This blog is going to be a long one, so fair warning! In this blog we will discuss what emotions and feelings are, where they come from, what they can mean, and how to interpret them. Then we will discuss communicating in a healthy and effective way to ask for what you need, and to be supportive of those around you as well.

Emotions and feelings are the brain’s way of getting our attention when we need to pay attention to our surroundings for safety, when there is a need not being met, an activating event related to a fear (and it wants us to acknowledge it so we can work through it), or to tell us when we need to rest because the “battery” is low. Emotions can feel complex and confusing when we don’t understand why we are having them, where they come from or what they mean. Emotions are the brain’s way of communicating with us and letting us know when we have an unmet need, a fear, something is important to our survival and it needs us to pay attention, or it just wants to stay connected. For example, did you know that we laugh because something was surprising or unexpected, and that was why it was funny – which also means that when we hear something that was once HILARIOUS over and over it becomes less funny each time because it’s not surprising anymore, we know it now. On the opposite side of that, did you know that everything puts off a “frequency” so when someone says the vibes are off, it’s a real thing? Our brains will pick up on those frequencies and send us feelings that make us feel uneasy or creeped out as a survival instinct to remind us to pay attention to our surroundings.

Okay, so that is what feelings ARE, now where do they come from? Firstly, not everyone just “feels” emotions, well, emotionally. It’s often physical and physiological with a biological blueprint to help us determine what it is when we haven’t yet connected the literal physical things we are feeling with an emotion. Where we feel our feelings can be different for some people, but generally we feel our anger in the head or chest – our blood pressure rises, our heart rate increases, we may “see red” or feel hot and flushed (some of us even cry when we are angry). Disgust is usually felt in the mouth and stomach – what is usually the first thing that happens physically when we are disgusted by something? Our mouth usually does the “ewww” pose, you know what I’m talking about. We may even get physically nauseous when we are disgusted, some people even fully vomit. This can happen when we are anxious as well because anxiety also affects the gut and the chest – our heart rate rises, we may feel nauseous, lightheaded, dizzy, and “panicky”. Sadness is usually felt in the chest and the throat – that dark hollow feeling in our chest as our heart rate slows, and the constriction of our throat because of our tear ducts and glands becoming active. Shame is felt generally in the chest and the face – blood pressure spikes because of the “humiliation” we have deemed important to us in some way, so our cheeks get a flush of blood which makes us “blush” and we feel it in our chest much like sadness because the two are related. Happiness can be found in a diffused pattern all over the body, with bursts of energy, movement, smiles, and maybe even tears or elevated heart rates. These are just a few, there is an entire WHEEL of emotions, and these are not all the physical symptoms when you feel them. This is something you will have to pay attention to in yourself – so the next time you feel some kind of way, take a moment to assess your body and make note of WHERE you feel what you are feeling, and WHAT it feels like, and then attach it to an emotion.

Awesome, we know what emotions are, and where they come from, now – what can they mean? Emotions and feelings are vastly misunderstood phenomena. Most people think that they are reactionary to surroundings or a response to some kind of stimuli and that’s it. And for surface level understanding, sure, technically that’s true; many times, “Stimuli A” causes “Emotional Response A” – as an example: I eat my favorite food for lunch, and it makes me happy. It makes sense if the emotional response matches the stimuli, or the stimuli’s intent; and it is more likely to match when we are younger compared to when we grow up and mature. Think of the movie “Inside Out” when Riley is a baby, it was just two emotions, very simple, right? Plus, it’s responsive. Dirty diaper? Cry. Hungry? Cry. All needs currently met and dad is making silly faces? Laugh. We could use critical thinking skills, pattern recognition, and deductive reasoning skills to decipher what a baby needs based on the time of day, where they are in their schedule, or with a few quick checks of their general needs, right? When do we stop doing that for other people that can care for themselves? Think about it, the moment someone can take care of their own needs, we stop critically thinking about what their reactions are telling us about their needs, in fact, this is where we stop connecting emotions with needs and fears in general. The excuse is usually, “Well they didn’t tell me, how was I supposed to know?” though there are still some widely accepted assumptions that are still accepted generally thanks to advertisement in certain industries to remind us that those are basic needs – like recognizing someone being “hangry” (example: “Hungry? Grab a Snickers! You aren’t YOU when you are hungry”) or being easily irritated because they are sleep deprived or being “emotional” when a female is on her period. Sure, no one is a mind-reader, and our brains, emotions, reactions, and experiences that garner our deductive reasoning, critical thinking, and pattern recognition become much more complex, sure – but we lose the ability we once used on babies that don’t communicate with us at all aside from crying or laughing in their first year of life mostly and usually don’t start becoming verbal until much later; but we have trouble understanding someone (or ourselves) that not only use our language, but have similar nonverbal reactions and universal micro-expressions? Why is that?

