Discover how feeling your feelings, rather than controlling them, will empower you to make lasting change
I often hear people ask, "What should I do to feel better?" This is a valuable question. Having healthy coping skills, such as engaging in hobbies, exercising, and socializing with friends, is necessary. However, when your end goal is "to feel better," you may be pursuing something like, "I don't want to feel how I feel now, and I need to find ways to make my feelings go away." So you try to control your feelings, reinforcing the illusion that you can stay on top of them and hold yourself together.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss how controlling your feelings keeps you stuck in repetitive suffering and the same emotional and psychological patterns, whereas courageously feeling your feelings can not only bring relief but also deepen your self-understanding and help you free yourself from habitual patterns. The process of feeling your feelings can be enlightening, as it allows you to grasp the root of your feelings, and empowering, as it gives you the tools to break free from unhelpful psychological patterns and make lasting change.
What exactly do I mean by "controlling" your feelings?
When you try to avoid, suppress, minimize, rationalize, or detach from your feelings, you are attempting to control them. On a surface, behavioral level, there are numerous things you might have done to control your feelings. For example, outright denying that you feel angry because you believe you should remain calm and rational, numbing your sadness with drugs, distracting yourself from your anxiety by watching TV and scrolling on social media mindlessly, striving for perfection so no one can criticize you, placating your friends to maintain superficial harmony, or overeating to suppress feelings of loneliness...anything, including positive things like meditation, can be used to control feelings.
On a deeper, attitudinal level, controlling your feelings has less to do with what you actually do and more to do with your belief that you should be in control of your feelings, though your feelings can’t be controlled; they must be understood and processed. A couple of common beliefs I’ve heard people have about their feelings are:
"What's the use of feeling my feelings?" People with this type of reaction prioritize being "useful" and often live within the mindset that life is about doing things and producing outcomes. They minimize the importance of their being, including feelings, intuitions, and instincts. Some of them may take pride in being high achievers and thus find it difficult to relinquish control over their feelings.
"If I don't suppress my feelings, does that mean I should take my feelings out on others?" People with these reactions struggle to understand that there's a third way — neither controlling nor acting out — that involves tolerating, processing, and reflecting on their feelings to hear the helpful messages within them. People may choose to suppress their feelings, such as anger and sadness, out of this belief.
What are the consequences of controlling your feelings, and why do you do it?
There's nothing inherently wrong with controlling your feelings. Sometimes it's necessary, as we all get overwhelmed in life. When you're angry with your child, taking a few breaths to calm down before speaking with them is a great practice. It's when controlling becomes so chronic and habitual that you’re disconnected from your feelings that you'll run into trouble.
The main consequence is that when you insist on controlling your feelings, you lose the opportunity to be curious about your innermost emotional world, wonder "what are my feelings about?", and discover truths about yourself. As a result, you repeat the same emotional and psychological patterns. Have you ever had a friend who seems to get into similar, unhealthy romantic relationships, where they’re treated poorly, experience intense conflicts, or tend to feel dismissed and disregarded? What usually happens is that they unconsciously seek romantic partners who stir up deep feelings underlying their self-view, like “I’m unlovable,” from their early life, unknowingly putting themselves in the same emotional experiences over and over.
If it feels awful to repeat the same patterns, why do people do it? You want to ask. This is because:
Making changes is not easy and can be a painful process. It takes a great deal of courage to acknowledge and feel our feelings. Let's take “the friend” I mentioned above as an example: Changing their negative feelings about themselves and self-view may open the door to acknowledging painful early experiences, such as the inadequate care their parents might’ve given them in their early lives. The truth that their parents' wishes might’ve come first when they helplessly depended on their parents for love and care can invoke a lot of grief and heartbreak, and not everyone wants to bear with this.
Controlling your feelings may have become so deeply habitual to you that you don't even notice you're doing it. An example of this is that some of my patients report experiencing 'going blank' when I invite them to feel certain feelings. This 'going blank' is an unconscious controlling strategy, a way for the mind to protect itself from overwhelming emotions. It's like metal armor, keeping them safe, however uncomfortable and hindering it may be.
Come to the dark side…
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What can help you feel your feelings, and how does this lead to lasting change?
