Feel Your Feelings

Feel Your Feelings

We are dying for want of this capacity to feel ourselves. Modern culture has so little capacity to be in present-moment contact with its embodied felt experience that it is literally killing us. People disconnect from their embodied experience because of trauma, because of the breakdown of buffers of resilience, social isolation, the breakdown of community. This is because sometimes, in order to grieve, in order to feel what we’ve been through, we require witnesses to be present; we need people to accompany us. Un-metabolized emotion accumulates, wreaking havoc on our stress physiology, and being held nonetheless in the body, because it has nowhere else to go. This inability to be in contact with our feelings drives dissociation, discursive thought, rumination, and the spinning of the mind. To feel our feelings we need to develop the twin capacities of support: to be able to be witnessed and held in community, in healthy relationships; and to have the capacity to be present with our own discomfort, present with the embodied texture of our own emotional experience without defensive reactions. If we have a feeling that we aren’t comfortable with, we can have a defensive reaction to our own internal state. We can go into fight/flight (anger/ anxiety) about our own internal experience. We can shut down. We are then creating layers upon layers of obscuration between ourselves and the feeling experience. Better to learn to build our capacity to actually be present with our feelings.