“Your emotions are real, your feelings are valid, but no one will know what they are unless you tell them.” – Vanessa Gore, LPC-Associate

How many times has someone asked you, or you’ve asked someone else, “What’s going on?” and the frustrating response is, “I don’t know”? There is a lot of in-depth self-reflection and honesty with oneself to understand that question and even more so to garner an actual answer. For those people who have the trauma responses of people pleasing as well as the “Fawn” of the “Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” sympathetic nervous system response it is so much harder because they live in “survival mode”, a permanent state of stress that they’ve learned to feel normal with that requires them to completely ignore their own needs and wants and focus on hypervigilance of their surroundings and anticipating the needs of others instead. We are in a society that has taught us growing up that no one wants to hear our problems, that we should “suck it up, be a man, boys don’t cry, etc”; so to have an unmet need or a fear would make us “weak” or “needy” or a “burden” in some way – making us lesser and not worthy – so we learn to ignore those things, smile, and post pretty Instagram pictures so people think we have our shit together. Unlearning those kinds of toxic and negative ruminating thoughts are the hardest things adults can do, but I promise it’s possible and it can lead to a much healthier and happier you. Healing is a long and hard road, and it will hurt more than anything you’ve ever endured; but once you endure it, forgive, make peace, and begin communicating healthy boundaries and speaking up for your needs in the moment rather than letting them fester – every type of relationship in your life will improve, especially the one with yourself.

Sounds fantastic, but how do I know what need or fear is related to what I’m feeling? Connecting emotions/feelings with a need or fear can be tough at first because it takes some brutal honesty and accepting of self that we are not all ready to do in the beginning. When we start this process, it’s normal for it to feel selfish because we are not used to really and truly putting our needs first – usually it’s someone else’s needs, the judgement of peers or society or religion, what we feel are “shoulds” or responsibilities that just cannot wait while we practice self-care. Once we get the hang of understanding where we feel our feelings and what those feelings are – we recognize those patterns. When an intense feeling happens, we will follow the trail like breadcrumbs to find it’s root cause, THAT is the unmet need or fear. We do this by being mindful and aware in our present moment. We notice when the feeling happens, and immediately take stock of our surroundings:

• What are we talking about?
• What were the last 3 thoughts I just had?
• Where am I?
• Who am I with?
• Why am I here?
• What was the very next thought after the feeling happened?
• What are some possible reasons why I would react this way?
• What does this remind me of from my childhood?

Let’s try an example: Sally is in a grocery store, and it’s packed today, and she is there with her boyfriend. She is having some trouble finding things on the list, and every aisle she goes down it just seems to have more and more people in it with no break in people rushing and pushing and grabbing the last of something before she gets there. To help, her boyfriend tells her to stay with the cart and keep looking for that spice on the spice wall she wanted while he goes to try and get the next thing on the list so they can work faster and get out of there and is gone before she can say anything. All of a sudden, as she notices all the people around her, she starts feeling overwhelmed, shaky, breath quickens, heart rate quickens, and she feels panicky as her vision starts to tunnel – these symptoms, more than anything, scare her, making the panic attack worse. Now – why is she having a panic attack? She has never had problems in busy or crowded places before, so she starts going over the check list to dig deeper – the panic attack started after she stopped paying attention to her list and her cart, noticing all the people and becoming overwhelmed – which only happened after boyfriend ran off. If she follows the breadcrumbs of her thoughts and feelings, he left and she felt alone, abandoned to the masses, and it reminded her of when she was little and got separated from her dad at a superstore when she stopped to look at something and he kept going. So, what does that mean? That means her feelings caused panic because she has unprocessed trauma around a fear of abandonment when over stimulated because even deeper down, she may have a fear or unmet need that she isn’t good enough and those she loves will discover her flaws and leave her because she is “too much”. The unmet need is reassurance, and the fear is abandonment.

