The way we express our emotions is really important. Expressing ourselves in an authentic way helps us to get away from mental burdens that hold us back and make us feel low. “Coming to voice and sharing emotions is pivotal to the healing process. In an effort to protect ourselves from invalidating environments and relational trauma, we choose silence and repression of our true feelings. This instinct to suppress can make it difficult to share and understand your emotions – it also means it’s hard to abstract practice wisdom from them – the unexamined history is doomed for repetition. Learning to become more comfortable with expression is something you can work toward,” wrote Psychotherapist Gillian O’Shea Brown.
Here are a few ways to express our emotions better:
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Naming the emotion: The primary thing to do while expressing ourselves is naming the emotions. Be it sadness or anger or disgust or embarrassment, we need to first term the emotion.
Unsafe to express: We need to delve deep into past experiences to understand which situations made us think that it is unsafe to feel and express our emotions.
Mindfulness: Doing meditation or praying or deep breathing exercises helps us to become more mindful and aware of our surroundings.
Introspect: We should look within ourselves and try to understand our own behavioural patterns and emotions better. This helps us to cope with difficult emotions with more clarity.
Compassionate witness: We should try to find people we feel safe with and be vulnerable to them. Expressing our emotions to the right people can make us feel a lot better.
Listening: In case we are not confident with expressing our emotions, we should learn to listen to others expressing – we should allow them to be vulnerable and create a safe space for sharing and expressing difficult emotions.
Identify what upsets you: We need to understand what stops us from expressing ourselves. We should address that.
