Learn How to Give Emotional Consent
Emotional consent is when we check in with the folks we love before responding to their stories, concerns or fears.
That allows us to show up in the most loving and respectful way possible. This is the flipside of asking for consent before we respond to others. We can also ask for what we need before we share.
You can get clear on what you’re thinking, feeling, and needing so you can ask for it in conversation.
Giving emotional consent is a vital part of self-love and honoring your own sovereignty, as well as honoring the person you’re speaking with.
Emotional consent is a loving aligned way that we can show up when someone wants to share their emotions, thoughts, and feelings with us.
When we get emotional consent, we check in before sharing our wisdom with someone else to make sure it’s something they want to hear. This is not unlike getting consent before touching someone, engaging physically with them, or even before using someone else’s stuff.
As feminists and respectful responsible humans, we ask before we enter someone else’s physical or emotional space and make sure that they’re on board for whatever we have in mind.
Simply saying, “I have some thoughts about what you shared, is it cool if I share those thoughts or do you just want to be heard right now,” can open up so much space for the person we’re talking with to set a healthy boundary and to tell us what they need in that moment.
Now, I want to talk about being the sharer and how you can set a healthy boundary for yourself before you even start the conversation.
When you’re the one who wants or needs to share something that feels heavy, fraught or emotional and you’d like the listener to do something specific—such as hold space, give advice, share their feedback, or just receive what you’re saying—you get to request that.
You get to understand that the other person is an adult with their own capacities and limitations and they get to show up however they choose.
You get to choose to respect and honor their capacities and or limitations.
Giving emotional consent can sound like, “Hey, I’m so excited about this new offering in my practice. Can I share about it with you and can you just hear me for now?”
Or, “I’m really sad that my wombat, Charlie, died. I don’t want to hear about how there are more wombats in the sea or that I can get a new wombat. I just miss Charlie and I want to talk about how soft and sweet he was. Can you hold space for that, or can I share for a few minutes and can you hold off on giving advice?”
Doing this takes just a few seconds and can help you get what you want and need from a conversation.
This is, as with any boundary, a gift that we give ourselves and the person we’re connecting with because it gives them clean and clear guidelines for what you want and need. They can then decide how they want to show up for you, knowing your request.
This is a kindness, asking directly.
For example, if there are specific foods you do or don’t eat and someone invites you over for dinner, it’s a kindness to yourself and the other person to say, “I don’t eat gluten,” or, “I don’t eat dairy,” or, “I don’t eat meat,” so they can know your preference and can plan accordingly.
Rather than not asking for what you want and need, then being grumpy, resentful or irritated when you get to your friend’s house and they made you their grandma’s special lasagna.
You are worth speaking up for.
It’s worth the momentary discomfort of doing something new, like stating your needs or stating a boundary, to get what you want and need in conversation and otherwise.
What we’re talking about here is a kind of boundaries issue.
You get to say what you want and need in a conversation, understanding that the other person may not be able or willing to meet you in the way you’d like.
If you set a boundary that’s not respected, you don’t have to have any bad or negative feelings about the other person, your relationship, or yourself.
It’s just more information about them and how they’re able or willing to show up.
Maybe you choose to get vulnerable and share some really deep stuff with your friend Sarah and you set a healthy boundary beforehand. You share that you just want to be heard. Then she launches into advice-giving mode. Cool, that’s what she’s capable of. That’s how she shows up.
You don’t need to make her into some villain or make her ability to honor your boundary mean anything at all about you, or even about her.
You always get to offer calm, peace, love, acceptance, and gentleness for others and yourself to your own beautiful heart.
One of the places that I see people struggle with asking for what they want or need in a conversation is around, well, not knowing what they want and need.
Growing up, I often didn’t know what I wanted or needed. I also didn’t know how to talk about emotions. I had no modeling in my family of origin for talking about feelings, much less this whole concept of boundaries.
As a young person, I didn’t want to voice my own thoughts, feelings or needs for fear of making someone mad, annoyed or risk someone having a negative reaction to me.
Not knowing what I wanted or needed and not knowing how to express it was a huge barrier to my healing that I put up right around myself.
The beauty of thought work and breath work is that these combined modalities have shown me that if I put the steel walls up around my own heart, then I have the power to bring them down.
I can swap them out on the daily for flexible, thoughtful, clean, clear stated boundaries based on knowing and believing in myself. I can own my value and worth on this planet and give voice to that.
Thought work gave me the tools to pull back and to recognize that no one can make me feel anything.
In the same way that my stating my needs can’t make anyone angry unless they have the thought, “I don’t like what she said.” Thought work also gave me the tools to ask myself, “What am I feeling right now?”
When I didn’t know or don’t know today, when nothing has come to me in mind or body, that’s when I can count on my breathwork.
This is a meditation that can help move my body out of all that panicky cortisol-y fight or flight sympathetic state into a calmer, more grounded centered parasympathetic state by connecting with my breath.
