Get In Touch with Your Feelings!

I used to despise it when people would ask me “How are you doing (feeling) today?” First off, I didn’t believe anyone REALLY wanted to know the answer to that question. And secondly, I often times didn’t know, or didn’t want to face, how I was feeling.

Can you identify what you’re feeling today-- right now—in this moment? Are you feeling content, sad, happy, anxious, afraid, cautious, mad, bored, impatient, tired, excited or restless? Or are you feeling “fine,” which usually means numb or basically out of touch with your feelings all together?

A major problem for people suffering from codependency or other forms of addictive behavior is that they are completely out of touch with their bodies and thus their feelings. They’ve grown use to living inside of their heads and out of their bodies. So they can’t tell in any given moment what they’re feeling, shy of anger, fear or frustration.

I remember telling someone once about a friend who had lied to me. We were supposed to go to a movie, but he got a better offer. Instead of being honest with me, he called and said he was feeling sick. I believed him and stayed home because I didn’t like going to movies by myself. I later found out the truth and I was very angry. The person I was sharing this story with asked me “What did you feel before you felt angry?” I didn’t have an answer. I thought for a few moments and then said “Angry!” He said “No, you had to feel something else first.”

I thought some more and decided I was right and all I had felt was anger. But this person challenged that idea and asked “Didn’t you feel betrayed first?” I thought some more and decided that feeling betrayed sounded logical. After all, my friend had lied to me, but I didn’t remember feeling betrayed. Then he said “And didn’t you feel hurt next?” That made sense, too, but I didn’t remember feeling hurt either.

Why had I missed-out on those two feelings? Because I had learned as a small child to shutdown those and other feelings that were too painful to experience. I didn’t want to feel betrayed, or hurt, or a sense of loss, or sorrow. So I learned to turn-off those feelings. And I replaced them with anger and self-pity. As I learned to shutdown my feelings, I took myself out of my body (the feeling center) and drew myself up into my mind (the thought center). As a result, feelings eventually made no sense to me; only thoughts did.

When we enter recovery programs, like A.A. or CODA, we learn that understanding our feelings is essential to building good, healthy relationships. And we also learn just how out of touch we are with our own feelings. Failure to face our feelings has kept us stuck in dysfunctional behavior and has clouded our thinking. It’s kept us from taking responsibility for our lives. When we refuse to face our feelings, we are unable to set proper boundaries with other people. We then allow people to walk all over us, and, at times, we become guilty of walking all over others.

In addition, our inability to face our feelings has led us into many other patterns of unhealthy behavior, like caretaking, people-pleasing and other forms of manipulation. Failure to face our feelings has also forced us to push people we loved away when they started getting too close for comfort. Once those nasty of feelings began raising their ugly heads, we felt anxious and fearful, so we did everything in our power to alienate ourselves from those who were forcing us to face those feelings—even if it meant losing people we didn’t want to lose from our lives.

Get in touch with your feelings today. Take time throughout your day to ask yourself “How am I feeling right now?” Then jot it down on a piece of paper. It’s important to put a name to each feeling (shame, joy, fearful, etc.), to own them and to simply be with them. Get in touch with yourself right now. And remember this: It’s OK to feel whatever you’re feeling. There are no bad feelings; just necessary ones!