Feeling emotional pain is difficult and uncomfortable. Nobody wants to feel this. Over the course of most people’s lives they adapt to these feelings by unconsciously and consciously pushing their emotions away. The downside of this avoidance of feeling is the accumulation of unresolved emotions. These feeling states build up in our cellular tissues and they contribute to the anxiety and depression we face during our lives. How can we find new ways to engage our emotional pain?

Most people are not encouraged throughout their childhood to feel their feelings. Instead they are often shamed for what they are feeling, resulting in burgeoning emotional pain. Parents will say, “stop crying,” or “you don’t have anything to be upset about.” As a child who is trying to maintain connection with their parents they will do the most natural thing: shut down their emotional experience. Over several years of this, children become more and more numb to what is happening inside of them.

Most often people will tense their body when emotions start to emerge. This tension is a way of keeping emotional pain from coming up. At first this may be conscious but eventually becomes so habituated that an adult, who started doing this as a child, is now oblivious to how they suppress their emotions.

The most common way that people stay away from the discomfort inside is to distract themselves. Their mind will come in with thoughts as they start to notice some painful emotion. I also notice many clients laughing when I direct their attention inside. Smiling and laughter are another way to avoid discomfort. When we smile it keeps us from fully touching into the pain of an emotion.

Emotions are not something we experience in our thoughts. Emotions are energetic sensations that are attempting to tell us something important. To be with an emotion means to feel it in our bodies and then make meaning of the sensational experience. For example, anger is often a fight response to some kind of injustice or threat. Clients often describe anger as a tension in their arms and jaw. They also notice a focusing of attention when they are angry. This makes sense if what our nervous system wants is to defend from an attack or to right some wrong. Energy is sent to our arms in order to prepare them for throwing a punch or blocking an attack.

Processing emotions is allowing the emotions to signal to our conscious awareness something important. When we stay with the sensations and thoughts for a period of time the emotional experience will usually end and the feeling state will be done. Afterwards, people often feel relief and a sense of unburdening.

Having emotions is that we allow the emotion to come through us and to be fully experienced. We notice the sensation, we can name the emotion and we allow things to move through our bodies. At the end of having an emotion people often feel relief.

For many people, emotions are the thing they try to avoid, so they can make reasoned decisions that don’t include the unnecessary vicissitudes of our emotional states. This belief appears to be quite common in American culture. As a result of this point of view, emotions are removed from the equation of our experience. Fortunately, this is impossible. As much as we want to control our emotions, they are instant responses to stimulus in the environment. We can try not to notice the emotion, but we cannot stop the emotion from happening.

The challenge of unresolved emotions and emotional pain is that they keep impacting us even after the event the stimulated the emotion is long over. The most obvious unresolved emotion is that of a traumatic event that hasn’t worked through in the person’s experience. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the way in which a person is continually being plagued by the implicit and explicit memory of a traumatic event. This can lead to intrusive thoughts of the event (explicit memory) or bodily pain, anxiety or depression (implicit memory). You can imagine a war veteran who, now thirty years removed from the war, is still uncomfortable with the sounds of helicopters over his head. The memory the helicopter signals to this man is that he is still in danger. Even though the man is aware that he is no longer in the war zone he still may experience heightened levels of anxiety and distress.

For those of us who are not dealing with major traumatic events, unresolved emotions can still weigh us down throughout life. I often find that my initial work with clients is the processing of many difficult emotions that may have been there for months and sometimes years. An example could be unprocessed resentments of our partners. When couples fail to repair events and acknowledge the pain of harsh words or threatening gestures they start to build up negative narratives about each other. These narratives become more entrenched over time. The painful memories of a partner’s angry accusation can live in our bodies and show up in surprising angry outbursts. Sometimes a member of the couple I’m working with will say that they didn’t know where their harshness came from. My guess is that they are responding to the build up of unresolved resentment.

How This Is In My Life. 

I have spent much of my early life trying to avoid my feelings. It has plagued me in the form of tension throughout my body. This has led to chronic pain and other symptoms. I have spent my life trying to work through this tension in my body and why I now find myself trying to help other people to learn healthier ways of experiencing their emotions.

I know how hard it is to work through the pain in my relationships and resolve resentments, mistrust and irritations.  I know this has contributed to relational distress for me and my partner.

I am finding my way in all of this and discovering that engaging my emotions, letting them be fully felt, has led to a new found freedom that reduces the burden I feel in my body and mind. I don’t do it perfect but I am getting better.

If you or someone you know has a hard time feeling their emotions I encourage you to reach out.