This post is part of the Difficult Conversations series. Start from the beginning [here].

It’s important when feelings come up, especially difficult ones, that we take the effort to own them. If we don’t own our feelings, we may mistakenly put them onto someone else. This, in the psych world, is what we lovingly call projection. And projecting our feelings onto someone else can make a difficult conversation even more difficult. So we are going to take a moment to talk about recognizing and processing our feelings in a healthy and beneficial way.

Recognizing Feelings

I like to think of recognizing feelings as one of our senses, known as introception. Introception is the sense of the body’s internal physical and emotional state. Introception not only applies to sensing one’s emotional state, but also sensing things like the need to have a bowel movement, hunger cues, and recognizing that you are tired. Here, we are going to focus on introception in the sense of recognizing your own emotional state.

So, what practices can we use to recognize our feelings?

• Body scans
  • Mentally scanning the body from head to toe to identify physical sensations and underlying emotional states.
    • Example: increased heart rate, dry mouth, and sweaty palms could indicate anxiety.
• Labeling
  • Identifying and labeling specific emotions as they are being experienced. This can help decrease the intensity of the emotion and allow the body to move from a reactive state to a reflective state.

Processing Feelings

Take a look at Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, and you’ll recognize many ways we protect ourselves from our feelings. These mechanisms may be helpful in the short run (Example – you just learned upsetting news, and you need to go to work, it can be helpful in the short term to repress the feeling). However, in the long run, we need to process our feelings so that they don’t show up unintentionally in other life situations (Example – you are upset at your husband and then yell at your child). However, to process them, we must sit with them. Sitting with them is letting your feelings be there without judgment or trying to fix it. Acting on a feeling is NOT sitting with it. Sitting with it is observing the feeling, allowing it, letting it be, and then eventually letting it go. 

Below are several practices to sit with feelings. 

• RAIN Technique
  • This article by the creator of the technique describes the process in depth.
• Mindful Observation
  • Focus on the feeling in the present moment. Notice it and observe it. Release your judgment of it, view it as if its your first time looking at it. Investigate the sensation. Be curious. How does it feel within your body? Recognize that all emotions are temporary and this emotion will pass too.
• Self-Compassion
  • Be kind to yourself and give yourself grace. Care for yourself as you would care for a good friend. Remind yourself that emotions are neither good nor bad, and as humans, we all experience the full range of them. Recognizing and sitting with emotions provides us with the depth and richness of life we could not experience in their absence.
• Journaling
  • Provides us a safe, nonjudgmental space to sit with our emotions. Journaling, just like labeling, can help to create distance from the emotion and decrease the intensity. The distance allows us to observe the emotion and reflect on it (instead of reacting). Journaling can also be helpful with identifying patterns and providing clarity.

Which of these practices feels most natural to you? Reply in the comments—I’d love to know what’s worked for you.

Next week, we’ll discuss how our feelings shape our narrative and our narrative shapes our feelings. Subscribe to our newsletter below or follow us on Instagram or Facebook to get notifications of blog postings. We post new blog articles every Wednesday evening.