When it comes to emotions, we do things like ignore, suppress, deny, blunt, reject, fix, turn against, try to control, minimize, distract ourselves from, disguise, dissociate from, numb out and violently act out emotions. As a result of this dysfunctional relationship we have with emotions, some of you are disconnected from your emotions to the degree that you may not really consciously feel your emotions anymore. This is a big problem. For so many reasons, it is critical to re-connect with your emotions and start to feel them again. In this article, I’m going to give you an exercise to do plus a few more tips, which will help you to do exactly this.    

Emotions are reactions in and of themselves. They occur within you in response to many different stimuli, such as people, places, things, situations, circumstances, and energies that you are encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts. Especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli. Remember that thoughts can be subconscious or conscious. When we encounter a stimulus, we experience a reaction to it in the form of a highly physiological response that we feel. Within this felt based response, is information. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves. Most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. Some people might refer to this as cognitive interpretation. For example, a person may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information “that makes me feel powerless to X bad thing happening and I need to feel like I have some hand in making sure it doesn’t happen.” This is why emotions can serve as a kind of internal guidance system and influence a person to take a certain action. 

Sometimes it is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. When we have an emotional reaction, most of the time, this information within the emotion is totally subconscious. And we do not take the time to make it conscious. We don’t tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains. And because of this, we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion. This is what people are most familiar with… the behavioral expression of an emotion. One of the biggest false assumptions people make is that all people experience emotions the same way and with the same level of intensity. They don’t. For example, anger does not always feel the same in one person’s body as it does in another’s. Some people also feel emotions much, much more intensely and for longer. 

Our emotions are an automatic response. And for very good reason. When we are out navigating the world and the people, places and things in it, we need to have reactions to things and make sense of things VERY quickly. The physiological arousal response element of emotions (which you feel) as well as the cognitive interpretation element of emotions (which you are only rarely consciously aware of) happens in such an immediate and intertwined way.

The thing is, if you struggle to be attuned with your emotions so as to really feel them, you need to re-attune to your emotions. A helpful exercise you can do for this is to do a three-week exercise. On week one, you are going to set a timer to go off at certain intervals, such as every hour or every three hours. When the timer goes off, you are going to turn all of your attention towards the way you feel emotionally in your body. Specifically, to the sensations that are occurring in your body. Emotions appear as sensations in the body. For example, Anger may show up as flushing in your face, muscle tension in certain areas of the body, increased heart rate, trembling, churning in the stomach, pulling in the brow etc. The way that different emotions show up as sensations in people’s bodies may vary. You are going to record the sensations that are occurring at that time. Keep in mind that numbness is in fact a sensation.  

On week two, you are going to do the same thing. But this time, you are going to add the element of trying to identify the name of an emotion that corresponds to the sensations you are experiencing. For example, say you notice dizziness, buzzing, weakness, constriction in that you are unable to breathe deep, sinking and lots of frantic energy movement. You may realize that this fits with anxiety. So, you would write down: Anxiety. You may pick more than one emotion if more than one fits. If it helps you, you can print off an entire list of emotions to refer to, so you can pick from that list. 

On week three, you are going to continue to do both things. But this time you are also looking to give your emotion context. What this means is that you are going to look back to see when the emotion started. What was happening, what situation caused it to arise and what thoughts you were thinking. You are identifying the “why” behind the emotions you are feeling. And you are going to write down your findings. For example, let’s say you identify different sensations you are feeling and decide it fits with anxiety. You think back and realize that you started to feel anxious when you realized that your girlfriend was speaking to an ex of hers. And that you had the thought of them flirting and potentially getting back together. And the fearful thought that you may lose her. This exercise will help you to connect with your feelings, actually feel them and learn about yourself at this emotional level and about how you are emotionally experiencing your life.

In addition to this exercise, here are some more things you can do to re-connect with so as to fully feel and understand your emotions.

1. The vast majority of the time, people stop feeling as the result of a protective adaptation. Essentially, at some point in their life, they decided on a conscious or even subconscious level that feeling their emotions in and of itself was harmful and would only lead to negative consequences. This means, it is highly likely that a part of you is protecting you FROM feeling things with every bit as much (if not more) fervor than you are trying to feel things. For this reason, one of the best things you can do is to work with this aspect of you directly. You can do this using parts work. To learn how to do this, you can watch my video that is titled: Parts Work (What Is Parts Work and How To Do It). Your goal here is to get this aspect of you on board with feeling emotions rather than continuing to resist feeling emotions.     
2. Practice experiencing your emotions as a mindfulness journey meditation. This process will put you completely in touch with your emotions and help you to start feeling again. I call this process The Emotional Experiencing Process. You can learn how to do this by watching my video titled: How To Do The Emotional Experiencing Process. 
3. Express your emotion. Sometimes getting the ball rolling by expressing emotion actually helps you to fully feel the reality of what is going on with you emotionally. You can do this by following the prompts that I have laid out in my video that is titled: How To Express Your Emotion. 
4. Water is an incredible amplifier of emotion. When I am working with someone who struggles to feel emotion, I will often put them in water because of how effective this is. So, if you want to feel your emotions, consider taking a bath or getting in an ocean or a lake or a stream. Getting into a Luke warm shower is also effective. And if you can find no option to submerge yourself, putting your feet into water is your next best option. 
5. Go out into nature. Nature grounds people into their bodies. The more embodied you are, the more you will reconnect with your senses. Remember that emotions are a sense. And because of this, nature will help you to feel what is going on in your body and being. This includes the way you feel emotionally.
6. Move your Body. Moving your body gets you into your body and also reverses the freeze state that often accompanies states of emotional disconnection. While any movement is a good idea, the best thing is to do movement where you are able to work up a sweat. On top of this, exercise combats stress chemicals and stress chemicals flooding your limbic system is one reason why some people experience emotional numbness.      
7. Consciously seek out and experiment with things that evoke strong emotion. This could be looking at art that is evocative, watching social media clips that are emotional in nature, watching movies that are meant to evoke strong emotions, listening to music that evokes emotions, trying new hobbies that stimulate emotions etc. You can seek out things that evoke specific emotions as well as a part of this experiment. And as you engage with these things, do so with mindfulness. Being fully present to and mentally describe the emotional reactions that are taking place in your body and being.
8. Start to pay attention to your dreams. Every morning, record what you can remember of your dreams as well as how you felt in those dreams. The dream world holds all kinds of emotional content that we may not be experiencing in our conscious waking life. Basically, we experience what is actually going on with us emotionally in our dream time. So, becoming conscious and aware of what we are experiencing in dream time, puts us in touch with what is happening with us emotionally in our day to day waking life. 

Even though it is usually a protective adaptation, being disconnected from your emotions, to the degree that you are not consciously feeling your emotions, can be a very scary experience. It can make you feel like you are not really alive even though you are technically living. It can ruin your relationships with other people. And it can make it so you have lost your inner compass with which to navigate your life. These exercises will help you out of this quandary. And as a result, you will be able to feel once again.