Co-written by Aida Manduley and Anna Stern

You’re cozy in your bed, drifting off to sleep when a voice calls out: “I’m scared! I need you!” You leap out of bed, heart pounding, and rush into the child’s room. He is sitting up in bed, his face stained with tears, cuddling a stuffed walrus. “Sweetie,” you say in the kindest voice you can muster, “it’s time to sleep now. I was asleep. You need to sleep too.” You give him a hug, he lies down and you go back to bed. Fifteen minutes later: “I’m awake! I need you!” Back into the child’s room, less patience now. “Baby it’s time to go to sleep.” “But I NEED you.” “We all need to sleep. Our bodies need sleep. Lie down now and I’ll sing you a song.” You sing a lullaby and tiptoe back to bed. Begin to close your eyes, and the child calls again.

A friend told one of us this story recently. At her wit’s end, she talked to his teacher who said, “he just wants to feel heard.” Instead of reminding kids of the rules, rationalizing, or focusing on soothing, you’ve got to home in on what they feel in the moment. You have to take them very seriously and ensure they believe you. “Use a lot of ‘really’,” the teacher said. “I really, really hear that you are scared.” Or “I can see that you are really, really sad right now.” When children hear this, they know you have connected their meaning to their behavior, they feel heard, and they can let go.

If you’re wondering whether you accidentally clicked on a parenting article, here is the connection you may be waiting for: Our feelings can be just like small children. They have a deep need to be heard, to be held, without judgment or rejection. To be held with compassionate curiosity. How can you be with yourself in a way that says “I am here. This is okay. Whatever comes up right now is okay,” especially if you’ve been taught the opposite?

In this article, we’ll go over what can happen to buried and inconvenient feelings, the science of emotion and survival, and how you can manage and process all these things differently and/or with new awareness.

Feelings Gone Underground or in Disguise 

The tricky part here is that kids (and feelings) don’t always make “rational” sense (and sometimes they do, but you don’t have the tools to understand them or are speaking different languages). When you ignore feelings, they don’t go away; they go underground. When they’re buried, they don’t stay buried forever. Once they’ve gone under, they often come back in even more confusing, less recognizable ways.

Feelings don’t always have the language to tell you what is happening or why. They only have the crude tools to make themselves heard. They manifest in adjacent feelings and other behaviors that may be hard to connect to the “originating” event or situation.

• Explosiveness and irritability: You’re filled with rage in certain situations – maybe your boss didn’t reply to your email, or your mom cut your toast in half when you wanted to “eat it big.” Maybe you snap at someone when they interrupt you while you’re working at your computer, or respond curtly when they ask how you’re doing. Either way, when explosive anger and irritability are disproportionate to the situation in front of you, it’s a hint the feelings are coming from (or being magnified by) somewhere/something else.

• Inertia: Getting out of bed, getting dressed, showering, eating – basic daily tasks become a struggle. A child might refuse to put their shoes on when going to play with a friend who has been mean to them or lie on the floor when they are supposed to go to school but are not feeling confident in a subject. You may find yourself blocked when trying to write something and stare blankly at your notebook for hours, or perhaps keep delaying getting ready for a date until you’ve made yourself so late that you have to cancel instead of show up.

• Physical sensations: Headaches. Tiredness. Lots of poops. No poops. Tight chest. Shortness of breath. Twitching eyes. Muscle tension. Any bodily sensation can be an avenue for feelings to express themselves. For example, one of the authors of this article—as a small child, before they could explain feelings of fear and apprehension—experienced them as stomachaches. On a trip to a theme park, they kept asking to go to the bathroom every time they’d get in line for a big intense ride. For them, stomachaches meant “obviously you need to use the bathroom,” so they would go to the bathroom. They’d feel temporarily better (because they were away from the scary ride), but they wouldn’t actually do anything in the bathroom itself, much to their own confusion. Eventually, they and their family figured out their stomach hurt because they were afraid, and what they needed was soothing and reassurance, not a bathroom visit.

