How to Sit in Your Feelings

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Emotion work begins with adopting the mindset that at any given moment, we experience a feeling or set of feelings. The emotional experience is wave-like, with one feeling following another continuously. Feelings can intensify and evolve into other feelings. They can change abruptly given external circumstances. In short, feelings are temporary and will pass to give way to other feelings. And whether we are aware of our feelings or not, they are present, nonetheless.

The field of psychology and the study of emotion is basically synonymous. The emotional experience is a window into the psyche and practitioners encourage clients to use their emotions to understand themselves. Emotions offer insight into values and boundaries. They indicate changes in the environment and motivate action in response. Emotions serve as instincts in otherwise novel situations. They also provide a universal language for expression and foster connection with others. Considering these possibilities, emotions clearly exist as reinforcement, not as opposition.

Doing this work is often referred to as processing emotions. To process emotions means to practice mindfulness and work through any defenses that usually get in the way of experiencing them fully, making meaning, and deciding how to be guided by them. In processing emotions of the past, the goal is to experience feelings in a safer way and feel them less intensely, while still maintaining their significance as a way of moving forward.

Source: Gloria Wilcox on Allthefeelz

Step 1: Label the emotion

Start with a breath and try on some words to the emotion you are experiencing. If a word doesn’t resonate, try another one or an even more specific one, until you are accurately describing the present emotion. If you are struggling with finding the language, you can use an emotion wheel to help. An emotion wheel at its core has emotions that are universally experienced with more specific feelings along the edge.

You might already notice that labeling the emotion helps alleviate some of the power and discomfort the feeling was originally associated with. Or perhaps, recognize that it is distinguishable from a different, though similar, emotion. Attaching a descriptor to something intangible makes it more real, with just enough distance to start to observe it.

Step 2: Locate the emotion

Focusing on the physicality of an emotion also makes it increasingly observable. It is easier to hold onto as you work your way through these steps. It also helps in providing a physical cue so that the next time you feel this physical feeling, you can label the emotion and process it sooner and sooner.

Recognizing the physical sensation an emotion brings also establishes a connection between your mind and body. It allows you to witness firsthand the impact working through emotions can have in providing physical relief. You might realize that a feeling you’ve labeled as anxiety presents a tightness in your neck. Perhaps, you’ve always noticed that neck pain, but didn’t attribute it to anxiety, but rather, poor posture. Emotion work like this has the capacity to improve the self-awareness of both your emotional and physical experiences.

Step 3: Ask nonjudgmental questions to understand the emotion

Questions that begin with “why” tend to be critical. Why did I do that? Why do I care? Why am I feeling this way? In judging our experiences, we make attempts to rationalize feelings away. In attempting to find a baselessness to these feelings by asking these kinds of questions, we hope to make the feelings smaller and feel relief sooner. This is untrue, however. In trying to minimize feelings, they actually become more concentrated and more powerful.

By asking more inviting questions about an emotion, we can start to understand its purpose. Here are some compassionate questions that start to encourage a positive relationship with emotions and help attend to their function:

• How intense is this feeling on a scale of 1-10?
• Was this a gradual or sudden onset?
• Is it familiar?
• How comfortable is the feeling?
• What color is it?
• What shape does it take on?
• What is this in reaction to?
• How can I make sense of it?
• What could it be trying to tell me?

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Step 4: Decide whether to act from the emotion or let it go

The words emotion and motivation are derived from the same Latin word, movere: To move. For this reason, they can be considered one and the same and serve to activate or energize behaviors (Neta & Haas, 2019).

As a motivator, emotions can be used to intentionally guide behavior or allowed to pass for the next emotion on the wave to take lead. After an emotion has been labeled, recognized in your body, and understood without criticism, you have the agency to decide if you are motivated to act. Anger, for example, might demonstrate to you a value having been crossed. You may decide to communicate from this anger and effectively practice self-advocacy.

Embracing emotional experiences and using them to navigate our world adds depth and dimension to understanding ourselves and others. Observing them closely and inviting them to guide our thinking and action can be incredibly empowering.