Where Do You Take Your Feelings?
Emotional Intelligence has lots of benefits in the home, the workplace, church, or any place we connect with others. Yet few of us learned what to do with our feelings in our families of origin. We enter adulthood with some form of suppression as the main model for dealing with our feelings. If you have a feeling you don’t like, just lock it up!
If we have any awareness of our emotions, it usually looks something like this:
Act out of our unprocessed feelings until we experience a negative consequence.
Shove the unwanted emotion (anger/fear/sadness/insecurity) deep down, often with numbing tactics. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses are often activated.
Pretend to have the emotions (joy/confidence/peace) we desire.
Dump the undesired emotions on the vulnerable people around us.
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Perhaps you discovered early on that your own feelings were dangerous or unwelcome in your family. Suppression isn’t the natural human way of processing emotions—it’s a learned behavior, often a strategy for protecting ourselves when we are vulnerable. Like most of the strategies we develop, it comes at a cost. Addictions, conflict avoiding, road rage, the proverbial “kicking the dog” are often the result of suppressed emotions coming out sideways. As Freud argued, unexpressed emotions come out in “uglier ways.”
So what’s the better way?
Dr. Alison Cook gives a clear and brilliant explanation of emotional intelligence and its importance for relationships in this podcast episode. I’ll summarize some of the steps here.
Recognize what you’re feeling. Notice and name what you are experiencing. Maybe you feel anxiety or sadness coming out as irritability. Scan your body and heart for your emotions and learn to name them. An easy way to start is by asking, “Am I sad, glad, mad, or scared right now?” Grow in your emotional vocabulary as you learn to name more nuanced emotions.
Understand your feelings. Be curious about what you’re experiencing. This is how we process our emotions. “Why am I angry right now? Is it really what my spouse just said or is it because I feel unseen, lonely, or taken advantage of? What wounds in my story are being triggered? Am I angry at my spouse or my mother or both?” Psalm 42 is a great example of recognizing and understanding emotions: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?”
Manage your feelings. Learn over time to regulate your emotions in healthy ways. Remind yourself that you can sit with an unwanted emotion instead of running from it because you trust yourself to manage it well. It will not overcome you. Deep breathing, journaling, connecting with someone you trust, praying, talking with a counselor, cultivating beauty—these are great ways to regulate big feelings so they don’t come out in destructive ways.
Express your feelings effectively. Use your emotions to connect with someone else without asking them to fix you. Maybe you communicate to your spouse the anger you are experiencing and why: “When you said that last night, I started to feel angry but I realized it’s in part because my mother used to say that to me and it always made me feel small and ashamed. I really want our marriage to be a place of refuge for us.” You may not have trusted relationships where you can communicate your deepest feelings at the moment. Fortunately, God is always curious and eager to listen. The Psalms are full of humans expressing their emotions to the God who listens.
Recognize, Understand, Manage, and Express your emotions. Let’s normalize this as the way we deal with our emotions. Let’s teach our kids how to do this. Let’s learn to do this with greater depth as we consider our feelings as one of the greatest gifts from God and one of the places he most wants to meet us. He is the God who listens.
Do you find yourself locking up your feelings? Do you act out of your emotions reactively? Do the people in your life walk around you on eggshells? Reach out to Good Shepherd Soul Care or someone else to learn what to do with your feelings, and how your story shaped your emotional intelligence.
