Why Is It Hard To Feel Things Sometimes?
I think it’s hard to feel things sometimes because it can be easier to avoid them. I recently discovered in therapy that I used people pleasing and saying that I didn’t know my needs as a copout to not have to feel anything that hurt me or anything that disturbed my general contentment.
Being able to not only identify what you’re feeling, but let yourself feel what you’re feeling without pushing it down or distracting yourself is difficult in a different way than only pushing it down. I think pushing it down is difficult and makes it more difficult in the long-term to connect with those feelings, and puts you in a place where you may lash out in different ways and might not know why you’re feeling how you’re feeling.
However, feeling your feelings is emotionally draining. It's exhausting to feel a feeling that’s hurtful. It’s hard to put in words that something hurt you. When you feel and express that feeling there’s a fear of someone not caring, or being rejected by the feelings that I’m feeling. It also makes it hard to feel feelings sometimes because it feels very invalidating to not have what you’re feeling acknowledged by the thing that hurts you.
Feelings are hard now or they’re hard later just like most things in life. Feelings are hard initially whenever you feel them because there’s a lot that goes into feeling a feeling, and not letting the feeling become you and consume you, just like we can’t let our thoughts become and consume us. I think that’s when feelings become really hard to feel is when we let them become us because then I think it makes us more inclined to be reactive and to stay away from who we really are.
The other kind of hard is when you push the feeling down because you’re not honoring what you’re feeling in the moment you’re not sticking up for what you need. Being yourself can be hard and showing up for yourself can be hard. You just have to choose your hard, one hard will be easy later, and one hard will be easy now and hard later there’s no getting past feelings being hard.
It’s just a matter of when you wanna feel, what foundation do you want to set for your feelings, and how you want your relationship with emotions to be. I read something recently that said that a feeling really only last 90 seconds scientifically and then the rest is your choice.
I feel like that’s really freeing when it comes to finding feelings hard to navigate because you can do anything for 90 seconds. I think when you just let yourself feel for that 90 seconds you can then gain some clarity to identify it and express it or express what you need whether that’s time alone, if that space, or if that’s some kind of understanding or clarity past that 90 seconds.