Because your controlling strategies, which stand between you and your feelings, are often habitual and unconscious, seeking a therapist's help to navigate them is often the first step toward feeling your feelings. A therapist can help you become aware of your controlling strategies, understand how they have come to be, and the deeper feelings underneath them, so you get a sense of where to look and move toward. A therapist will not only support you but also show you the direction you need to take as you feel your feelings.
When you navigate through your controlling strategies, you'll become increasingly open to feeling your feelings. I want to revisit the movie The Red Turtle to illustrate what's involved in this part of the journey. In The Red Turtle, when the man realizes he can't fight the red turtle, he returns to the island and almost dies in despair. Interestingly, before the turtle turns into a woman, she dies as well. After the turtle is reborn as a woman, she swims in the ocean, decides to release her shell, and pushes it out to sea. The man gives up the new raft he is making. They reconcile, fall in love, and have a son.
The theme of death is highlighted here. It's a type of "ego death," an act of surrendering, or relinquishing control from our conscious attitude (i.e., "I shouldn't feel this way," "I should be over it," "being vulnerable means being taken advantage of," "there is no use in feeling my feelings," "my feelings are too much," etc.) The theme of giving up control is reinforced by the woman shedding her shell, a symbol of defense against (controlling) vulnerability, and the man letting go of his raft, a symbol of escaping (controlling) unwanted feelings.
It's as if the story is saying, "You need to relinquish control over how you think you should be and stop fighting, before you can connect with yourself and others through your feelings." One example I sometimes use in therapy is inviting my patients to explore the idea of mindfully eating a raisin. There isn't a goal involved in the activity. You'll need to relinquish control over what you think you should do and how the process should be conducted. The idea is to pay attention to the texture, the taste of the raisin, how it feels on your tongue, and how it becomes supple and soft little by little, without trying to force anything to happen.
You can feel your feelings similarly. Let's do an exercise together. If you often become angry, I invite you to acknowledge your anger in your body without blaming anyone (i.e., refrain from telling yourself it's because of your boss or your neighbor). Pay attention to where you feel your anger in your body and wait to see what comes up next. You may get an image, a sensation, or an impulse. What happens if you let yourself look at the image, feel the sensation coming up, or move through the impulse?
Stay with these experiences for a bit longer. Can you hear the subtle messages hidden in these deeper feelings? Perhaps you hear your heart murmur with sadness and pain, "When my dad hit me when I was 8, I wish someone had been there to protect me." At this point, your pervasive anger, which leaks out into all your relationships — like feeling the whole world isn't fair and that everyone is against you — has a real shape to it that can be worked with, with the potential to bear new meaning (i.e. "I was so hurt...and will perhaps live with theis pain...life isn't fair, but some people get my back, and I can trust them to help me when I need them.") You earn yourself the opportunity to start changing your identify from a hurt one, reacting to your enviornment defensively, to an empowered one, taking charge of your own life’s direction.
What if I'm just not a feeling type, or I don't have feelings?
We all feel, whether we are aware of it or not. You may have developed controlling strategies I mentioned above that you’re unconscious of, like many of us, resulting in you believing that you aren’t a feeling type or don’t have feelings. Think about this: Our feelings tell us what we value, from which colors we like, what food we want to eat on a particular day, which movie to watch, to which person we choose to date, and what types of life we want to live...because different colors, food, movies, people, and types of life evoke different feelings in us. Without feeling your feelings, you'd be like the man at the beginning of The Red Turtle, stranded on the island, making efforts but going nowhere. You must have felt something to have made it this far with this blog post.
I want to turn to the turtle symbol before concluding this blog post. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Symbols notes that the sea turtle's ability to dive into the dark, cold depths of the ocean inspires fantasies of being carried "to nethermost regions of mystery and regeneration." A female sea turtle, in particular, can navigate both the sea and the beach. Metaphorically speaking, it represents our innate capacities to dive into our emotional life—the oceanic, unconscious processes in our psyche—and enrich our conscious attitudes.
Just as the man and the turtle woman give birth to their son, who turns out to be a natural swimmer and eventually leaves for the world beyond the island, you can start cultivating your capacity to navigate your feelings and broaden your horizon, too. Schedule a 15-minute consultation with me here if you'd like my help in working through your controlling strategies and letting your feelings enliven you. Until next time!
