-Written by Jessica Parks

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller

Many of us have a conflicted relationship with our emotions. For some of us, we may perceive our emotions to be unpredictable, bad, dangerous, or even sinful. We may strive to feel only certain emotions – such as happiness – to such an extent that we attempt to shut out the discomfort of more unpleasant emotional states. Some of us see ourselves as better off without messy emotions altogether. We turn to logic and reason and like to see ourselves as thinkers rather than feelers. Regardless of how we’re wired, we can all grow in our emotional health and intelligence. 

Emotion, at its most basic, is energy produced by the brain and nervous system in response to stimuli in our environments. The core emotions of fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust all have healthy, functional expressions. At their best, they keep us safe, guide us towards connection with God and others, teach us what we most value, and signal when some part of our lives needs attention.  

Most of us start off in life feeling and expressing our emotions freely. We soon learn that our emotions – though ours alone – occur in a social context. They have the power to grab other’s attention. This is important for the survival of babies and young children, who don’t yet have the verbal skills to ask for what they need. 

But, for many of us, our parents and caregivers didn’t have the skills they needed to support us in our emotions. We were told things like, “Stop crying!” or “Don’t get your hopes up” and a million other messages that add up to the underlying message: your feelings are a big PROBLEM. We go from expressing our emotions for safety and survival to bottling up our emotions for the exact same purpose – safety and survival. Often because of our own or other people’s discomfort, we learn to stop attending to our emotions. We shut down and shut up. 

We go from expressing our emotions for safety and survival to bottling up our emotions for the exact same purpose – safety and survival.

But regardless of how we censor our feelings, emotional energy is still there and very much active under the surface. Much like a volcano that appears dormant, we can have a seemingly calm exterior, but the pressure has to be relieved somehow. Our bodies have many different ways of releasing emotional energy from tears to laughter to full on angry explosions or panic attacks. Sometimes, our physical bodies will scream at us through headaches, stomach aches, and even chronic diseases to get our attention.  

Emotional energy is very real, and our bodies are producing it all of the time, whether we know how to support ourselves in healthy ways or not. Brene Brown summarizes it well. “Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other”, she writes. 

We all have the opportunity now to learn how to support ourselves with compassion and curiosity about our emotions, rather than shaming and silencing messages. We can all gain self-awareness around the negative beliefs we’ve internalized, and the behaviors we’ve adopted that may not actually be helping us.  

While reading this is no substitute for therapy, the remainder of this blog series will be dedicated to sharing a few thoughts and tips on how to have a healthier relationship with emotions.

Jessica Parks is a counseling intern at Grace Counseling, offering reduced cost services to teens, adults, and couples. She is eager to help people unpack the difficult emotions and discover healthier ways of understanding their emotions. If you would like to schedule an appointment with Jessica, contact her or call the front desk!