How To Take Care Of Our Feelings

Learning how to take care of our feelings is a fundamental part of being able to come into a more caring and nurturing relationship with ourselves. As such, it’s something well worth dedicating ourselves to.

We all have different ways of coping with our feelings. The fortunate ones amongst us are more than capable to be with our feelings whatever they are.

Yet still more of us are uncomfortable being with our feelings, especially when we’re experiencing the more discomforting ones, like fear and anxiety, or guilt, jealously and anger.

Whatever our relationship to our feelings, it’s likely that we relate to them in the same way that we were related to as children when we expressed our feelings.

How We Can Lose Touch With Our Feelings

Boy Crying

If we cried when we fell and cut our knee, only to be told by our parents or caregivers, ‘Get up, that didn’t hurt’, or the well-worn phrase, ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’, we would have received the message that our feelings are wrong, not be trusted and inconvenient. We would likely become disconnected from our feelings over time if we consistently received this message.

If our feelings are habitually met with a lack of empathy or understanding we eventually stop expressing them. Our experience is that more pain is heaped on top of the hurt we are already experiencing and it becomes easier to cover up our feelings instead.

Societal and cultural beliefs like ‘Boys don’t cry’, that are handed down from generation to generation also lead us to reject our feelings of hurt.

Societal and cultural beliefs like ‘Boys don’t cry’, that are handed down from generation to generation also lead us to reject our feelings of hurt.

It’s important to note that a lot of us from loving homes with the most well-intentioned parents may still have lost touch with our feelings to a certain extent.

The way our parents behaved in some situations may have been due to them acting out of their own limiting beliefs which were passed onto them by their parents. These beliefs are subconscious and are unwittingly passed on, so there’s no need for judgement or blame.

Neither is there any need for self-blame or worry if we feel we could have passed on the limiting beliefs we got from our parents onto our children.

We are all doing the best we can with the information we have at the time.

Responsibility yes, blame, no.

What Happens When We’ve Lost Touch With Our Feelings