Emotions are the heartbeats of your life
Your emotional world
Emotions are messengers and guides, protectors and warriors
Yet it is vital as humans to learn how to navigate this emotional landscape because it allows us to recognise what we’re feeling and, most importantly, what we can do about it. Without this knowledge, our emotions remain scary and unfamiliar. We see them as a Pandora’s Box that, if opened, would let loose chaos both inside and out.
We learn a lot as children, good and bad, from the hypotenuse of a triangle to that pervasive sense of ‘not enough-ness’. One thing we rarely learn however is how to navigate our inner world of emotions. This means that we often grow up finding feelings overwhelming, confusing or tantalisingly out of reach, and so shut them down, out of fear of feeling … anything.
Yet the more we befriend our feelings, the more we can work with them - acknowledging, honouring and containing them in comfort and peace.
How to befriend your feelings
1. We learn to identify our core emotions and notice when they appear.
2. We then work hard to notice how they show up in our body, helping us to grow our emotional lexicon and provide an early warning system.
3. We discover nuanced emotions and what these are telling us about our lives, and absorb these messages into our goals and priorities.
4. We receive the messages our emotions are sending us and decode their cognitive truths - and fictions.
5. We build up our comfort levels to sit with emotions, even the most challenging ones.
6. We begin to learn how to turn up and down our ‘emotional volume’ which is great for those times when you need a quick pause.
7. We start to notice when we want to feel some of the ‘difficult’ feelings and learn how to welcome them in and hold them with compassion.
7. And then we build ways to express our emotions to others and have them heard and held in safety.
Sounds good? It really is!
Emotional work is revolutionary and can be a lot of fun (anger work? Yes please!) and will leave you feeling in control, rooted in yourself, and confident and empowered with others.
Testimonial on discovering emotions
“Following a difficult childhood and an abusive marriage, I had learnt to shut down my feelings. Partly, I’d never learnt to notice them, in fact I’d learnt to ignore them. There had been a lot of ‘hushing’ of my emotions as a child and I frequently felt “too much”. I internalised a lot in my teens and then, in my marriage, realised that my feelings could be used as weapons against me.
I was shut down.
I started working with Eleanor for help to get out of my marriage but quickly discovered that when she’d ask me what I was feeling, I’d reply in thoughts, like “I’m feeling that I’m useless and I’ll never escape this life”. Through our work together, she helped me to explore what I was actually feeling. And also why this was so scary for me.
She taught me techniques that I used every day to try to access my feelings and it was like I was a child, learning to be an adult, learning to feel things again. I felt rubbish at it at times, but Eleanor was really gentle and patient, and our sessions involved laughter as well as tears. She held my hand through it all, even between our sessions, she reached out every day on WhatsApp to see how I was doing.
From the day I started working with her, I stopped feeling like I was doing it all alone and began to realise we were actually doing it together. It was revolutionary. I’d felt so isolated, so alone. And now someone was in my corner, 24/7.
I left my marriage a year ago and on the day of my divorce Eleanor sent me a sunflower in the post to symbolise my new start and I have it with me in the corner of the room when we have our weekly sessions. She is always there for me and without her I think I’d still be this shut down thing that felt nothing, scared of all those big scary emotions inside. Now I feel I’m finally living fully for the first time in decades.
“I bumped into my shadow on the way to thorny feelings
she whispered to me:
‘You can’t rush your healing
Its time is not measured in seconds but steps
some forward, some backward
then forward again”
— Valentina Quarta
Case Study: A deepening relationship
Adam approached me for answers to his failing relationship. His wife was unhappy and arguments were increasing. He was lost and confused about what was going wrong and his wife seemed to have lost patience. They were in last chance saloon and Adam was desperate for solutions, or he was facing life without the woman he loved.
As we started to work together, it became clear that Adam was very solution focused. His wife would go quiet and withdrawn. He’d become annoyed and confused. He would ask her what was wrong and he’d either get a “nothing” that actually meant “everything” or he’d get a barrage of criticism about his lack of effort, lack of warmth, lack of care, lack of love. He would put forward solution after solution, often asking his wife what he could do and what she needed from him. This seemed to cause even more antagonism and battle lines were quickly drawn.
I asked him how he thought his wife was feeling during a recent argument. He went on to describe what she’d said, what he’d suggested and her short response. I asked again how she might have been feeling … Adam was unable to guess. I suggested a few possibilities and he paused and considered each in term. “I honestly don’t know” he eventually replied. His homework that week was to go away and try to guess what his wife was feeling throughout the week.
It was revolutionary. With the help of tools and techniques from me, Adam came to recognise what his wife was feeling and held space for her to express these feelings and have them heard without immediately offering solutions. He learnt how to communicate with her so she felt heard and understood, and recognised her core needs and go about meeting them.
And most importantly, during this journey, Adam began to understand his own feelings - of feeling rejected, lonely, unappreciated. And he began to work on expressing these feelings in a way that his wife could access. Together they began a process of learning each other’s needs, meeting them and holding each other’s emotions for them, in companionship and compassion.
Adam attends my sessions now and is able to express his emotions, and even recognise them before they appear through an awareness of how they show up in his body first. He is confident and adept at emotional expression and, most importantly, is looking forward to a long and happy future with the woman he loves.
“Eleanor saved my marriage. It’s as simple as that.”
— Adam, 52
Nothing ever changes by doing things the same.
Reach out and take the first step towards doing things differently and creating the life you truly want.