I come out of a short breathwork experience with this intense bodily knowing that I can process through my body. Then I can take that knowing to my thought work.
With this increased clarity around my own feels, I can then step back and ask, what thought am I writing in my mind that is leading to this feeling that I now recognize, through breathwork, in my body.
From there, I can do what we do in thought work, examine the think- feel-act cycle to see what that feeling was creating in my life. I can write down the situation, my thought about it, the feeling that I have when I think that thought, the action I take when I feel that feeling in my body, and the outcome of that action or inaction.
Before thought work and breathwork, that action outcome was often my going along with what someone else wanted and letting resentment and irritation build up in me.
Now, with these magical twin tools, I can much more easily get in touch with my own feelings, my wants and needs, and can express them more easily.
I can process them through my body with my own breath, as my own healer, and can choose new thoughts to create new feelings in my body, which leads me to take different and more aligned action.
Other barriers to voicing our needs can be found in conversation with our perfect and amazing inner children.
If we turn back the clock to childhood, we see that each of us had unique childhood experiences, even those of us raised in the same household. Psychologists have identified some patterns that are common. Knowing that our experience may be at least similar to those of other people can help us feel less alone as we process our younger years.
One common experience that can make it hard for us as adults to feel connected to our own wants, needs, and preferences is the experience of being a parentified child—a term that means being asked to be parent-like when we were just a kiddo.
As children, some of us were asked to step into adult-like roles before we were developmentally ready. Maybe you had the burden of parenting younger siblings, had the weight of your parent’s lives, health, wellness and finances put on your tiny shoulders.
Circumstances and realities meant that you had to grow up real fast if you were to survive your childhood home.
In these situations, a young person has to stay focused on the management and survival of others. While parentified children can most certainly develop to be highly responsible and reliable adults, they can also suffer from feelings of disconnection from themselves because of so many years spent worrying about others.
This can often come to look like codependence.
For these kiddos and others, finding the words to say, “I’ve had a hard day and just want to share without any input,” may feel selfish or impossible.
We can use tools like thought work and breathwork to better understand and rewire our thinking around asking others for support.
Even the parentified child in adulthood can learn to listen to themselves and speak up to get what they need.
Another common and challenging childhood experience is that of being raised by parents or others in our families who triangulate their feelings, asking us to be the go-between between two family members. For example, “I’m so done with this. Tell your mother that I’m not taking you to swim class anymore.”
This kind of behavior can be really confusing for a child, or for an adult, and can take us out of our capacity to know what we want and need. Again, we’re being asked to attend to what others want and need first.
The challenges that we face as adults often grow from seeds planted in childhood. Exploring the inner child can bring to light so much useful information to put in our toolkits as we move forward.
It is important to ask for emotional consent when someone comes to us in their feelings, whether excited, sad, angry, or confused, those emotions are theirs. We, with love and respect, can allow them to feel their feels before we jump in with our own ideas, solutions, and concerns.
It’s also important for us, when we’re feeling emotions, big or small, get to ask our conversation partners for what we need.
“Hey, I need a listening ear right now,” or, “I want to share something super exciting—do you have the space to just hear my story?” Or, “Oh my god, I had the worst day and I just need to vent, would you be able to be a sounding board and I’ll let you know if I want feedback?”
Remember, there is power and kindness in asking for what we need.
Sometimes, we can give our consent for feedback and then realize we don’t actually want it once we’ve heard it, and that’s okay.
The beauty of boundaries is that they’re malleable, flexible, and the beauty of consent is that it can be rescinded if it’s no longer aligned for us.
When we change our behaviors, it can sometimes be challenging for others to adjust. It can throw our conversation partners off balance.
In those awkward moments, I want to invite you to slow down, pause, take a few deep breaths with a longer exhale.
Asking for consent is a fair, thoughtful, self-loving, kind thing to do.
If your conversation partner doesn’t know how to handle your request for consent, that’s okay. You can do your best to meet them with loving acceptance, without judging, blaming or criticizing.
Each of us is on our own journey, and if you’re in a place to live a life built on emotional consent but your relationship partners aren’t, that’s okay.
What someone else is thinking is never about you. It’s about themselves and their cultural context which leads to their own habitual thoughts and reactive feelings.
State what you need thoughtfully, clearly, and with love. Stay focused on yourself, your journey, your values, your sovereignty and your needs.
Pause in conversation before you start to share something that feels tender or charged. Feel your feels about it, honor your inner child, honor your history and honor your habitual thoughts.
Get right with yourself about how you want to show up today as an adult in a way that loves, honors, and respects you and the people you’re in conversation with.
Ask for consent before giving advice and ask for what you need and want before you start talking.
Remember that other people’s reactions to you is none of your business. If someone isn’t able to honor your boundary, that has nothing to do with you and it doesn’t mean that there’s some terrible horrible person. It simply means that they have limitations in their capacities and you get to choose, for your own best mental wellness, to honor that about them and not make it about you.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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