• Avoidance: You pick up your phone, turn on the TV, go on Facebook, anything to distract yourself or buy yourself time from the thing you’re avoiding. This can also look like not answering emails from a professor who asks about a missed deadline, getting lost in daydreams frequently, leaving a friend’s texts unread, etc. In a child, this can often present like outright ignoring something that’s right in front of them as if it simply didn’t exist.

• Difficulty naming: You make plans with a friend, and when they ask you how you are you say “fine,” and then go home frustrated that they didn’t support you. A child calls out again and again in the night, sounding fearful, but when you go to them they say “I can’t find my bear.” Saying the fear or worry out loud feels impossible.

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

Inconvenient Feelings and Directing Them

But I don’t want this feeling, you tell yourself. This is such a bad time. It’s not the right way to feel – I’m not being fair to my partner, my boss, my friend. I’m exaggerating. I shouldn’t care about this. I’m being childish. This is irrational—there’s no need for this. Other oppressive and normalizing forces like to show up here too – often gender. I need to man up and get over it. I’m being needy. Extra. Too much. Hysterical.

You can think of a million reasons why the feeling isn’t welcome, isn’t convenient, does not deserve the space it’s taking up. You push it away, push it down, reject or ignore it. You find ways to quiet it. Janet Bystrom, a therapist in Minneapolis, says we have three choices about what to do with this energy:

• Point it at ourselves (fuck me) – substance use, self-harm, dissociation
• Point it at others (fuck you) – aggression and physical violence
• Point it at the sky (fuck this) – discharge the feeling safely through movement, art, communication

Here, let’s just acknowledge that options in the first two categories might serve us very well, until they don’t. It’s not always safe to feel feelings, or to inhabit our bodies. If we are experiencing ongoing abuse or trauma. If we are experiencing dysphoria (a sense of disconnect and unhappiness, frequently tied to ways that one’s appearance may not line up with one’s internal sense of self). If we are in a medical or family crisis that requires us to remain organized and productive in the face of big emotions.

Even as we move toward making space for and accepting feelings, can we also be compassionate with ourselves about the reasons we’ve delayed feeling them? Can we honor the roles our survival strategies have played in protecting us,  thank them for their work, and let them know they can rest for now, or at least for a bit? (And of course, if you are still in a situation where you are surviving with some of the strategies named here, trust your assessment of safety and, if it’s available, seek guidance and support).

But let’s say we’re safe. Let’s say we have most of the support we need and are relatively stable. What do we do with these feelings we’ve been avoiding? 

The Science of Survival and Feelings

We carve our own neural pathways with our actions. A famous adage in the field of neuropsychology is “neurons that fire together, wire together.” If we come to a fork in the trail, and one branch is flat, well-tended, and clear of debris, while the other is steep, rocky, and full of thorns, most of us will choose the clear path. It seems to take less effort in the moment (though the effects of that choice may have longterm implications).  It’s familiar. We know where it leads. 

Striking out through the brambles requires more equipment, more energy, more persistence. But a magical thing happens when we keep choosing the overgrown path. We begin to clear it. We bring our machete. We wear hiking boots. When we come to that fork again, choosing the overgrown path is a little bit easier. Of course, there will be days when we are tired, when we are overwhelmed, when we must choose the familiarity of the clear path. There is no shame in that. But when we choose the overgrown path, we make that path more available.  

All this is to say that the new path may not feel comfortable; it may feel dangerous, and even viscerally wrong. When we have been trained to react in certain ways, our bodies may resist changing—and of course they will! They think changing will put us in some mortal danger! And, in fact, if we have a history of using suppression as a strategy to manage tough feelings, starting to open up to feelings overall will likely feel worse at first. (This is a common experience among folks working through emotional changes; stick with it if you can.)

So when have come to a place of realizing we do indeed need to change, we have to get ready to manage that new set of feelings and reactions. This doesn’t mean we have to dismiss our gut reactions, but that we have to dialogue with them in a new and different way. It means we have to take our worries, assumptions, and immediate reactions through a few more filters before we accept or use them.

