3 Things I Do When I Can’t Feel My Feelings — From a Therapist
You know that feeling when you don’t know that feeling?
You’re going through the motions, feeling kind of bleh but not sure why. Maybe you do know what’s going on in your life but you keep feeling down or stuck and unable to move through it. Often that stuckness has to do with being able to connect with, feel, and understand your emotions. It’s the critical skill of accessing and expressing emotion, something that a lot of therapists help people to learn and practice.
Many people struggle with accessing and expressing emotions because they grew up in homes where they weren’t allowed to express their feelings, where it wasn’t safe to, or where they knew there was no point to because no one would be there to listen. Being unable to access and express emotions often causes problems in the lives of many of the men I work with who have been socialized not to do it, or that the only acceptable emotion to show is anger. It can leave your partner feeling left out in the cold and it can leave you feeling stuck, confused, and in a perpetual state of not quite right. When you live too long without being able to move through your emotions it can build up anxiety, worry, and feelings of depression.
Even after building the awareness and practice of accessing and expressing emotion we can all fall prey to getting caught up in the business of life and disconnecting from what’s going on inside of us. Yes, it happens to your therapist too. When I’m feeling stuck, like I’m bleh and not quite feeling fully, I know that the key to figuring out what’s going on and moving through it is to actually FEEL.
Here are 3 things I turn to that I can rely on to help me feel what’s going on and get back to experiencing the full range of emotions that make life so beautiful.
1) Journaling
This is stage 1, “accessing emotions lite”, if you will. While I wholeheartedly feel journaling is a great practice, if you never move beyond journaling you can easily fall into the territory of intellectualizing your feelings. Intellectualising is where it seems like you’re talking about emotions and addressing them but you’re actually just using logic and reason as a defense to feeling the feeling. Nevertheless, I think everyone should do some method of journaling for the benefits of:
Externalizing, aka getting it out of your head. Your thoughts and feelings hold weight. The effort it takes to carry that weight can contribute to feelings of malaise and “stuckness”. Let the paper hold some of it for you.
Recognizing patterns. Journaling helped me to cultivate a practice of gratitude once I noticed that I only turned to my journal during hard or sad times. I made a conscious effort to document all the good that was going on as well.
Naming emotions. For a lot of people, this is the first major block in being able to access emotion. If you can’t even name what’s going on how will you understand and explore it? Write down the feeling to describe what’s going on, and see if it feels accurate or not quite right. The more you name it the better you get. If you’re new to this break out the good old emotions wheel to help you explore naming what’s going on.
There is no right or wrong way to journal. What makes it that you just do it? You can free-form, write letters to yourself, buy a journal with prompts already in it, or use questions from your therapy session as prompts to get you writing.
2) Sweating
The mind-body connection is real. I’ll save you from a long-winded talk about the nervous system and polyvagal theory, endorphins and serotonin, and how your body is keeping the score. But for me, I’ve solidly come to accept that if I’m not moving my body my mental health is going to be impacted, and that if I’m feeling unexplainably down I likely haven’t been exercising enough. In a culture where for so long the messaging around exercise is that it’s some sort of punishment or its only purpose is to change your body to fit a certain standard, a lot of us have an inherent resistance to exercise because we want to avoid the inevitable shame that will come with not meeting the standards we and society have set for ourselves.
The benefits of exercise have nothing to do with how you’ll look and all to do with how you’ll feel, including greater clarity about what’s going on inside of you. Muay Thai in particular has gifted me so much. It was while I was training to fight, during a particularly tough conditioning session, that it sunk in that I had a problematic relationship with food. I had a similar experience as sweat was dripping down my eyes while laying in a child’s pose at hot yoga and “I need to quit my job” came to me clearly.
Me taking care of my mental health. Trust me when I say exercise and regularly moving your body is one of the most loving gifts you can give to yourself.
3) Music
Specifically, a heavy drum beat (riff? lick? solo? I don’t know the term, I just know what I like). Meaningful lyrics are cool but I like to be forced to move my body because I can’t resist the rhythm of the smashing and banging. The more the sound resembles Animal from The Muppets the better. This has to do with #2 above. Lately, I've been listening to Everlong by the Foo Fighters on repeat, in the car at full blast, or at home by myself with headphones. Bonus points for coupling the loud noise with body movement like jumping, shaking, waving your arms, or whatever else you classify as dancing.
He’s feeling things. Image from Consequence.
The Relationship Agency can help you to start feeling what’s going on inside so that you can reduce your anxiety and worry, get unstuck, and have more fulfilling relationships. All of our therapists have done their own work, and continue to do it, while also being trained experts in the fields of relationships, trauma, anxiety, and ADHD. Book a free consult now to start working with us.
