What’s the point of feeling?

What’s the point of feeling my feelings?

I realize that I am fulfilling a widespread stereotype about therapy when I ask the question, “and how does that make you feel?” I can feel the eye rolls as a response to this question, and I get it, emotions can be uncomfortable, especially when we feel them with others. I often hear from my clients “it’s annoying when you ask me how I feel” or “I don’t see the point in feeling this now.”   It would be easy to skip the discomfort and chalk emotional processing up to “therapy phooey,” but then, we would be missing out on what is essential for growth, healing, and lasting change.

The question, “And how does that make you feel?” serves a purpose; emotional awareness. Emotional awareness is important because our emotions are important. Our emotions make up the core of who we are as humans. They help us connect with others and they inform us about our needs and what actions we need to take. It is important for us to feel into the experience of our emotions and draw wisdom from them. Anger teaches us that we need to set boundaries, sadness brings healing, grief leads to acceptance, guilt can tell us that we’ve done something wrong, and joy allows us to connect to others in very deep ways.

Science now validates the importance of emotions. New research in affective neuroscience, neuroplasticity (brains ability to change), and emotion theory inform us that emotions are a powerful influence in our ability to change and transform. They are strong psychobiological forces within us that inform us about ourselves and our world.

So, what’s the point of feeling? Here are two benefits that most resonate with me:

Connection to yourself

Making space for what we feel allows us to understand our needs, motives, and priorities as humans. When we inhibit our emotional experience, we are distancing from the core aspects of who we are. People often come to therapy saying things like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or “I feel confused about what to do.” These statements represent disconnection from feeling and require getting reconnected with the experience of one’s own emotions.

Reconnecting with the experience of emotion requires more than just awareness of it on a cognitive level, emotions need to be experienced in the body to be integrated. I can tell you that I am sad because my mind is aware of it and yet my body registers anxiety and shame that inhibit my experience of the sadness. By exploring the experience of the emotion in the body, we become aware of the myriad of factors that can be inhibiting the felt sense of the emotion in the body. So, connection to yourself and your feelings supersedes the cognitive experience, we must also incorporate the body.

When we achieve connection to self, we experience authenticity, reduced anxiety and depression, and a more coherent narrative of who we are. We cannot fully understand ourselves and out needs when our connection to emotion is inhibited and defended against.

Connection to others

Our emotions help us connect with others. We are a bonding species, we need each other. Yet often our relationships are a point of contention and distress in our lives. People often seek out therapy when they notice this distress in their relationships and are wanting a change. They come to therapy wanting to feel seen, understood, and validated by their partners and friends, yet it is often their own internal conflicts that interfere. What is helpful to understand is that the very complaints we have of others are often small projections of the way we treat ourselves. We may desperately want to feel heard by our partners, yet every time we feel anger towards them, we dismiss the feeling, grin and say, “that’s fine.”

I’m reminded of a patient who felt so hurt and frustrated with his friend for discounting him. As we worked together in the session, we discovered my client’s own internal conflict around validating his anger. “Do you notice that as we try and stay with this frustration you judge yourself quite harshly for experiencing it?” I asked. “Well I think it’s dumb that I even care this much,” he responded. What unfolded in the session led us to see that my client’s own way of responding to his anger was discounting. We were able to identify patterns of dismissing his anger towards others, and turning the blame and self-attack towards himself, which was something that greatly distressed him and his relationships.

So, there is purpose in feeling your feelings. It is not just something your therapist asks you when they haven’t been listening and don’t know what else to say. Making space to experience our feelings in our body reconnects us to ourselves and others. What brings more joy than that?