Gemma Spake

So why are we so bad at feeling our feelings?

Obviously, there's a few very clear reasons.

The biggest one being that processing our emotions in a helpful way was probably something that was never modeled to us as children or at any stage really by society, by our parents, by anybody.

And so we don't have a guide on how to feel our emotions without them completely overwhelming us.

There's this, well, there was this really huge paper from like, I don't know, 2010 that showed, especially if you have emotionally stunted parents in particular, this reduces how many different emotions people report being able to label or feel.

And it's highly correlated to emotional suppression in individuals themselves.

So people, you know, couldn't name as many emotions as they actually had available to them.

Contrary to popular belief, emotions are also not things that we're born understanding.

Like we have to form a relationship to our emotions and that is done by modeling the people around us and seeing what they're doing.

If emotions aren't shown, unless they are this like extreme thing, we don't actually get those skills.

And if they, again, are only shown at their highest, most intense level, that also drives us to be a bit more avoidant of our emotions because

Our impression is that the only way to feel our feelings is intensely and is maybe violently or is severely.

There is no moderation.

Somebody's going to get hurt and so we don't feel them at all.

Another reason we are bad at feeling our feelings because it feels like self-protection.

If we don't feel sad about what happened, who's to say it happened at all?

If we don't let ourselves feel angry, then maybe the emotional impact of what we've been through will just fade away.

Ignorance is bliss.

That's kind of the mindset that we have unconsciously.

The longer we avoid the emotional consequences though, the longer we avoid the origin point and we prevent ourselves from examining it.