Emotions play an important role in our lives. Our emotions can offer us clues into who we are and can compel us to take action and influence the decisions we make about our lives. In order to understand ourselves fully, we must be willing to recognize and explore our emotions. However, our culture has taught us to try to avoid unpleasant emotions or distract ourselves from them.
Rather than hiding or distracting ourselves from feeling our feelings we really should be allowing ourselves the time and space to feel our emotions.
Here are a few reasons why we need to feel our emotions:
- Processing emotions is a healthy part of living and thriving: Feeling all of our emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant are all apart of being human and can help understand and make decisions.
- Emotions allow us to understand each other: Social communication is an important part of our daily lives and relationships, and being able to interpret and react to the emotions of others is essential. Emotions allow us to build deeper, more meaningful relationships and it also allows us to communicate effectively in a variety of social situations.
- When we try to avoid our feelings, we avoid feelings of joy and happiness: The reality is that we cannot selectively numb emotions. Experiencing negative emotions is part of what makes it so wonderful to feel positive emotions. Our feelings come and go- rise and fall. No one’s emotion will last forever.
- Fighting or numbing our emotions often leads to more negative feelings: When we try to fight or numb our feelings all we are doing is putting a band-aid on a wound. We might feel better temporarily, but these behaviors do not help resolve the feeling.
We deserve to experience and feel all of our emotions. Let’s allow ourselves to do this more often.
