked, we know we need to go through feelings of humiliation and bewilderment. And we appreciate that if we fail to do this, our unprocessed pain may show up as insomnia or indigestion, facial tics or lower back pain, rage or numbness.

The problem is that the implicit scorecard of pain we operate with – the list of what issues deserve what kind of attention – is riddled with inaccuracies and omissions. We may have good enough entries for the so-called ‘big’ things, like deaths and divorces. But we tend to gravely minimise the impact of a huge number of less well-heralded, less openly respectable kinds of suffering.

Small Incidents, Deep Wounds

For example, the thought that a short online exchange with a client – which takes a somewhat nasty and sinister turn – might ruin a whole day sounds, at first glance, daft. We’re not the sort of people who’d get upset by this kind of nonsense; we take things like this in our stride. Or what possible harm could come from a short visit to our mother, with whom we have a notoriously poor relationship? Or why would a quick look at an ex’s social media matter? We’re on top of these problems. We’ll be able to get on with our lives untouched.

Except we can’t. There has been a blow inside; something has started to bleed. Denying this only compounds the difficulties. We may try to move on, but – as is always the case in psychological life – the unattended sorrow starts to hold us hostage. We can’t sleep. We aren’t able to work. We get uncontrollably angry with another driver.

There is no good option but to honour our full sensitivity. In the wake of certain quasi-invisible blows, we need to pause our normal activities and raise a white flag. We need to cry in bed for a little while, call our best friend to complain, or write another entry in our journal. We have to tell ourselves: this hurt, this was awful, and we have every right to wince.

We are – whatever we might wish – deeply impacted by a bewildering range of so-called small things. We are – however inconvenient it is – profoundly shaken by the email that still hasn’t arrived, by the off-hand way in which the coffee date ended, by the unfriendly exchange with a neighbour, by the tetchy encounter with a parent.

How to Process Your Emotions

We should never compound our sufferings by pretending they don’t exist. We should allow ourselves to feel every pain that has befallen us to the full extent that it merits. Learning how to process your emotions means acknowledging sensitivity without excessive bravery and with much imagination, in the name of a life that is more vulnerable, but also far less distorted, kinder and more creative.