notes on freedom
A weekly email series containing easily digestible morsels of info on relational trauma and how to find freedom from it.
THIS WEEK IT’S A NOTE ON…FEELING feelings
In last week’s note I explained that relational trauma symptoms are designed to disconnect us from pain. A central part of this is about avoiding painful feelings. We push images, sensations, thoughts and emotions away from us so we can cope with life.
To find freedom, then, we have to reconnect to our emotions and (with help if necessary) learn to ‘feel our feelings’.
But you ‘know’ this, right?
A while ago, in relation to something going on between my daughter and I, my own therapist sagely said to me:
“Theoretically, someone can do a PhD about honeybees without ever having heard a bee buzz, seen a bee fly or tasted honey.”
I understand that you ‘know’ you have to connect with your emotions to heal. But do you actually do it? And if so, how do you do it? Are you doing a PhD on feeling your feelings or are you actually hearing, seeing and tasting your emotions as they move through your mind and body?
Emotion is energy. It’s a pattern of physical sensations in the body that we interpret as good or bad, happy or sad, in the mind.
Two thing required for feeling feelings
Two things need to happen for our emotions to process and integrate.
1 We need to name and notice what we’re experiencing in our mind and body. This helps our prefrontal cortex make sense of what we’re experiencing. In turn this facilitates cognitive, emotional and physiological processing.
In real-time this simply means we say to ourselves, or to someone else, what we’re feeling and, if there’s a ‘why,’ we can say that too:
“I’m feeling so fearful and anxious. My chest is tight and I can’t catch my breath. My thoughts are really scrambled. What happened with Charlotte keeps popping into my head so I guess it links to that.”
2 We allow our physiological impulses to move and flow. This sounds abstract but it’s a very simple concept. We literally just let our beautiful body do its thing. In real-time this means that after we’ve named and noticed what’s going on, we get curious about what our body wants to do – and let it.
Maybe you need to sigh, cough, cry, stand up, tense a certain muscle, shout, Stamp your feet?
Without overthinking (or thinking at all, actually) we allow our biological impulse.
We connect and flow instead of disconnecting and repeating unhelpful patterns (e.g. necking wine, obsessively cleaning the house).
This is how we ‘feel our feelings’ and it’s the cornerstone of finding freedom from relational trauma.
It’s how we move from PhD to authentic practitioner.
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Sarah Woodhouse is a trauma expert, research psychologist and writer who delivers people the knowledge and tools to recognise and overcome self-defeating cycles, to achieve personal freedom and success. Please follow her on Instagram, Facebook or X for all the latest updates.
