Feeling Your Feelings: Emotional Awareness in Therapy

What does it mean when therapists say to feel your feelings, sit with it, be still, etc?  In counseling, this may be something that comes up during sessions. Your therapist may ask you “how does that feel for you?”

In the past, I’ve heard clients express difficulty in doing this and also they wondered, why so much emphasis on the emotions or feelings part?  Don’t therapists just give me advice or tell me what to do? 

Why Are Emotions Important?

Our emotions are important components of being human and they have a purpose.  Emotions communicate to us and others that something is up, and motivate us to take action. 

Identifying our emotions is an important step in learning to regulate our emotions, if we don’t know what’s happening, or are having difficulty naming it, it can also be more difficult to change it. Sometimes if we’ve been stuffing our emotions down for some time, it can seem daunting to start acknowledging them.

Instead of interpreting our emotions as inconvenient, we can see them as signals or clues that get us to pay attention.

Emotional Pain Can Have Physical Components.

Similarly to when you have physical pain, emotions can also be painful. We’ve all heard the expressions such as “I’m worried sick to my stomach,” or “They died of a broken heart.” Emotional pain can have physical components that if we continue to ignore can take a toll on our overall health and well-being. Often, situations such as these can lead us to cope in unhealthy ways that only add to the pain we are already experiencing.

How Does Therapy Help?

That is where working with a therapist can be helpful, in identifying patterns that may be keeping you stuck in a cycle of distress, and help you learn how to cope with emotions that are sometimes unavoidable. If you feel overwhelmed with emotions and are looking for an online therapist in Houston, TX , please reach out and contact me here for a free 15-minute consultation to see if counseling could be right for you.