How to Feel Your Feelings When You Were Never Really Taught

a post by Margarita Tartakovsky for the Weightless blog [via World of Psychology]



Many of us never really learned how to feel our feelings. But we learned other things about emotions instead.

Maybe we learned that certain emotions were acceptable, while others were not. That is, we learned that happiness and excitement were fine, while anxiety, and even more so, anger were forbidden. And so, maybe you learned to swallow your rage, and shove it down further and further, deeper and deeper, to plaster a smile onto your face.

Maybe we learned that crying is for weak people who can’t hold it together, and holding it together is a virtue we must uphold.

Maybe we learned that emotions are to be ignored, neglected, and glossed over. Maybe we learned that emotions are useless or downright dumb. Maybe we learned to judge and criticize ourselves for certain emotions.

We’ve likely learned many things about emotions—and maybe those things are steering us in the wrong direction, namely away from our emotions.

But the key in dealing with our feelings is, of course, to steer toward them. This is where creative activities come in. Writing and drawing are powerful tools to quietly and gently reconnect to ourselves, to listen, to acknowledge, and to explore.

As such, here are seven prompts to help you notice and name what you’re feeling in a (hopefully) helpful and accessible way.

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Hazel&tsquo;s comment:
What I am feeling right now is sad. My husband was not only told he was weak for crying as a child but was beaten. Now coming up for 70 years old he still has nightmares about his childhood and difficulty in expressing his feelings.

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