How to Feel Your Emotions (Even the Ones You Avoid)

Many people come to therapy feeling overwhelmed mentally, emotionally, and physically.

In my somatic therapy and integrative counselling practice, offering in-person sessions across the Northern Rivers, Palm Beach, and the Gold Coast, as well as online worldwide, I consistently see one core pattern:

People are living in ways that help them avoid what they don’t want to feel.

The way through? I’m reminded of the quote by Carl Jung: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Relating to feelings and emotions: “You must feel the thing you don’t want to feel.”

Why Avoiding Feelings Keeps You Stuck

Unprocessed feelings and emotions, don’t disappear – they loop, and without awareness, this becomes your “normal.”

When you haven’t been shown how to safely and effectively feel and process that which you don’t want to feel, your system, in an attempt to deal with the discomfort or overwhelm, adapts and finds ways to cope.

For example, you might:

  • Stay constantly busy
  • Overwork or over-exercise
  • Use porn
  • Scroll endlessly on social media
  • Use caffeine, sugar, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine or other substances
  • Seek validation or avoid conflict
  • Overspend on things you don’t need
  • Shut down or withdraw

Whilst such compensations may offer temporary respite, they come at a cost: disconnection from your emotional world.

Practice 1: Build Emotional Awareness (Journalling)

Start simple. A simple self-enquiry practice to enhance awareness is to pause throughout the day and ask, “What am I feeling right now?” then write it down.

For example:

  • 10:15am: I feel tired. Heavy chest. Sad.
  • 2:12pm: Fast heart. Shallow breath. Anxious.
  • 4:13pm: Foggy, numb. Possibly overwhelmed.
  • 9:05am: Relaxed, open, excited. Happy.

Practice 2: Feel the Emotion in Your Body

Once you notice a feeling, don’t analyse it, experience it.

  1. Sit upright, grounded
  2. Relax your jaw and shoulders
  3. Focus on your breath
  4. Locate the feeling in your body

Maybe it’s:

  • Tightness in your chest
  • A knot in your stomach
  • Pressure in your throat

Place a hand there. Now breathe. Don’t try to fix or change it or create a shift. Just to be with it. The shift happens organically when you offer presence to what you’d normally avoid. As the energy dissipates, your state and mood begin to change.

Point: When you stop resisting a feeling, it begins to shift on its own.

Practice 3: When the Feeling May Not Be Yours

You may have heard of intergenerational trauma (also referred to as transgenerational, multigenerational, ancestral, inherited, familial trauma, or historical trauma). One way this can show up is as unresolved emotional pain passed down through generations – patterns of distress carried through family systems.

Or if you’ve ever left someone and found yourself feeling drained, anxious, or uplifted, you’ve already experienced emotional transfer – either absorbing or mirroring aspects of their energetic transmission.

Now extend that concept to genes, beliefs, and familial patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It may all start to make sense.

Point: What if some of what you feel isn’t entirely yours?

Instead of fully identifying with a feeling and being ‘with it’ try being ‘alongside it’.

Try this:

  • When you notice the sensation in your body (tightness, heat, tension, constriction), rather than placing a hand over the area and breathing into it, experiment with breathing alongside it
  • Place your attention 10–20 cm away from the intensity and breathe there, or
  • Place a cushion on the ground a few feet away from you, or on a chair alongside you, and imagine the intensity sitting there. Allow it to fully exist without merging with it, or trying to fix or soothe it.
  • This is different from being the watcher or observer in mindfulness practice. Instead, it is allowing the sensation, feeling or emotion to be in its fullest expression without interference.
  • Stay with slow, deep breaths for at least 3 minutes. Then pause and notice what you notice.

Point: This creates separation between you and the experience (sensations, feelings, emotions), creating internal space.

Practice 4: Regulate Through Self-Containment

The self-containment hug is a simple but powerful nervous system tool to create a sense of safety in the body:

  • Sit comfortably, eyes open or closed.
  • Gently tune into your body and notice what you notice without judgement.
  • Place one hand under the opposite armpit and the other across your opposite shoulder.
  • Take a long, deep inhale followed by a slow exhale. Repeat three times.
  • Swap arm positions.
  • Stay for a few minutes and notice what it’s like for your nervous system to be held.

Point: sometimes, feeling becomes possible only after safety is restored.

The Truth About Emotional Healing

You don’t need to force emotions. You don’t need to “figure them out” or rush the process. You only need to allow them. Your body already knows how to process what you’ve been avoiding, it just needs the right conditions:

  • Presence
  • Safety
  • Patience

Somatic Therapy: A Different Approach

Somatic therapy works with the body, not against it.

My in-person and online work in somatic therapy, trauma resolution, and integrative counselling supports individuals and couples to gently unwind survival patterns, restore balance, and experience greater ease, connection, and emotional safety.

Somatic work invites a gentle approach to meeting your body where it wants to be met – a slower is faster approach versus a too much, too fast, too soon approach. So, it is not about fighting your body or suppressing feelings, sensations or emotions, but learning to listen to it, gently, patiently, respectfully, compassionately, trusting that under the right conditions, the innate wisdom of the body will return it to balance. Sometimes it just needs the right support.

To arrange an initial consultation to explore how I can best support you.

Book here: [introductory call] or [schedule a session].