How to actually process your emotions

I’ve done a lot of thinking about my feelings, as a human and as a therapist. But even to this day, despite knowing all that I know about how to actually process emotion, I sometimes won’t even do it for myself. Why?

Why is it that the people that help others often don’t show up to help themselves? I’ll tell you what my answer is… it’s because of how vulnerable it can be.

I’d rather live day in and day out with a lump stuck in my throat than sit down, label the experience, observe the experience, bring my honest emotions up to the surface to face them, and actually move through them. Same question, why?

Why is that we’d rather suffer than face the suffering, cry it out, feel through it and eventually… hopefully, release it?

I can’t be completely confident about anything in my life; because as much as I’d like to believe I’m a mother effing genius, I’m just another flawed human being with my own ideas and opinions. But I think I’ve finally discovered what’s underneath it all for me.

I learned to exile the sensitive emotional girl part of me and I learned to manage myself with anxiety and self criticism. I learned to do this because during my own upbringing, I learned that I’d be judged for feeling my emotions so intensely and so honestly. I learned that I’m incapable of holding space for my emotions and for my calm and grounded self. I learned that it was “either or.”

Not only that, but I was frequently (both in childhood and in my adulthood) accused of being “wishy washy” and indecisive. Guess what I learned later in life… indecisiveness is a main symptom of anxiety.

Guess what else I learned… anxiety is a main symptom of emotional suppression.

When we’re burdened with the criticisms of others and when we’re burdened with the thought of being unliked, or worse, unloved… we essentially train ourselves to wrap our emotions up tightly and throw them into a tightly sealed box in the dark corners of the brain. “You stay here and don’t come out,” we say to our emotions.

But it doesn’t work, does it?

Our emotions and our sensitivities are pained even more so because they’re neglected. Anxiety then works harder and harder to keep those parts of you tucked away; anxiety works overtime and you can feel it throughout your body and you can see it in your mental spirals.

So in quick summary here; many of us anxious individuals learned over the course of our lives that our emotions are unacceptable, inconvenient, and potentially threatening. As a result, anxiety surfaced as a main protector and started stuffing all the other “unacceptable, inconvenient, potentially threatening” parts away…

Instead of learning how to process emotion, we learned how to:

A. push the feelings away

B. analyze the feelings and their root causes

C. rationalize why we feel the way that we feel

D. try to convince the feelings that they’re wrong

This isn’t processing emotion; it’s trying to either avoid emotion or control emotion… this is anxiety.

If we want to feel less anxious, we have to start uncovering all we’ve learned to hide away.

This is how we do it:

1. Connect to the present thoughts, emotions and feelings

2. Comfort the physical sensations by allowing them space to exist and by offering them support

3. Counteracting the dis-ease and dis-comfort further by embodying opposite parts through touch, movement or somatic shifting

I call this the Cx3 Process; I should tell you a little more about the science behind the approach.

We all, as human beings, experience a process of separation between ourselves and our attachment figures. Naturally, we experience some level of anxiety during our baby years and early childhoods when we’re so dependent and unable to meet our own needs+ sense disconnection between ourselves and our caregivers (whether physical or emotional).

The reason I say this naturally creates some level of anxiety for every child is because of the structure of the human brain; we all have a Limbic System comprised of an amygdala, hypothalamus and hippocampus.

The amygdala senses information from the outside world and goes “SOUND THE ALARM” if it senses something “off.” Then the hypothalamus starts the process of hormone secretion into the body to gear a person up for fight-flight-or-freeze (“I’ve got you b- sending back up NOW.”). Meanwhile, the hippocampus stores memory related to the behavioral responses that result in increased feelings of momentary safety (“received; will help you react accordingly the next time you’re stressed in any similar way”).

Point is; this is a survival response. Anxiety is a condition in which we experience a chronically activated survival response in situations where survival isn’t actually at risk.

When this happens, we naturally suppress our other emotions (there’s no time or space for them) and we build an unconscious automatic habit of suppressing emotion. This only further triggers the “separation anxiety wound” and results in ongoing anxiety.

So, now that we got some of the brain science out of the way, let’s get back to the Cx3 Process. This process is all about connection and self soothing; it calls you to do the exact opposite of what you’re anxiety wants you to do. And at the same time, it calls you to give anxiety what it wants; attention.

We want to connect to our honest emotions, labeling the anxious experience, labeling the function of the anxious thoughts, labeling the emotions underneath your patterns of “questioning, doubting, imagining, creating, evaluating, analyzing, and so on,” and observing, non-judgmentally and unattached.

We next want to comfort our honest emotions, the ones we labeled initially and the ones we became increasingly aware of as we connected more deeply. We might use breath, movement, the voice, touch, or somatic shifting (subtle shifting from one position to another with the intent of embodying different parts of yourself). Somatic shifting might look like tensing up in my chest and shoulders and bringing my hands up to cover my throat and jaw- to surround the lump in my throat with my sadness, panic and worry. Then I might breathe, observe and gently shift my body by bringing hands down to my sides, lifting my chin, softening my jaw and relaxing my belly- to surround the lump in my throat with acceptance and calm.

And lastly, we want to counter-act. As an example, if I’m feeling that lump in my throat and a rigid tension in my body, I might intentionally lift my chin, bring energy upward with forceful and audible exhales, and allow my body to freely sway, bend, twist or frolic. At this point… I’ll probably cry if I hadn’t already started crying at step 2.

I hope that these simple steps might help you to actually processing your emotions rather than just thinking about them.

The truth is, these steps are simple in theory but challenging to really put into practice. I definitely wouldn’t expect someone to read this single blog post and walk away feeling equipped with all the skills needed in order to actually put this process into practice. For this reason, I created a thorough 17 page Emotional Processing Guide to help walk you through the ins and outs of each step.

To access this Emotional Processing Guide for free, click here!

Thanks for being here.