Why Feel Your Feelings?

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “You need to feel your feelings,” or “If you can feel it, you can heal it,” phrases that suggest that you must feel emotions as deeply as possible before you can heal.

It seems a little cruel, doesn’t it, that one needs to feel the excruciating pain of severe mistreatment, betrayal, rejection, or devastating loss in order to recover from it? What kind of a system would require this? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to simply heal without falling to emotional pieces?

While I’ve known the truth of this process, I’ve spent many hours wondering why it is so and after some years as a healing professional, I finally feel able to explain it.

To illustrate, let’s use an example. This person is not real, but could be!

Marie is in her 40s - she is professionally employed, mother of a young child, in a supportive marriage, doing overall well. As a child, Marie was often rejected and mistreated by her mother for being “ugly.” Marie’s younger sister was favored for her physical beauty.

Why would Marie want to bother knowing the pain of her mother’s rejection? What would be the point in that? Didn’t she do enough of that as a child?

Here’s why.

Marie learned she was unattractive when she was too young to question it.

She was probably just a couple of years old, if not younger when she was taught this unfortunate “lesson”. As a child, Marie looked to her mother to help her know who she was - this is biologically how humans are programmed and we cannot help but do this. So she inevitably learned that she was ugly. It was a painful lesson, one that she desperately wished she could change, but she had no choice but to believe that this was the final truth. Once she believed it, she didn’t have to feel that painful rejection anymore— she could simply accept that she was ugly.

As she grew into the identity as “ugly one”, she found ways to cope, with stories like: Ugly people are appreciated when they make nice meals for everyone else! Ugly people shouldn’t dance but if they can sing they can be celebrated. Ugly people can still be admired if they get good grades. These, and many other lessons were learned and all were based on the unquestioned (and, by the way, totally false) idea that Marie was indeed unattractive.

Today Marie is working with me on her healing journey. She feels deficient a lot, has imposter syndrome at work, and often feels like a bad mother, even though she can’t explain why she feels this way. As we explore her history, her mother’s rejection comes up. I ask her,

“What did that do to you, when she said you were ugly?”

Marie wonders why I’m trying to make her feel bad.

I tell her, “If you can tolerate answering, it could lead somewhere good. Is it okay to explore this?”

She agrees to try. She says, “Of course it was horrible!”

I ask how horrible. What kind of horrible?

Marie tears up, “I just…” she starts to shake and her body takes on the posture of a shamed child, “I just don’t want this. I don’t want her to say that to me, it’s like my heart is getting ripped to pieces in my chest!” She cries.

This moment. This, right here, is the moment where she “feels her feelings.” This is also the moment that everything shifts.

In this special space, Marie’s belief in her ugliness takes a critical hit. When she recognizes the pain caused by her mother’s comments, she learns how it felt to have the label “ugly” imposed on her; importantly, she sees from this place that this label was not and is not the truth. As a child, believing in her ugliness was the only way she knew how to explain and avoid the terrible pain of her mother’s rejection. It was as if she would say to her mother, “I know what you’re going to say, but don’t worry I already know. You don’t want to love me because I’m ugly. That’s okay! I understand that ugly people don’t get as much love.” This would prevent another episode of searing emotional pain at the relatively lower cost of believing that she did not deserve as much love as everyone else.

While she cries, Marie has dared to be innocent of the label “the ugly one.” She starts to see the truth - that her childhood pain was a sincere, appropriate reaction of a perfectly good kid to her mother’s callousness.

As a child she had no choice but to believe in her ugliness. It was a critical part of her ability to navigate the conditions of her upbringing. But today Marie no longer needs her mother’s care, and she has had many experiences of feeling attractive, celebrated, seen and known by friends and partners. She knows that the truth is much broader than anything her mother taught her.

It takes about 90 seconds for all of the following to happen:

• Marie has the courage to feel the pain of her mother’s rejection.

• Marie rediscovers and embodies her innocence, before she believed “I am ugly.”

• Marie understands that her mother’s words have cast a long, unnecessary shadow on her self-image.

• Her belief updates from: “I am ugly” (untrue) to “My mother thought I was ugly” (true).

• Marie feels a new freedom to deserve and enjoy the wonderful life she is living.

This. This is why we feel our feelings. And this is, as far as I have seen, the only way to heal.

What do you think, is it worth a go? If you want to try, reach out to me or someone you trust with your story. ♡