Ep #94: Feelings You’re Not Supposed to Feel

Hi! How you feeling? I’m feeling great. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve had a wonderful morning, and I’m so happy to be talking with you.

Today, I’m going to be talking about feelings you shouldn’t feel.

Sometimes when I’m teaching my clients exactly how to allow themselves to feel their feelings and feel their urges without eating to make them go away or to feel better, they have some resistance.

Actually, a lot of the time there is resistance and this is why it’s so important to have someone like me help you work through your resistance and help you get to a place where you are open and willing.

There are lots of reasons why you might feel resistance to this and one of the reasons I’ve heard from some people is because of what they’ve been taught in their past about feelings.

Someone, maybe a parent, a teacher, a sports coach, someone who was an authority figure to them or a role model to them, taught them that it’s not okay to feel certain feelings.

What I think most of them meant was actually that they didn’t believe it was okay to react to certain feelings.

Like, they didn’t think it was okay to express their anger and yell at people or they didn’t think it was okay to cry or they they thought certain behaviors were considered to be unattractive.

They look down on people who express their emotions and consider them to be weak, inappropriate, or for women, as un ladylike.

So instead of reacting to their feelings, they did what they could to hold them in. They would suppress their feelings, avoid them, ignore them, and do things like eating, drinking, or drugs to make the feelings go away.

But as we know, these are not productive ways of handling your feelings. They don’t give you a chance to work through them and process through them. And if you’re consuming food, alcohol, or drugs to feel differently, it’s only a temporary solution and after it’s over you’re going to feel the same, worse, or a new undesirable feeling.

People teach other people that certain feelings are not okay to feel because of what they make those feelings mean. These people make certain feelings mean something negative about you as a person and your character. Then these beliefs are passed on to the person feeling them and then there they are, not wanting to allow feelings because of what they make their feelings mean about them.

And this doesn’t even just happen with negative feelings, it can happen with positive ones too. You may believe that you shouldn’t feel too happy or too excited because of what you make that mean about you. Maybe you make it mean that you’re conceited, cocky, that you’re bragging, that you’re too extra.

So then you’re not only not allowing yourself to experience the negative emotions you think you shouldn’t feel, but also the positive ones. So what you’re left with is just the neutral ones in between. To me, that doesn’t sound like a fulfilling way to live. Life isn’t meant to just be blah and neutral. Life is meant to exist with a full spectrum of all the emotions. Who wants to live a life without joy and excitement?

I think the biggest problem we face here when we’re taught things like that is that we are going to feel all the feelings, all the emotions.

As far as I know, no one I know has never felt angry or sad. Not one person.

This is the reality of being alive and being human or even just being an animal. Your dogs and cats feel angry and sad.

You can try really hard to never feel the emotions that you consider to be bad or wrong but I can almost guarantee you that you won’t be able to make that happen.

Then since you can’t make that happen, you’re going to feel them and you’re going to do what you can to make them go away ASAP and you might also beat yourself up for feeling how you feel.

Neither of these are productive and neither of these will really give you the result you want which I’m assuming is to truly feel better.

It doesn’t feel good to beat yourself up and get mad at yourself for feeling how you feel and again, eating to make the feelings go away doesn’t really solve anything.

When you believe that there are feelings you’re not supposed to feel, and then you do feel them, because you will feel them, that’s how life is, you resist or avoid them, you argue with them or eat to avoid them.

Is this how you want to deal with your feelings?

A lot of you talk about how you want to be your most authentic self. You want to be the person you believe you’re meant to be and to be your best self.

That person, that authentic version of you, feels all the feelings, including the negative ones, including sadness and anger and frustration and stress and fear.

Because that is what an authentic person does. They are genuine and real and real people have all the feelings.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to show them. This doesn’t mean you have to be yelling or be bawling your eyes out or be snippy with people or freeze up.

If you are, there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you truly don’t want to be reacting that way to your feelings there is another option. The option is to process through the feelings.

What I mean by that is that you are at peace with feeling how you feel and you don’t get mad about it and don’t try to escape it and just let it be until is passes through you. You go through it instead of trying to shove it down with food or release it by taking an action you don’t want to be taking.

There are no feelings you’re not supposed to feel. We know this because those ones you think you’re not supposed to feel, you feel them. If you weren’t supposed to feel them, you wouldn’t. If you spend your time when you are feeling them thinking that this is wrong, then you’re not going to be able to see what’s so right about it.

This is part of the human experience. This is part of being alive.

The negative, uncomfortable feelings you feel are part of life and they’re actually what makes the good feelings so good.

Imagine what happy would be like it there was no unhappy and we were just happy all the time. It wouldn’t be as great as it. It would just be neutral because that’s just how it is always.

It’s the contrast and polarity that allows for the positive to be positive and not just neutral. The negative makes the positive possible.

No feelings are wrong, they are just feelings we all feel. They’re just feelings we feel caused by the thoughts we think. We all have them, we all feel a wide spectrum of them.

Feeling feelings doesn’t have to be about the reaction and what you do in response to the feelings. Those are separate entities. We feel a feeling and take an action because of it. Don’t confuse this. A lot of people think it’s one in the same but it’s not.

You feel stressed and then you do something in response to that feeling. You feel angry and then you do something in response to that feeling. The feeling is what we want to allow and to process through and if you do that productively, then that action you usually take, probably won’t happen.

This is all about feeling and being at peace with how you’re feeling. Reacting is just another way to release the feeling and feel better. You think if you yell at someone, you’ll feel better. But what if you just allowed yourself to feel angry and you felt that anger bubble up inside of you but didn’t yell it out? What if you just let it be there? That’s what I’m talking about here.

If you process through your anger, you could feel angry without ever taking it out on anyone. If you process through your fear, you can still take action instead of freezing up and doing nothing.

All feelings are normal. All feelings are okay to feel. So feel them. Don’t be resistant them or avoid them, just let them happen.

Whether you like it or not, they’re coming. They have many times in your life and they’re not going to stop.

Life will never be happy all the time. It’s going to be more like 50/50, 50% on the negative side of the feelings spectrum and 50% on the positive side.

If you accept this and allow it to happen, that’s when you can truly live authentically and be more in control of your actions.

There are no feelings you’re not supposed to feel. Go feel all of them and have a beautiful week. Bye bye.