Healing Isn’t Linear: Learn to Feel Your Feels
Healing does not mean not having feelings. Growing and changing and healing and becoming your most intentional self does not mean never experiencing pain or heartache or irritation. It doesn’t mean staying centered and grounded and living in good vibes only all the time because that’s just not how the world works. Certainly not how brains work.
Instead, healing to me means learning and knowing and coming to believe that you, yes you, have the power to come back to center within yourself, for yourself, regardless of what happens. It starts with awareness and with understanding and accepting that healing isn’t linear, and some days are just freaking lousy.
This framework of “I’m so upset that I stepped back into a pattern that I have had for the last 30 years” comes from this belief, this false story that when you’re healed or healing or doing whatever spiritual, mental, or other work on yourself for your own growth, you should be impervious to human emotions.
And in this ironic turn of things, that framework, that story that you should not have your feels actually leads to so much unnecessary feels. That is self-flagellation. It turns out that in fact, no number of green juices, amazing herbal potions, voyages with the grandmother plant, breathwork sessions, or daily future self or thought work practices you complete will leave you a person who doesn’t have human emotions, human experiences on this complex planet in this fascinating time.
What I support my clients in doing, what I think one of the most vital practices is is to learn to see your own mind. Not to judge your mind, not to criticize your thoughts and your feelings, but rather to be your own watcher, to raise your awareness of your habitual thoughts so you can decide if you want to keep those thoughts and the feelings they’re creating, if they serve you and the collective wellness.
My darling, let this one sink in.
Healing isn’t linear. There’s not a direct path to a blissful Zen state and then you’re done.
Everything in your life is 100% perfect 100% of the time. That’s not how it works. And in my book, the goal of healing is not to never feel discomfort, to never feel lousy, to never be irritable or sad or angry or annoyed or to spin in self-doubt or feeling unworthy or less than.
The goal of healing work in my world is in the process and practice of seeing ourselves as we really are and feeling that little zap of sympathetic activation energy in your belly and honoring it. It’s about a slow return to yourself, your own body, your communities.
It’s in feeling your irritability starting to wind up like a clock and to notice it when it’s a level one, before you get to 12 out of 10 and rip your partner’s head off over something silly. It’s about awareness, followed as we do, with acceptance. And finally, the most important action, coming back to ourselves with compassion, love, and care always.
It is not about embodying or working towards another perfectionist thought fantasy, about feeling 110% perfect and amazing and always awesome all the time. I mean, that’s just not what being a human is. It’s not how human brains and bodies work.
This work, the work I support my clients do, the work I do on myself each and every day, it’s about feeling your feelings, but truly feeling them, recognizing where they live in your body and honoring them.
Learning to say, “I think I’m getting a little upset right now, I’m going to take a break,” or, “I’m feeling annoyed and I think it may be because I just need some alone time. I’ll holler at you in an hour,” or, “Babe, I’m feeling sad. Will you hold me?” versus stuffing it down.
It’s about feeling it all, loving it all, sitting with the discomfort just a little more each time it arises and learning to accept that being human comes with suffering.
Recognizing there is no yin without the yang, no light without the dark, no stepping into your brightest light without getting to know your shadow, no happy times if you don’t let yourself feel the crappiness and suckyness and yuckers of life, which is totally not pleasant or comfortable, but is so necessary.
It’s so necessary to let yourself be real with it, to feel it all, sometimes little by little, but to work towards feeling it. Not stuffing it down or buffering against it. And for me overall, what this points to is this; there’s no “there” to get to with this work. No goal, no end point, no marker that means you hit the healing jackpot and now everything will be sunshine and roses and puppies who never pee on the floor.
My beauty, all puppies pee on the floor. It’s their job. They also eat your shoes and bite you with time razor teeth, but their sweet little paws smell like Fritos and they’re so magical when they look at you with love. Yin, yang, light, shadow.
So too, you will continue to have human emotions.
Things will feel terrible, things will suck, things will be hard and challenging, and that is human life.
And the work as I see it is to not shoot the second arrow into your own tender heart, which in short means not to make yourself feel worse about a situation by telling yourself that you shouldn’t feel bad about a situation, to layer on the blame, shame, and guilt, none of these things serve you.
And being upset that something is upsetting simply makes you more upset.
My beloved sweet kitten, the healing is in the acceptance of your feelings and your struggle.
And please note, acceptance doesn’t mean to condone or to approve of anyone else’s behaviors, of challenging situations, systemic oppression, or whatever else may be weighing on your tenderness, but rather to quit pushing against the life-ness of life because that is a healing act in and of itself.
It is beautiful and vital to feel your feelings, to process them through your body. To experience the range of human emotion, knowing and believing and trusting that your perfect body knows what to do with all of your feels given the opportunity.
