Here's How a "Core Feeling" Is a Pipeline to Your Past

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Anne lives an incredibly active life. She’s an office manager for a thriving company, goes to school at night for her business degree, sings in the local choir, sees her many friends on weekends, and travels frequently with her partner of five years. Needless to say, Anne doesn’t have much spare time.

Each night before Anne goes to sleep or when she’s home while her partner is out of town for work, an aching feeling creeps up inside her. She hates this feeling. The thought of experiencing the ache at night terrifies her. So, she continues to stay busy and focused on the hectic life she has around her and sleeps with the television on loud each night until she falls asleep.

What is this achy feeling inside Anne? It’s what many therapists call a “core feeling.” It’s so deep-seated that its firm grasp over your life can affect you without you even knowing it.

A core feeling is an emotion that visits you often and throughout all stages of your life. It’s a feeling that develops in childhood and tends to be powerful and visceral.

Core feelings are inside you and most people around you. Even though we all can experience them, no one seems to talk about them. It’s a feeling you probably experienced most often, or more intensely, in childhood. It’s been inside you for a long time and is always just right around the corner, waiting to be touched off.

Childhood Emotional Neglect and Core Feelings

A child is heavily influenced by the environment they grow up in. Their parents’ rules, expectations, norms, values, and feelings become integrated into a child’s wiring. What they learn and absorb from their family becomes a large part of who they are. What a child feels consistently in their upbringing will follow them into adulthood.

While we all have core feelings, some people are more vulnerable to being ruled by them. These people are the ones who grew up with childhood emotional neglect. In this type of environment, a child is not taught how emotions work. Their feelings go unaddressed, unacknowledged, and sometimes even invalidated or pushed to the side.

Without a parent to teach you how to identify and name, tolerate and manage, or express and communicate your emotions, these feelings stay inside you—unprocessed and waiting to be noticed. Old, unprocessed feelings are more likely to follow you into adulthood if you experience childhood emotional neglect.

We know that Anne from the example above has a core feeling that nags at her. As a child, Anne’s parents were extremely entrenched in their careers. She would be left home alone and had different nannies who took care of her, even on family vacations. She felt alone. Despite feeling this way, her parents didn’t seem to notice her yearning for their presence. So, Anne learned to push this feeling aside, too. And she continues to do so in adulthood as she stays busy and distracted.

It’s common to experience your core emotion as unpleasant and burdensome. In an effort to get rid of it, you do all that you can to keep it down, whether it’s through distracting, ignoring, avoiding, or denying.

Unfortunately, these are tactics you most likely learned from your emotionally neglectful environment. You weren’t given the tools to effectively deal with powerful emotions around you or inside you. But, it’s never too late to learn the essential emotion skills to deal with these feelings.

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Your Core Feeling: What You Need to Know

• Your core feeling is directly connected to your childhood. In fact, when you allow yourself to feel your core emotion, you gain access to memories from your past. This is because your core emotion is a pipeline to your unresolved issues. It’s the key to healing old wounds.
• You make your core feeling stronger by ignoring it. Imagine you have a deep cut from an accident. If you choose to ignore it, chances are high that you could get an infection and have to deal with more serious issues down the line. If you tend to the cut—disinfect it, stitch it, and bandage it—it’s easier for it to close up and heal.
• A surefire way to heal your core feeling is to allow yourself to feel and process it. The only way out is through.

Following are the steps to properly process your core feeling.

8 Steps to Processing Your Core Feeling

1. What is your core feeling? How would you describe it in words? What does it feel like in your body?
2. Start paying attention to it throughout your day-to-day life. Observe instances when you experience it. Is it during certain times of the day? When you are around certain people? When you are in a specific kind of environment?
3. Notice your attempts to resist the feeling. Perhaps you find yourself scrolling on your phone, eating, shopping, or distracting in other ways. Make a conscious effort to sit with your core feeling instead of directing your focus away from it.
4. As you’re sitting with your core feeling, reflect upon times when you have felt this before. Do certain experiences in your life today bring this emotion to the surface? Having a pen and paper for this step is helpful.
5. Does your core feeling hold certain beliefs or messages? What does this feeling say about you? Why might you have felt this way as a child?
6. As you gain more clarity about your core feeling, share it with a trusted person. Talking about it is just another way of confronting it rather than avoiding it.
7. Attempt to generate your core feeling at will. This allows you to feel as though you have the ability to manage and control this feeling, not like the feeling controls you.
8. Take time to learn about childhood emotional neglect. Healing from childhood emotional neglect involves learning about your emotions and relating to them differently. This is a direct way of understanding your core feeling and stopping the generational pattern of emotional neglect.

Knowing Yourself at Your Core

Through this process, you will increase your tolerance of discomfort, gain self-awareness, and heal old wounds that have been following you for decades.

If you relate to Anne, you might feel like you are running away from something. It’s probably difficult to be still and breathe because a painful emotion could be lying in wait. When you start to process your emotions, you are increasing your capability of handling difficult emotions in the future. You are taking your power back.

So, no more running. Turn around and look at what you’re running away from. You won’t regret it.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.