Emotional Balance For You + Your Children

Expressing our feelings is a key contributor to our (and our children’s) emotional, mental – even physical – health. If we don’t express our feelings, they tend to come out sideways later (sometimes decades later) in the form or resentment, rage, or disease.

As one of my former clients said, “As an overachiever, I’d become really effective at suppressing my feelings. When unprocessed and unacknowledged, they would resurface unproductively in my life. One of the most significant shifts from working with Sara was to learn to acknowledge my feelings.”

But most of us don’t know how to feel our feelings. Because in childhood we were taught to cover them up instead. Many of us heard things like:

• Be tough, don’t let anyone see you cry.
• Girls are meant to be seen not heard – keep your anger and your wild ideas to yourself.
• You’re sad? Let’s get you a snack to make you feel better. Here’s a cookie or a toy.
• It’s not that big of a deal. Calm down.
• Stop tantrum-ing or you’ll lose your iPad.

Have you ever said anything like this to your children?

The reason us well-meaning parents say these things and discourage our children’s authentic expression is because, well, that’s what our well-meaning parents did. And we’re not comfortable handling or holding space for our children’s big feelings. We feel overwhelmed by them, embarrassed about how others are judging our parenting, and incompetent. So we make our children shush rather than allow them to express themselves in a way that’s healthy.

Even if we had conscious parents that modeled feeling and self-expression to us, we often don’t want to feel our feelings because it hurts too much. We think a painful feeling is going to last forever. So we stuff it down or numb it with alcohol, shopping, scrolling, food, etc. 

It’s important to remember that our feelings DON’T last forever, so long as we allow them to move through us like a wave. To do this:

• Notice how the feeling is showing up in your body. What’s happening in your belly, your heart space, your breath, etc.?
• Breathe into what you feel.
• Observe it with compassion (without judgment or wanting to change it) and let it pass.

If we allow it to flow in and out like a wave, it will often move on rather quickly, especially as we get better at feeling our feelings. (Just like meditation or yoga, it’s a practice.)

We can also get in trouble when we attach to the feeling and start creating a story around it that begins to defines who we are. So feel the feeling, but don’t cling to it.

Please also remember that feelings are neutral. We are the ones who label some as good and others as bad, but this is not true since feelings are neutral. Every single one of us experiences all of them at different points in our life – sometimes in the time span of just one day. Sure, we want to spend our time and energy doing things that make us feel joy, love, happy, etc. but if something happens that brings up another feeling, that’s ok. It’s part of being human.

It’s also part of self-mastery, which I teach in my coaching programs. Our feelings are messengers which is why it’s so important we allow them to be present and “speak” to us. If we feel anger or jealousy or love or joy, those feelings have something to tell us.

Sometimes when I find myself stuck in a feeling that doesn’t seem to want to pass and I can’t figure out what its message is for me, I’ll journal with it. I’ll write at the top of the paper, “[Feeling], what do you have to tell me?” (Like: Anger, what do you have to tell me? Or Sadness, why are you here?) And then I’ll free flow whatever comes up.

Some of us have feelings buried so deep that it weighs us down. It’s the emotional baggage that I talk about with my clients that contributes to our feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. (We want to blame our busy day and to-do list, but often it’s this emotional baggage that is pulling us away from balance.) If this is true for you, or if you open a can of buried emotions and it’s too much for you to process by yourself, reach out to a conscious coach like myself or skilled therapist you trust. Having someone witness you, your experience, and your feelings is part of the healing process.

Hopefully you see that by learning to express your feelings, you can model, teach, and encourage your children to express theirs. It’s such a critical skill that needs to be taken seriously.

With love, your coach, 

Sara

Sara Mueller

Success Coach helping ambitious women obtain self-mastery and emotional balance so they can experience joy and fulfillment in their relationships, parenting & career.