The Danger of being out of touch with your emotions and how Being In Touch With Your Emotions is Not The Same Thing As Being Out of Control

Chronic stuffing or being unaware of your feelings is a big problem. If that is happening it is probably a case of biological needs in competition with personality needs. Meaning, your biological needs are to express your feelings while your personality is saying it’s not okay or safe to express. For example, let’s take an emotion that is very challenging in our culture for people to be encouraged to have (especially women due to the sexism), anger. Being unaware of your anger means you will potentially be unaware of a dangerous or unjust situation (or perhaps a situation that is not dangerous but that has tricked your brain into remembering an unjust situation in your past and importing that onto the present). You then could potentially: be taken advantaged-of, express an unnecessary aggressive response, increase avoidance, become passive aggressive, maybe even feel bad physically. So, being in touch with basic or primary emotion is important for adapting in life but the instincts of our emotions sometimes need to be re-tooled to fit our current situation. Which is why we have that great gift of our upstairs brains! Our basic instincts, reflexes, impulses and feelings need to be channeled through our values and goals. For example, just because you feel angry and the instinctual impulse for that is to attack doesn’t mean that you attack! It means you need to find a way to acknowledge and accept your emotion without judgment and learn from it about what the moment means to you so you can prepare to adapt. You might have to learn how to express it in alternative ways so that you can channel that anger into something empowering and not settle for stuffing.

This can be really difficult to realize if you have set your life up in light of stuffing your emotions because getting in touch with your emotions might really mess with your life. You might realize that you’ve been settling for unsatisfying relationships and people might be surprised or even offended by your new self awareness. Re-finding and re-being your self can cause big uncomfortable even painful changes when life has settles around you and taken advantage of you not being in touch with your feelings. Additionally, getting in touch with stuffed feelings might create a release of a lot of back log of emotions and survival based protocols needing to express and complete still. That can be overwhelming and even feel confusing. So it is no small thing to take on your feelings sometimes, it can be super messy, take real courage and sometimes needs the help of good therapy too.