What if I told you, that the only way to feel better, if, let’s say, you’re sad, is to feel…sad?
You’re probably thinking… “What the fuck does that mean? I’d rather not feel sad. Who wants to feel sad?”
I get it. I do.
I spent a lot of my life trying NOT to feel my feelings.
My favorite way of not feeling my feelings is to be really busy. My second favorite way is to intellectualize everything. “Oh, I’m mad about xyz because of zyx unmet need in my childhood.”
What I’ve realized, is I don’t always allow myself to actually FEEL overwhelmed, sad or angry.
How do you know if you feel the feelings?
Answer this: when you start to cry… do you try to stop the tears? Do you hold back?
When you feel anxious, do you start doing something that’s supposed to help calm the anxiety?
Have you ever sat and just… let the tears come? Let the anxiety come?
It's okay, most of us don’t. It’s possible because we believe this horrible feeling will last forever, or will overcome us if we let it.
Most of us probably have some beliefs surrounding our feelings- for example, “If I feel bad, I am bad”. “If I let myself be angry, I’ll do terrible things.”
These are all just stories we tell ourselves.
I would encourage you to take a moment, next time you have a strong, unwanted feeling, and ask yourself… If I show this emotion, if I let myself feel this emotion? What am I worried will happen? What do I make it mean?
When I first started nursing, I thought sharing tears with a patient meant I wasn’t strong enough, and that I couldn’t hack it in medicine.
And that never felt authentic to me. Still, after delivering bad news to a family, or something worse, I’d learn to stuff it all down and move onto the next task.
It was a problem when I never went back to unpack these emotions. Developing burnout, vicarious trauma, and chronic pain, I learned that this was all emotion trapped in my body. Energy with nowhere to go.
My body was telling me that something was wrong and I didn’t listen.
Years later, when I let myself actual feel that grief, anguish and sadness, I cried for many of the patients I didn’t cry for before. Their faces flashed before me as I broke down sobbing, letting the tears come, letting my body shake.
To my surprise, it didn’t last long. 13 years of sadness that filled me came out in just a few minutes that day. And I felt better. I felt lighter.
Learning that emotions are just physical sensations in the body, just information that your brain is telling you about your environment, helped me do this. I had to explore what the emotions meant to me. Or rather, what I was making it mean.
Hillary L. McBride, a Canadian therapist wrote,
“We heal when we can be with what we feel. In other words, trying to make feelings go away…won’t do it.”
If you are suffering from burnout or vicarious trauma or even chronic pain, part of your healing is to be with those feelings.
In order to do this, you need to examine the thoughts you have around them.
As a coach, I can help you to unpack these beliefs, and fill your toolbelt with new ways of being with your emotions- an essential step on your path to healing.
We can continue this conversation together- my books are open.

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