3 Real-World Examples of How to Listen to Your Feelings

Sit with your feelings.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, perhaps from a friend, your therapist, or somewhere on social media. It sounds simple enough. But what does it really mean to “sit with your feelings”?

I’d love to share what sitting with your feelings looks like because it’s one of the most important things you can do. Before we dive right in, let’s review some vital facts on feelings.

4 Feeling Facts

1. Feelings are part of your biology. Your feelings provide your body with a natural feedback system. Each emotion you have (feel in your body) sends you an extremely important message. Your emotions are your body’s way of communicating with you.
2. Your feelings inform you about what you want and need … and what you don’t. Here are some examples: Joy tells you that you’re enjoying your experience and to seek more of it. Fear tells you to fight, flee, or freeze because danger is nearby. Anger tells you to take action to protect yourself. Sadness tells you to slow down and reflect on what you’ve lost or what’s important to you. And on and on it goes. When you listen, emotions can guide you to stay true to yourself and your values.
3. Childhood Emotional Neglect is what happens when you grow up in an environment/family that does not treat your emotions as important or necessary. Growing up without encouragement to freely have and express your feelings, you are taught (directly or indirectly) to hide or ignore them. As an adult, you go through life with your feelings walled off and without access to your deepest, most personal sense of self, your emotions.
4. Having access to your feelings and learning the emotion skills are two of the most powerful things you can do for your mental, emotional, physical, and relational health. Emotions were meant to be used to inform you, direct you, guide you, motivate you, empower you, and connect you. Your feelings are the key to living an enriching and meaningful life.

While knowing about the importance of emotions is helpful, you might still have difficulty understanding how to actually put them to use in your daily life. How do you sit with your feelings? What does it mean to listen to them? Having helped hundreds of people overcome their Childhood Emotional Neglect by accessing and utilizing their feelings, I have quite a few examples to share with you.

Below are three people with Childhood Emotional Neglect who have already worked hard to build a healthy relationship with their feelings.

How to Sit With Your Feelings

Melanie

Melanie has been a stay-at-home mom for a year and a half. She had a successful career as a nurse before having her daughter. She knows it’s time to go back to work, but each time her husband brings it up or she begins to look at nursing jobs online, she feels irritated and strangely uneasy. Melanie chalks it up to a big transition after motherhood.

After a few months of this irritability, Melanie realized she needed to check in with herself. It was late at night and she just finished scrolling through job postings. She paused … closed her eyes … took some deep breaths and started to get curious about the unease inside of her. She realized that this wasn’t about leaving her daughter or transitioning back to work. In fact, she was thrilled to have something of her own and a change of pace. What she wasn’t thrilled about was returning to the kind of nursing position she’d had before. Her body was telling her that going back to that kind of setting wasn’t what she wanted. With this realization, Melanie started to think about her true passion, one that sparked after having her daughter: helping pregnant and postpartum women. She started researching nursing jobs that would support her passion and soon she felt excitement and motivation about returning to work instead of unease and irritation.

Logan

Logan goes golfing on the first Sunday of every month with his friend Paul. For the past few months, Logan has started to feel dread and a weird sense of anger on his ride over to the course. He’s been perplexed by these feelings because he genuinely enjoys playing golf with his friend. Like Melanie in the example above, he finally decided it was important to listen to what his feelings were telling him. He got curious about the dread and anger and realized it was directed toward Paul. Paul had a tendency to boast and it was wearing on Logan. He wanted Paul to talk to him about more than just his successes and triumphs … Instead of all the apparent boasting, he wanted Paul to be real. Logan realized he wasn’t sharing much about his own life with Paul, either. Logan decided he would try asking Paul more pointed questions about meaningful aspects of his life and share things from his own life. He ended up doing both.

Valerie

Valerie had started to get serious with her new partner, Vito. She was so happy to have found such a kind and caring person after the prior, unhealthy relationship she was in for five long years. But something weird kept happening to Valerie. Each time Vito would compliment her or do something thoughtful, Valerie started to feel anxious. It happened enough times that she decided it was important to finally sit down and focus on her anxiety. She traced it back to her prior relationship… realizing that each time her last partner said or did something nice, it was a form of manipulation. It usually came after treating Valerie poorly. After listening to her feelings, Valerie felt an immense sense of gratitude toward this anxious feeling inside of her. She knew it was her body’s way of protecting her and making sure she was in a healthy dynamic with someone new.

The Impact of Sitting With Your Feelings

Melanie, Logan, and Valerie each sat with their feelings and acted accordingly.

If Melanie had ignored her feelings of irritation and unease, those feelings would have followed her into her next nursing job. Without understanding these feelings, she may have started to think something was wrong with her, that she wasn’t a good nurse, that she was weak, and the erroneous, negative list goes on. She likely would have ended up in a job that didn’t fulfill her, feeling unhappy and dispassionate. She may have even been at risk of becoming depressed.

If Logan had ignored his feelings of dread and anger, his friendship with Paul would have been at risk. He may have eventually pulled away from their golfing tradition and felt disconnected without truly understanding why or how to make it better.

If Valerie had ignored her feelings of anxiety, she could easily have damaged or destroyed a promising relationship. Without understanding the unhealthy cycle she was in with her previous partner, it would have been difficult to foster a healthy relationship with someone new.

By listening to their feelings, Melanie, Logan, and Valerie avoided potential mistakes, unwise decisions, negatively impacted relationships, and continued feelings of discomfort.

There you have it. That’s what sitting with your feelings and listening to them looks like.

Next time you have a feeling, see if you can describe it. Then, close your eyes and think about what this feeling means. Ask the feeling what it wants you to know. Show your feeling that you are curious about it and want to understand it better.

This is how you give yourself what you didn’t receive in childhood. This is how you heal your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

To dive deeper into your recovery from Childhood Emotional Neglect, you can purchase my first book, the international bestseller Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, for only $10 here.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.

Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com.