What If You Were Never Taught to Trust Your Own Feelings?

What if the problem isn’t that you feel too much, but that you’ve spent so much of your life believing you shouldn’t feel the way you do?

Sit with that for a minute.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think it’s worth talking about.

Where does a feeling go?

Picture a child who tries to explain that something hurt their feelings, only to hear, “You have no reason to feel that way.”

But the child does feel that way. Something happened, and it affected them. They may not have the words, and they may not even understand why it hurt so much. They just know that it did.

And instead of helping them understand what they’re feeling, the adult tells them they shouldn’t feel it.

What is that child supposed to make of it? Do they trust what they feel, or do they decide the adult must be right and they’re somehow getting it wrong?

I wonder what happens when that child grows up. Maybe they become the adult who questions every feeling before they’ve had a chance to understand it.

Maybe you’ve been there yourself.

So where does the feeling go? I think it waits. Often until the house gets quiet.

The 11 p.m. replay

You know those nights when you replay a conversation over and over in your head?

Something someone said bothered you. Maybe it hurt your feelings, made you angry, or left you wondering what they really meant. You keep going back over it, thinking about what you should have said or done differently.

And somewhere in all that thinking, you start questioning yourself.

Maybe I’m too sensitive.

Maybe I shouldn’t have let it bother me.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this.

Sometimes you even wonder if you’re imagining things. Did they really mean it that way? Are you reading too much into it?

And just like that, you’re no longer trying to understand what you feel. You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.

I’ve done this myself. By the time I’ve finished going over everything, I’m often more upset with myself than I was with the person who hurt me.

What if you gave yourself a minute?

Have you ever noticed how quickly we can turn on ourselves when someone hurts our feelings?

But what if we gave ourselves a little time before deciding we were the problem?

Maybe there’s a reason that comment bothered you so much. Maybe it reminded you of something that’s happened before. Maybe the person really did say something hurtful. Or maybe you took it differently than they intended.

You might not know right away, and that’s okay.

I think there’s a difference between trying to understand why something hurt you and telling yourself you shouldn’t have been hurt in the first place.

You can think about what happened without being hard on yourself over your reaction. You can even realize later that you misunderstood something without deciding you can’t trust yourself.

And sometimes, after you’ve had time to think about it, you may realize that the way someone treated you isn’t something you’re comfortable with. You might decide you need some distance, and that’s something you can think through, too.

You don’t have to figure everything out the minute something happens.

Maybe the first step is simply giving yourself the same chance to work through your feelings that you’d give someone else.

What about the one everyone counts on?

There’s always one person everyone turns to when something needs to get done. The one who remembers everything, takes care of things, and shows up when people need help.

Maybe that’s you.

You get up, do what needs doing, take care of the people around you, and keep moving, even when you’re tired and have things weighing on your own mind. There’s always something else that needs your attention, so it’s easy never to stop and ask how you’re doing.

I wonder how many people have become so good at taking care of everyone else that they’ve forgotten to ask what they need.

And when someone asks how you’re doing, do you tell them the truth? Or do you say “I’m fine,” because it’s easier than trying to explain everything?

I’ve been thinking about how much time we spend explaining ourselves to other people, trying to make them understand why we feel the way we do. Sometimes we get so caught up in that, we forget to listen to ourselves.

You can be a strong, capable person and still be hurt, disappointed, angry, or tired of being the one who keeps everything going. You don’t have to be falling apart for your feelings to matter.

No tidy ending

I don’t have a neat way to wrap this up.

If any of this stirred something up, there’s no rush to do anything with it. It can just sit beside you for a while.

A question for today: When you feel hurt, angry, or disappointed, what’s the first thing you say to yourself?

No right answer. Just curious.