For example, people who have become hypervigilant due to trauma pay attention to a lot of ambient cues of danger. Sometimes these cues signal realistic and imminent danger, but often they do not. Figuring out which is which can be very tricky when your body’s been trained to see them all as equally dangerous threats – getting on the subway taking on the quality of intense danger, for example. Conversely, some people are “hypovigilant” and rarely notice threats even when the red flags are glaring to those around them. (Read more about the science of this and “the window of tolerance” here from the perspective of a therapist.)

What Can You Do?

There is no magic one-size-fits-all recipe for how to shift your relationship with your feelings and create more space for them, but it’s key to go slow rather than trying to rush it. Self-compassion as you figure out this new path is also essential, because you’re doing something pretty damn hard—figuring out how to change the wiring you’ve been building for years, and even decades. That’s no small feat. Take care of yourself along the way. Turn back if you need to. But keep finding your way. We promise it’s worth it — even if ONLY to minimize the devastating effects chronic stress can have on the body (note: that linked article, while very thorough, conflates sex and gender).

In the next section, we offer a list of ideas for processing and feeling feelings in no particular order. Not all of them will feel right or available to you. Some may feel great in certain situations and terrible in others. If a strategy feels strange or uncomfortable, that is also information to pay attention to.

Practices for Processing and Accepting Feelings

Some Notes on Externalizing: 

Externalizing is the process of separating one’s sense of self from the feelings, problems, social forces, and relational patterns that influence it. It is also the belief—and its associated worldview—that people are not their problems. What this looks like in practice can take a lot of different forms. You might do this reflection and separation on your own, with a therapist, or in a group.  You might write down the stories in your mind about a situation or problem, and use color-coding or headings to link the stories with their related sources (i.e. “my dad,” “racism,” “transphobia,” “the mean administrator at my school”). You might develop an externalized metaphor or personification for a problem, like “the void”, “the sneaky hate spiral”, “the ferile cat.” Creating this separation between self and problems creates a reflecting space to take a position on the things that are influencing you. 

For those of us in highly individualistic environments (like the United States, which has historically been very influenced by concepts of “rugged individualism”), it can be tough not to solely blame ourselves for our issues. Western medicine and mental healthcare also have a long and unpleasant history of conflating people’s identities with their diagnoses. However, it’s critical that we see the full spectrum of influences, because there are many. It is both a disservice to our healing and a factually inaccurate way of assessing problems when we solely locate them in the individual. (This is also why it’s important that therapists discuss systemic oppression and politics rather than presume they should—or even can—be “values neutral.”)

That said, total separation isn’t really possible, and that’s okay; the point is to create a bit of room in our heads so we can see the issues from a different perspective. We can take a position – maybe we like the influence of the thing we’re evaluating and want more of it. Maybe we want less. Maybe we want to feel it, but don’t want to act out toward others in the ways it invites us to. 

We come into relationship with the force or the problem, and in so doing, stand with a self that is separate from the problem. Externalizing can be an antidote to shame saying “we are bad” when we have done something bad. (This may be tricky for people whose systems of faith and value say that doing, or even thinking, “bad things” automatically means they are bad and full of sin. For people in that situation, more discernment work and evaluation will likely be important to address those challenges. People in this situation may also wish to externalize the views of their faith community and step into conversation with those views in new ways.) 

An important thing to remember here is that externalizing is not a single strategy, it’s a process and a lens. Acknowledging the influence of oppressions, or positioning yourself as separate from your problems is not a thinking experiment to trick yourself into feeling better. Imagine what it might mean to truly believe that people are not their problems. Think of someone you don’t know very well who activates your defenses – what would it mean to your relationship and interactions if you believed that they were also under the influence of problems at times, just the way you are. 

