I wanted to share something I've learned in the course of therapy that I felt might benefit others. Specifically, I'd like to share how to better listen to one's emotions.
You might wonder why would we want to be in better touch with our emotions. One reason why is that everybody builds a metaphor or narrative for themselves that they filter all of their experiences through. This narrative helps them interpret, understand, and analyze their experiences so that they can better process them and learn from them.
However, sometimes our narrative breaks down and the way we understand things intellectually departs from how we experience things emotionally. This incongruity between our narrative and emotions can lead to anxiety, stress, or self-destructive behaviors. Or we could simply impede our own personal growth by drawing the wrong conclusions from our own experiences.
One example of this is when a person is in the closet with regards to their own gender or sexuality. They aren't necessarily being willfully obtuse or ignorant; instead, the narrative they've created for themselves might be drawing the wrong inferences from their lived experiences and a narrative can be a hard thing for a person to shake off.
This is why we sometimes need to get in touch with our own emotions, in order to fix inconsistencies between our underlying emotions and the narrative through which we interpret them. We can only fix things by turning off the narrative and experiencing our emotions as directly and plainly possible, without judgment, explanation, or analysis. This is the art of getting in touch with one's own emotional side in order to see the underlying truth that our narrative might be misinterpreting or suppressing. Once we do so we can disassemble the parts of our narrative that aren't working for us and rebuild them so that we interpret both our past and future experiences in a new light.
In order to explore our own emotions we must recognize the most opportune time to do so. Usually the time is right when we get into an emotionally charged or emotionally vulnerable state. Emotions don't try to surface all the time, but when they do they can greatly affect our demeanour.
A therapist can help you recognize when you're in an emotionally charged state to better assist you with exploring your own emotions. The exact cue may differ from person to person, but I can give an example from my own experiences: one way that I tell that I'm emotionally charged (with either good or bad emotions) is when I feel "wrecked", meaning that I feel reluctant to carry on with my daily life or business as usual. If I've really "got it bad" then my hands will start to shake.
It can be difficult to surface emotions, especially for people that have a lifelong habit of not listening to them. After all, we superimpose a narrative on top of our emotions for a reason, so that we can better function or cope with our daily lives. Intellectually interpreting our emotions can protect us from harm, steer us towards rewarding behavior, or teach us important lessons, but when the interpretation is out of sync with our emotional reality then our narrative can just as easily lead us astray.
So you need to find a safe outlet with which to express yourself without judgment, where you can become vulnerable. Therapy is a safe avenue for this once you build trust with your therapist, but there are also things you can do in privacy, like writing down your thoughts and feelings. The important thing is that whatever outlet you use is somewhere where you feel comfortable taking off the narrative that clothes you so that you can see yourself more clearly in an emotionally naked state.
The next step (assuming that you're emotionally charged) is to state the emotions that you feel, without attempting to analyze or interpret them. In particular, don't rush to explain or justify why you feel a certain way. After all, part of the reason you're doing this exercise is because you suspect that your narrative might be interpreting your emotions incorrectly, so you have to dial down the interpretation and try to experience the emotions as they are.
Once you state your emotions, let them sit and experience them as fully possible. Steep yourself in them. Don't try to explain them away. Experience them in an unfiltered and uncritical way. Accept them.
For example, if you feel sad then let yourself feel sad and don't be in a hurry to figure out why you should or should not feel sad. An emotion is not an explanation.
You can only begin fixing your narrative once you experience and accept your emotions fully. Then you can begin the process of repairing the narrative you built for yourself and properly analyzing and interpreting these emotions again. The important thing is that the raw emotional experience has to come first, and the analysis / interpretation / judgment / explanation comes second. The more you let yourself experience the truth of your own emotions the more fluently you can later interpret and analyze them.
I'll give an example from my own personal experiences that I feel comfortable sharing.
At one point during therapy I recounted a phrase from my inner monologue whenever I tried to escape from a compulsive behavior. The exact phrase I would use was "you're free now" and the moment I said those words out loud to my therapist I began to break down into tears. My therapist obviously recognized that these words had elicited an emotionally charged state and asked me to dwell upon those words afterwards … emotionally.
At first I didn't understand how to emotionally process those words so I tried to understand them intellectually by thinking of all the ways to interpret those three words. "Maybe I'm trying to lift some sort of curse". "Maybe I'm in a metaphorical prison and I'm being freed from it". "Maybe it means that somebody is taking some burden off my shoulders". None of these interpretations really "hit the spot", though, because I was trying to filter my underlying emotions through a narrative that wasn't interpreting them quite correctly.
I only made progress once I approached things from a different point of view. Instead, I asked myself: "What emotions do I feel when these three words provoke an emotionally charged state?" That prompt helped me clearly see that the underlying emotions were: relief and humiliation.
The emotion of relief was consistent with multiple intellectual interpretations of the phrase "you're free now", but the emotion of humiliation caught me by surprise and didn't make sense to me at all. So rather than try to make sense of either emotion I turned off the analytical part of my mind that wanted to jump to conclusions. Instead I let the emotions sit so that I could experience them.
Experiencing those emotions, especially humiliation, helped me more clearly see what was wrong with my prevailing narrative. Many of my compulsive behaviors stemmed from doing something that I told myself was selfless, but was actually driven out of pride. I could only free myself from these compulsions by admitting that I was doing them for the wrong reasons, which was humiliating. In the end the interpretation of the three words that rang true with me was: "You're free now … from your pride". My intellectual narrative had been suppressing that insight because, well, it was humiliating to me.
I hope this post encourages people are struggling with their own emotions to seek therapy. You can go to therapy even if you can't clearly articulate what feels wrong to you. After all, one reason why people might need therapy is because they aren't fully in touch with their emotions and can't clearly pinpoint what is going wrong.