Expressing Emotions
I used to have a hard, HARD time identifying my feelings, much less being able to communicate them with others.
It’s not that I didn’t feel something. It’s just that I couldn’t explain what I was feeling.
This inability affected my quality of life. I didn’t have healthy interpersonal relationships, which hindered my ability to stand up for myself, among other things.
Being unable to identify my feelings also meant that the information they were trying to provide went unnoticed, often to my detriment.
As a Jamaican, my fallback term for expressing something difficult was “mi feel a way.” It acknowledges a discomfort but not what the discomfort was.
In the book Permission to Feel, the author says that our feelings matter most in five areas:
Determining where we direct attention, what we remember, and what we learn
Decision making
Social relations
Our health
Creativity, effectiveness, and performance
Since I’ve spent more time learning how to identify my feelings, expanding my feeling vocabulary, and honoring what I feel (rather than pushing it down), life has truly improved.
What about you? Do you know how to talk about your feelings? Do you have misunderstandings and challenges because of difficulty in identifying and expressing your feelings?