Externalizing is also not a get out of jail free card. Separating yourself from your problems or the societal forces that influence you does not exempt you from responsibility for the things you do while under their influence. For example, while it may be true that toxic masculinity lays the groundwork for sexual violence, the violence itself, and its impact on its targets, remains the responsibility of its perpetrator. However, taking a bit of space and a position on the influence of a problem on our actions could change our response to those influences in the future. For more on issues of accountability and larger social forces, you can explore the Transform Harm Resource Hub. 

Below is a list of specific strategies you can use to process and manage feelings and how to bring them into your day-to-day.

Give It A Name

A perfect example of externalizing is on the show “Big Mouth”—a sitcom revolving around a group of middle-schoolers experiencing puberty and all its ensuing shenanigans. In this show, puberty is not just a set of seemingly random bodily changes, but instead changes that come as a result of Puberty Monsters & Monstresses influencing their lives. These creatures are ones that the teens can see and directly interact with. (At the same time, since teens can only see their own Puberty Monsters, the viewer is invited to hold the possibility that these monsters are actually just personalized manifestations of puberty that exist in their own heads.)

This makes puberty an inherently relational experience—one that the teens can navigate with someone else even in its most private components. For example, the Puberty Monsters & Monstresses give the teens advice (as well as argue with and sometimes even sabotage them), jumpstart physical reactions, provide a sounding board for their worries, and more. 

The teens can also take a position in response to the puberty monster’s suggestions, argue with them, step away from what they are encouraging, or take their advice and jump in. The teens  are autonomous objects, rather than subjects under the influence of external forces, who can reclaim their power, autonomy, and choice, from the forces that seek to influence them.

The technique of giving feelings a name (and even an image) can help us approach them creatively and with enough distance that we can deal with them in a different way than usual. 

Practice: 

• What would it look like if you could dialogue with your feelings as if they were an embodied, physical presence sitting in front of you? How would interacting with them feel and be different? What kind of questions would you ask? What kind of things would you say? 

• Pick a feeling you struggle with and give it a name (e.g. jealousy, grief, pettiness, anger, happiness, etc.). Draw it, imagine it, and/or write a description of what it looks like. Consider how long you have known it, when it flares, what it suggests you do or don’t do, when it yells versus when it is silent, what people it tends to get excited around versus the people that make it go away. 

• Practice having a conversation with the feeling. (While you are doing this you might notice that other feelings or forces hang out in cahoots with this feeling – for now just name those and set them aside (“oh, hi, internalized racism!”). If this felt useful you can go back and repeat these steps with  those too).

Be With The Feeling & Let It Land

In a Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle writes:

[Meg] leaned her head against the beast’s chest and realized that the gray body was covered with the softest, most delicate fur imaginable, and the fur had the same beautiful odor as the air. I hope I don’t smell awful to it, she thought. But then she knew with a deep sense of comfort that even if she did smell awful, the beasts would forgive her.

Can we be with emotions this way? No matter how smelly, how distasteful, how unwelcome, just be with them. If they don’t have words for what they are bringing us, if they have only tension, or big angry energy, or silence, or tears, can we be with them?

For most people, that is actually a huge ask. Many of us are taught to suppress emotions, especially ones culturally labeled as “too big”, “unhealthy,” “negative,” “bad,” or “inappropriate.” But suppressing emotions doesn’t make them go away, and indefinitely punting them off to “deal with later” only leaves them room to grow and fester.

Therapist and mindfulness teacher Tara Brach calls the practice of being with the feelings “the turn of acceptance.” Brach guides her students to put a hand to their hearts in moments when challenging feelings arise, and to practice welcoming them. We might say “It’s okay that you’re here.” But maybe it doesn’t feel okay! We might instead say “I notice you.” You can take it a step further and say “And I am willing to listen to what you’re trying to tell me.” We might just tune into the sensations in the body and be silent. The hand to heart gesture may not work for us – we might rather plant our feet on the ground or connect with our belly, hands, or forehead.

No matter how you do it, experiment and find a way that works for you to simply create a welcoming, accepting, or compassionately curious environment for the feeling to land in so you can see what wisdom it has to share with you. Even the most uncomfortable of emotions usually have good insight for us! 

