Controlling your emotions starts with feeling them

Many people still claim that controlling one’s feelings means putting them aside and focusing on something else.
Controlling our emotions looks completely different. It is the opposite of the mentioned solution. In order to control your emotions, you should not avoid or ignore and shut them down. Think about it for a moment, do you really think that by avoiding something you actually have control over it? It’s not possible to have control over something that you do not even see, hear, or feel. It’s logical, isn’t it?

Many of us fell into this trap at some point in our lives and we never questioned it. We probably learned it when we were entirely young but since we’re adults now, we have the power to change that.

Controlling our emotions in a healthy way

Controlling our emotions in a healthy way means raising awareness, and giving permission for feelings to be there. Accepting them, and being with them. Control means living with those feelings at the moment, and feeling those feelings.

We may have learned while we were young, so young that we don’t even remember learning it, to shut down any undesirable feeling for fear of what it will do to us, but paradoxically when feelings are really felt, they don’t stay with us for long. In reality, the discomfort of fear, sadness, anger, or any other feeling is much less than the discomfort of anxiety, anger, or panic we feel, which comes as a result of ignoring what is primarily bothering us.

Whatever you feel, feel. Let it be there. Give those feelings a hug. When you were little, your need to express emotion was not met. They were probably forbidden to you and considered undesirable and endangered. But today you are not a child anymore and you can change your patterns entirely. I promise you that you can because it happened to me as well. That’s why you should allow them to be there and take up their space. Remember that you are the only person that can do that and no one will do it for you. If you need help through that journey, feel free to contact me. Your inner child deserves to see how much you love her or him.

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