Some of the questions that I hear most often regarding emotions are, “I’m happy for them, why am I feeling jealous? How do I stop being jealous?”; “I’m so reactionary, I just blurt out the most hateful things sometimes like I can’t help it, how do I stop doing that?”; “I know we broke up for a reason, but I miss *person*, did I make a mistake?” etc. With what we’ve learned in this blog for understanding emotions, what they feel like, where they come from, and what they can mean – how do we use this information to communicate what we need and answer questions like that? As mentioned earlier, we stop and take a breath – and be mindful of what is happening in the moment, how we feel, and follow that feeling down to the unmet need or the fear associated with it. Once we have figured out why we are feeling the way we are, then we practice telling our partner, our boss, our family member, our friend, whomever it is that is involved what we are feeling, why we are feeling that way, and work together to improve it. Likewise, others can do this with you as well. To start communicating this, we use “I” statements (and discuss the feelings and the situation, never anything about the partner until we learn to discuss things openly, honestly, with compassion and empathy rather than defensiveness and blaming).

Once we have communicated what we are feeling, and why, then we must pluck up the courage to ask for what we need. No one is a mind reader, and to expect that unrealistic behavior from anyone is toxic and unhelpful. People expect their partners to be mind readers when they are too emotionally immature to know themselves, what they need and want, or how to figure that out, let alone ask for it – so they want someone to do it for them (hence being the mind reader). Growing up, I was told, “No one wants to hear your problems/hear you complain” and I internalized that to mean that no one cared about how I felt or what I needed, so I just had to push it down to grin and bear it. What that actually meant was that when you complain there is no constructive critical thinking going on – I wasn’t complaining to compromise or fix anything, I was just complaining (for example, if it was raining outside, and I got water in my shoes so my socks would get wet – I would complain, “This weather is dumb, I hate it here, I just want to go home” when that isn’t what was happening at all. I had not yet learned how to express the real problem and share solutions that were a good compromise instead of selfish needs. I could have said, “My socks are wet and it’s really uncomfortable, do we have an extra pair I can change into, or could we get one so everyone can keep having fun?” Of course, what kid talks like that, right? It’s a learned behavior that we learn by observing modeled behavior (so if you grew up around people that did not know how to emotionally regulate or discuss in a healthy way how to solve issues, then that’s what you learned, too).

Figuring out what your feelings mean, verbalizing them, then asking for what you need sounds easy when I put it like that, but I understand that it is really difficult at first. Let’s try an example from earlier: “I’m happy for them, why am I feeling jealous?” – if we follow that feeling down to the root of where it comes from; it’s probably related to feelings of inadequacy, fears of being replaced or abandoned, and learning to handle shared affection and time – not to mention trust. Trust is a BIG one that many people don’t realize they haven’t actually got. Trust is not a blanket either, once you “trust someone”, you don’t trust them with everything, just their specialties. So when we say that we trust our partner; it’s normal to generally trust them, but certain things will require us to let go of fear to fully trust them. Like trusting them not to leave us for a “better” or “younger” or whatever “model”; trust them to speak up with something new starts or they are feeling some kind of way (like what I mentioned earlier). Now that we’ve figured that out, we can tell our partner by using “I statements”, which have 4 parts:

• Start with how you feel – “I feel jealous, left out, and lonely when…..”
• Describe the situation the feelings are from – “…I am left alone…”
• Describe what you need from your partner to make things better (not what you resent about them or their behavior) – “…I need more reassurance before and after your dates for a while to remind me that I’m still important to you and I’m not “lesser” during the NRE phase of the new relationship please”
• Discuss and compromise on how to make that need work for both of you – “sure, we can cuddle a bit before I leave so I have a chance to remind you how amazing you are and that I’m not going anywhere; and when I come back we can sit down and cuddle some more and I can include you in sharing whatever details you are okay hearing from my date and then we can cuddle some more so I can remind you how even though I had a great time, it does not diminish what we have, and that I’m grateful to be your partner, I love you”.

This way, we have identified the emotion or feeling, where it comes from, what it means, expressed it in a healthy way, and now have a plan to incorporate a fix so everyone’s needs can be met. Do you still have questions? Feel free to go to the FAQs on my website Polyfractal Healing to learn more or ask questions!