Practice:

• Watch or listen to “Here Comes a Thought” from the popular TV show “Steven Universe.” How can you integrate this kind of approach into your daily life? For some people, it means they keep a bookmark to this video on their phone to watch whenever they’re overwhelmed, or quietly sing the song to themselves when they’re spiraling in negative thoughts! For others, it means they do the same visualization as in the show: seeing intrusive thoughts or challenging feelings as butterflies (or the flying creature of their choice) than can then slowly float away once noticed. 

• Practice acknowledging feelings and explicitly naming them (this is where a Feelings Wheel can come in handy to help you identify which ones are present).

• Try emotion mapping, which gives space to notice emotions without tying them to narrative. You just take a blank paper and draw/shade in the space taken up by each emotion that was in your day. You can color code so that each emotion has a color or spectrum. (Some people like to color their own feelings wheel as their map for this). 

Separate Sensation from Story

From this place of acceptance, or even just curiosity, we might find it useful to notice sensations in our bodies without immediately attaching meaning to them. A crucial part of managing stress, trauma, strong emotions, etc. is about helping our nervous system recalibrate, and to do so, we need to pay attention to what’s even going on in there in the first place! For example, the amygdala—a small structure in the temporal lobe of the brain—is in charge of a couple of things, including detecting environmental threats and kickstarting our survival protocols (commonly known as the “fight/flight/freeze/fawn” responses). When we pay attention to what our bodies are doing and feeling, we can better figure out how to sit with it and what to do about it, including telling the amygdala to chill out.

So, especially when our mind screams urgently, it can be useful to instead slow down and get curious. Is there tightness in the body? Pain? Fluttering in the belly? Shortness of breath? Try to be with what is in this moment. Might this stance bring you more peace, even just for a few minutes?

Peace is this moment without judgment.

That is all. This moment in the Heart-space

where everything that is is welcome.

Peace is this moment without thinking

that it should be some other way,

that you should feel some other thing,

that your life should unfold according to your plans.

–Dorothy Hunt

At the very least, learning to listen here can help attune you for your next steps!

Practice:

• Explicitly connecting mind and body here can be very useful, but it’s hard to do if you don’t have practice (and especially if you frequently are disconnected from your body and have been trained to ignore its sensations). Sometimes this feels more accessible in less charged moments – maybe an interaction with a coworker rather than a lover, or in a moment where you are activated by your own internal monologue rather than an external stressor. Even something as seemingly mundane as someone getting your order wrong in a coffee shop – can these interactions become opportunities to practice working with emotion?

• The next time you have a strong emotion, pay attention to what’s going on in your body (e.g. areas of tension and relaxation, heartbeat and pulse, breathing, perspiration, etc.). Do your limbs feel tingly, heavy, twitchy, numb? What’s going on with your stomach? Is there any part of your body that feels an urge to move? What happens if you follow the movement? Is your breathing fast, shallow, slow, deep, measured? Is your jaw clenched and throbbing? Is there a knot in your throat? Does it feel like there are bees in your sternum? 

Check or Challenge the Stories

Maybe you are riding in the car with a partner and having a tense moment around navigation. A storyline might start to form in your mind: “they hate how I have no sense of direction. Why can’t I be better at this? They must be so annoyed with me right now.” You might go further down the road, imagining fights you might have, how long this conflict might last. You may get anxious and quiet, or even preemptively defensive and irritable. Things may escalate and end up in an actual fight with your partner, or in a secret internal fight with yourself that your partner is oblivious to!

It’s very possible you were attuning to your partner’s body language and making an educated guess about their judgment of you. However, sometimes these thought spirals are actually forms of twisted thinking that are a bit more removed from a shared experience. It’s possible you assigned value and meaning to their actions that didn’t match their own, and reacted to your own story rather than a shared reality or even their intentions. So how to differentiate?