And knowing and believing that it’s in your own best interest to feel them all, instead of trying to leapfrog over them, to spiritually or emotionally bypass, which means trying to do anything you can to not feel them. Telling yourself that it’s wrong or you’re bad for feeling an emotion that is generally labeled as negative takes you out of feeling that emotion.
And here’s the catch, here’s the rub with this. Doing so is a kind of buffering, which means attempting to push a feeling aside instead of feeling it. But wait, how mind-blowing is that?
Feeling bad about feeling bad is buffering against the original emotion you had.
Instead of feeling, for example, the irritation or anger you had about a conversation with your mom, you turn inward and get mad at yourself about getting upset at her, you’re buffering against that original feeling. Fascinating, right?
And my beauty, we have to remember what you don’t feel you can’t heal.
So our goal is never to push the feelings away but rather to let them all flow through. And yes, especially for folks with a trauma history, we need to titrate how much we feel, to take it in little by little, drop by drop, to feel challenging feels in small amounts, to not throw ourselves down a dark hole of depression, but rather to let the little things flow through and to get used to experiencing them and surviving. Not collapsing forever, as your brain may fear you will do.
I know how it feels to worry that a feeling will kill you. I’m no stranger to that. But what I’ve learned is that no feeling itself will kill you. Many are super-duper challenging, no doubt. But with care, gentleness, love, and the right guidance and support, you can learn to feel all your feels and to stop fearing them and pushing them away.
Let yourself feel it all, cry it out and see what that feels like on the other side. For me, it usually feels amazing.
Healing our wounds, managing our minds is about cultivating a deep belief that you can cry and fully experience your feelings through your body.
You can come back to yourself with love in learning a new way to come back to your grounding and your center, and you can learn to manage your mind around any and all circumstances so you can have peace in your heart. But also a grumpy afternoon of doubting yourself. A morning of being annoyed or angry. And that’s okay. It means zero bad things about you. Promise.
Getting rid of lousy feelings is not the goal because that would make you not human.
The goal is to be more in touch with our humanity, our deep humanness, to learn how to navigate those moments where we can be radically honest and real and loving with the parts of us that are having foot-stompy feelings, who are in emotional childhood and blaming everyone and everything else for our feelings so we can give those parts of ourselves love and care, so we can eventually move on, but not until you’ve felt it all and gotten really real with yourself around it.
And then and only then, once you have felt it in your body do I recommend that you do your thought work around it to identify the story, the internal narrative, the habitual unintentional thought that is keeping you feeling however you’re feeling and recognize your pain can be your greatest gift. It’s an option. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can choose to use the painful, lousy, F-ed up situations and experiences in life as an opportunity to see yourself as a person who learns and grows from these experiences. Take note of my careful wording here.
I’m not on that “all bad things happen for a reason, just see the beauty in it, positive vibes only” bandwagon.
No, mi amor. No. It’s always a choice. All this work is.
Babe, you can stay in the grump and the anger and all of it for as long as you want and need to, as long as you decide to. You always get to choose that, and no one should ever be telling you to just get over it because that is oppressive, it’s rude, it’s traumatic, it’s stressful, I’m not here for it.
If righteous anger fuels you towards getting amazing things done then rock on with it.
For me, these days, feeling the anger, processing it through my body and then deciding to shift from anger as motivation to self-love or love for community, love for vulnerable populations, love for the earth, whatever it is, that love as motivation has always been a more sustainable fuel for me in the long run.
But you always get to do you, my perfect one. You just get to be real about what your thoughts and your feelings are creating in your life and to love yourself throughout the way.
The point here is this—the more you come back to yourself, the more often you’re able to get into alignment with yourself, to support yourself, to right the boat when you start to tip over, every time you do that, you’re opening up space in your heart for curiosity, to ask yourself why.
Why am I thinking this? Why am I feeling this? What is happening in the truest deepest recesses of my heart? And to come back to yourself and your unending capacity to ground yourself in yourself. And just how strong you are to have survived and thrived through all you’ve been through.
To give yourself love and care and to ask for co-regulation, to ask for support from others, from the earth, from the plants and animals around you, even if it’s through a Zoom screen these days. As a way to support your beautiful nervous system, to support your healing by coming back to you.
My beauty, it’s not about not having the blip. It’s about recognizing that life is so blip-filled and accepting that, moving with that. Not against it. Not fighting it, but rather embracing it and remembering how strong and powerful you are, and just how far you’ve come.
Have your own back for you. Accept the slings and arrows of this life because they’re going to keep coming. Know in your heart that this, feeling the feels, coming back to yourself, accepting that whatever is happening is happening and coming to believe that you have the strength to support you through it all.
This is you healing 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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