Staying in touch with our feelings - A guide

By Lukas Klaschinski

Feelings are like the weather: sometimes thick clouds roll in, sometimes it's half clear or half overcast - depending on how you look at it - and on a perfect day the sun shines brightly. One thing is certain: feelings are temporary. They stay with us for a certain amount of time, then they leave again and are in a constant state of flux.

Why do we block out our feelings?

Many of us have grown up with a different view of emotions: Emotions such as anger, shame, sadness or loneliness are incredibly unpleasant and because we often experience them as overwhelming, we learn not to allow them in the first place. Instead, we chase after feelings of happiness as if our lives depended on it.

Contrary to the promises that romantic comedies and love songs convey to us, I don't believe that life is about being happy. At least not all the time. It's about many things: about the security of our family, about pursuing life goals that we set for ourselves, about facing crises and setbacks, about caring for the people around us. And yes, also: happiness and anticipation, hope and fun. However, psychological research shows that what actually makes us content in the messiness of life is not the persistent pursuit of happiness. It is the ability to allow and feel all the feelings that are brewing inside us. This is what I call emotional readiness.

Why do we need emotional readiness?

Emotions are information carriers. They spread throughout our body - for example when fear chokes our throat or joy tickles our stomach - and send us important signals. If we feel joy, this is a clear sign that we need more of this good thing. Anger, on the other hand, marks a crossing of boundaries. It calls out: ‘Stop, stop, this far and no further!’. Shame stops us from staying in contact with our group when we could violate the norms of togetherness. Grief tells us of a loss, of the absence of someone important to us. And fear is an alarm signal that warns us of possible danger and thus protects us. With this in mind, it quickly becomes clear that we cannot do without feelings. They are the language of our inner experience; they guide us like a navigation system.

Pushing away fear, just like any other emotion, can have negative consequences for us in three ways. On the one hand, we give the emotion great power over us if we don't let it. Fear will always be like a stone in our shoe if we don't take it in hand and look at it closely. It can cause us to miss out on important things in our lives - like road trips or changing jobs - because we can't get rid of the unpleasant feeling. Feeling it also means being able to let it go.

On the other hand, research shows that suppressing our emotional impulses has fatal consequences for our mental health and can lead to depression. This is because when we switch off unpleasant feelings such as anger, we inevitably switch off all pleasant feelings such as joy and hope. Emotions are like a mixer on which there is only one master control. Being alive means feeling the highs as well as the lows. The only alternative is emotional numbness.

Stay in touch with your feelings

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, emotions form the bridges between us and the people in our lives. We communicate through emotions, using them to express our love, attachment, frustration and conflicts. Those who have lost touch with their own feelings also lose touch with the people around them. Our ability to empathise depends largely on accepting the other person's perspective and sensing how the other person may be feeling at the moment. Only those who have familiarised themselves with their own feelings and have learned to bear and endure them can do this.

When my partner comes home from work in a rage because her colleague has stolen her idea, I can let go of her anger and express how frustrating the situation must be for her. In the past, when I myself preferred to put my anger in a corner, I might have snapped at my partner, blamed her for a situation that wasn't her fault or minimised her feelings: It's no big deal, what's wrong with you again! Unfortunately, this would have made my partner feel even worse. Not only did I not validate her feelings, but I also brought distance into our relationship.

A guide to feeling: How do we find our way back to feeling?

If we want to stay in touch with ourselves and with the people who are important to us, our willingness to feel is crucial. But how do I find a good way of dealing with my emotions? How do I get back the feeling that I have long pushed away?

I would like to give you three simple tools for this. I have derived these from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a relatively new therapeutic approach that has been tried and tested in several thousand studies and is used with professional athletes, medical staff and depression patients.

1) Mindfulness

The first method in our toolbox of life is the simplest and most difficult at the same time: mindfulness. Many of us who have a problem with feeling find it difficult to be still. This is because the unpleasant feelings such as loneliness or shame that we have drowned out with the noise of life often surface in moments of inactivity. The first step towards feeling is therefore to find our way back to calm and to our senses. To do this, we strengthen our body awareness and feel which physical impulses want to draw attention to themselves. There are various exercises to specifically sharpen the senses for experiencing the body, such as the body scan. This involves mentally scanning all areas of the body with your eyes closed. Every feeling is expressed in physical sensations and it is through these that we make initial contact with our emotions.

This focussed awareness of the body and the present moment takes practice. But those who practise this in silence will later remain in contact with their own emotions even in heated situations and react authentically from this position.

2) Acceptance

In addition to mindfulness, there is a second basic pillar of emotional readiness: acceptance. With this, we allow the feelings that we now hear knocking at the door thanks to mindfulness, open the gates and allow them to flow through us. We say: Yes, feelings, you can be here and you have a place.

This does not mean that we should always take our feelings at face value. If we feel nervous anxiety about a road trip, that doesn't mean we shouldn't go on the journey. But we should take the anxiety seriously and listen to the worries it raises. We can react to some of these worries - for example by double-checking the fuel level in the tank - and we can recognise other worries as unjustified and send them back to where they came from.

3) Thought cinema

The last method I would like to introduce here is thought cinema. It is derived from the psychotherapeutic idea of ‘defusion’. At its core is the goal of gaining distance from a feeling or a thought so that we are not completely controlled by it. A feeling is a feeling and we are not one with our feelings. We are more than that.

But how do we achieve this? There are various tricks we can use to create this distance. One is what I call the thought cinema. A lot of thoughts haunt our minds, and some of them get in the way rather than helping us move forward. To get out of these mental spirals, it can help to take a seat in the cinema and observe exactly what is going on inside us. We all have a level-headed, adult self within us that can make such observations.

Let's take this sentence that many of us carry around: ‘I am only lovable if I have achieved something.’ Now let's watch ourselves think and comment: I have the thought that I am only lovable if I have achieved something. Okay, can you feel that? We've already gained some distance. We can take that even further: I notice that I have the thought that I am only lovable if I have achieved something. Suddenly big thoughts lose their overwhelming effect.

Another personal favourite of mine is singing thoughts: We sing (or yodel or bawl) a negative thought to our current favourite melody and in this way take away its oppressive power. Whichever method you choose: When we free ourselves from the entanglements of our thoughts, we can make decisions with the part of us that has our best interests at heart and looks at the world with reason. It can lovingly bring us to sport, even when we are feeling reluctant, or end a relationship that no longer serves us, even though we feel fear of the consequences and sadness at the impending loss.

To be honest, feeling is pretty hard. But from my experience, I know that not feeling is harder. We miss out on such a big part of our lives when we turn down the emotional master controller and let experiences and people pass us by. Sooner or later, there will come a moment when we no longer want to bear this distance from life - when we wake up from our high, look up from our mobile phone or, as in my case, are thrown off course by a serious accident. The good thing is that our feelings haven't left us. They will always be waiting for us until we listen to them again.

I have documented my very personal experiences with big feelings and the psychological methods for dealing with them in my book ‘Fühl dich ganz’ (Feel whole).