Rather than immediately blaming yourself or punting off responsibility to your partner, when your mind returns to the past—or begins to spin more stories about what this all means and churn up anger, self-blame or resentment—what would it be like to interrupt those stories, or even let them go? What might it look like to ask for reassurance, or get external help with those interruptions? What other ways can you engage to check in on the story you’ve built? How would your feelings and behaviors change if the story were different? What past experiences are informing your reactions?

Practice: 

• Read through a list of common cognitive distortions. Which ones do you find yourself doing frequently? Read through a list of antidotes to those distortions. Which might you be able to try out? Try practicing these first in “lower-stakes” situations and going from there. If you like a daily reminder, there are a number of “mood tracker” apps which can help you spot patterns and distortions in your thinking.

• Related to this and the previous strategy set, consider what meaning your physical sensations may be trying to communicate (e.g. dehydration, low blood sugar, need for sleep, chemical imbalance of some sort, etc.), and how your emotions may shift if you address your physical body (e.g. decreased irritability, greater focus, heightened ability to manage emotions, etc.). If you want a guided walkthrough of common things to look for and how to address them, http://youfeellikeshit.com/ is an excellent and down-to-earth resource. 

Clarify Attachment Wounds

The way we learn how to process our emotions is partly based on what we see others do around us. This is part of why our experiences with early childhood caregivers is so important (and is a cornerstone of “attachment theory”). As kids, we learn the “rules of emotions.” What feelings are acceptable, what feelings are not, what we’re supposed to LOOK like when we’re having a feeling, and so forth.

We also learn how to have (or not have) conflict, how to address (or not) interpersonal issues, and so on. These things continue to evolve as we grow, and it can be very useful to note what “core attachment wounds” and defensive patterns have emerged as a result. When we know those core wounds that sometimes flare up or lead us to react to present-day people as if they were people from our past, we can better address them both individually and collectively.

For example—one of the authors’ therapy clients loves cats. This person lived a complicated childhood, where responses to her needs were unpredictable. As a result, she experiences a lot of insecurity in her closest relationships as an adult. When her attachment wounds are activated by things like a partner not texting back immediately or her detecting a frustrated tone in their conversation, it is very difficult for her to engage. Instead she might back into a corner, make herself small, take space in solitude, pretend she doesn’t have needs or even lash out if confronted about it. It reminds her of how feral cats react.

So, she and her partner have developed a shared language about her “feral cat” showing up. Because her partner knows her “core wounds,” he does not position himself as her adversary, but rather joins with her to move through the past relational patterns that are currently activated. The “feral cat” language locates the problem outside of her, giving herself a bit of distance from shame and judgment about her actions when triggered. At the same time, her partner knows not to take her actions personally in those moments, to give her space, and to approach her cautiously and with a lot of compassion. Together, they figure out how to care for “the feral cat” and help it feel safe again.

Practice: 

• Listen to this podcast episode on attachment in relationships (and/or read the transcript). Alternatively or in addition, listen to this other podcast episode on the same topic but a slightly different spin. Consider how these insights apply to you and the ways you build relationships with other people. What have you learned to do with your emotions and how does that relate to what you saw growing up? How does that relate to past interpersonal relationships?

• When in a conflict with another person, try to join forces to tackle the issue, problem, challenging dynamic rather than each other. Part of doing that is through externalizing and clearly stating how you and your other person are aligning together rather than being adversarial toward each other. Try to name the problem as a specific thing that is external to both of you, or a “part” of you rather than the WHOLE of you (e.g. you and me and My Depression, or you and me joining to address The Anger).

• Remind yourself that the person in front of you, when you’re activated, is likely bringing up a memory of people from your past. Try to specifically identify who you’re remembering, and recognize/affirm that the person in front of you is NOT that person. (Basically, help your body stop time-traveling and orient to the present moment.) It can help to focus on what makes the two people different, or in the case that you can’t or you’re in fact remembering a past version of this same person (e.g. a partner who cheated 10 years ago but has been faithful since), think of how *you* have grown since then and how you are a different person with new tools now to deal with the situation.

Header image, without changes, used under CC license from https://www.flickr.com/photos/tofu_mugwump/24434222832.