What happened when I stopped avoiding my feelings
What actually happens in the brain when we allow ourselves to feel
Early this year, I had one of the most important breakthroughs I ever experienced in my life: I learned to see myself.
This can be translated into many forms: loving myself, validating myself, trusting myself, and realizing my worth despite my external world and achievements.
Finally, all that inner work I've been doing over the years through therapy, books, and real world practice clicked in my brain. And all of a sudden, I could finally see.
But it wasn't all of a sudden, really.
It took me months of resilience navigating a combination of painful experiences: a difficult heartbreak, losing my sense of identity, and lacking meaning and direction at work.
Each of these situations is hard enough individually, now imagine experiencing them all at the same time.
Breaking the pattern
Most of us see life as a straight line, always moving forward. I’ve come to see it differently: life as a spiral. It brings us back to similar situations and challenges until we choose to respond differently, to break our patterns and apply the lessons we’ve earned. That’s when growth happens: in an upward spiral.
This time, as the tornado took over my life, I chose a different response. I chose to feel it all.
I didn't try to stop feeling uncomfortable feelings.
I didn't distracted myself from the overwhelming emotions.
I didn't repress. I didn't shut down.
I was a river. Whatever rose in me, I let it flow through me.
Grief. Pain. Anger. Sadness. Joy. Gratitude.
The worst I felt, the kinder I was to myself.
This combination of feeling my feelings and being gentle to myself, no judgement, no pressure, no "shoulds", was the most transformative medicine I ever experienced. But doing so wasn't an easy task.
I noticed my mind constantly trying to revert to its default mode: dissociating, rushing to keep up with the pace of the world, insisting on being practical and solution-focused. Voices whispered in my head “The world is moving and you’re stuck." “You should be doing that." “You shouldn’t be feeling this way at this point.”
In the face of each one, I took a deep breath and sat with whatever I was feeling. That was it. As simple, and as hard, as sitting still, without distractions, and letting myself dive into my feelings.
After all this, and after witnessing how transformative the act of feeling can be, I dove deeper into understanding the science behind it, and why it led to such profound changes in me.
In the last weeks, a question popped up in my mind:
Why we feel?
I learned that there are emotions and there are feelings.
Emotions, as the word suggests, are energy in motion. They're biological signals. What's going on in your body? Heart rate, sweaty palms, tension in the muscles, chest compressed, etc.
Whatever happens at a biological or physical level involves energy moving through the body. Emotions can be understood as recurring patterns of that energy, each associated with certain bodily sensations that we learn to recognize and label. In that sense, we are experiencing emotional states continuously, even if we’re not always aware of them.
Feelings, on the other hand, are our conscious awareness of that energy in the mind. The energy, what we experience as emotion, is always present, but we don’t always feel it. When it remains outside our awareness, that’s often when we get stuck.
OK, but why is it important to feel? Why did nature imbue us with this functioning? Why do we get stuck when we don't feel our feelings?
1) First:
Imagine your brain as a powerful computer made up of different systems.
One of those systems is the arousal system. You can think of it as the power button.
Your brain contains many sophisticated processes, but they aren’t always active. Like apps on your phone, they’re installed, but not always running.
The arousal system, the “power button”, activates these processes. It brings them online, making them conscious. That’s when you become aware of your thoughts and able to use them.
Without this power button, many of the brain’s most advanced functions would remain “asleep,” operating outside of conscious awareness.
So how does this power button get turned on?
Through our feelings.
Feelings activate awareness. They bring our thoughts and our surroundings into consciousness.
When we notice our emotions, what’s happening in the body, and reflect on what’s giving rise to them, our perception deepens. We understand ourselves and our situations with greater clarity.
In other words, feelings don’t make us less rational, they make us more capable.
2) Second:
Feelings are drivers of change.
Feelings carry information. That information becomes motivation, an urge to meet a specific need, whether physiological or emotional. In this way, feelings act as catalysts for action and change in our lives.
The process works like this:
First, we experience an emotion (neurobiological energy arising in the body).
When we bring awareness to that emotion, it becomes a feeling.
That awareness then transforms into a drive to meet a particular need, physical or emotional. A need only becomes actionable once it is felt.
When we repress feelings, distract ourselves, or dissociate from them, we lose access to this information. Over time, this makes it harder to recognize and respond to our own needs, prolonging the discomfort of having them unmet.
Eventually, this disconnection can settle into a sense of emptiness, one that many of us carry quietly through life.
3) Third:
There's no consciousness without feelings.
In simplified terms, imagine the brain as having two main layers.
At the top is the neocortex, often associated with conscious thought, reasoning, and reflection, where we analyze, plan, and make sense of things in words.
Below that is the limbic system, sometimes called the emotional brain, where emotions arise and where meaning, relevance, and value are first registered.
Most of us tend to assume that our perception of the world comes primarily from the rational, conscious mind: I see something, I notice it, I think about it, and therefore I’m aware of it.
In reality, much of our perception and understanding, of the world, of others, and of ourselves, is shaped first by the emotional brain. We don’t just think our way into the world; we feel our way into it. Without emotional engagement, much of perception remains vague or unconscious.
When we don’t feel our emotions, awareness narrows. We may still function, but we do so largely on autopilot, guided by patterns and reactions we don’t fully recognize. In that state, it’s harder to understand what’s driving us, and real choice becomes limited.
Awareness grows when emotional signals are felt, not bypassed.
Our capacity to feel is directly related to our understanding of the meaning of life
Which led me to realize that understanding the meaning of life is deeply connected to understanding our emotional world.
When we become aware of our emotions, when we truly feel what’s happening inside us, two things begin to happen.
First, we allow energy to move through us and transform, rather than stagnate.
Second, we start to recognize that experiences are happening within us, not to us. This shift moves us away from the role of the victim and into responsibility, for our own care, our choices, and ultimately, our happiness.
If we’re not aware of what’s happening internally, how can we move beyond it? How can we explore healthier alternatives or clearer directions to meet our needs?
It’s no coincidence that the moments in life when we feel most lost often overlap with the moments when we’re least connected to our emotions.
As Alan Watkins puts it:
“Crossing the threshold from the victim position to ownership is the most important transition one can ever make in their life. And to do that, we have to understand where we are now in the universe of emotions.”
On a PS note:
The stereotypical distorted idea of what feeling looks like
Feeling is not what the main characters in Mexican telenovelas dramatize on TV.
Feeling is developing awareness of what’s happening inside you, making emotions conscious by noticing them, naming them, and allowing the energy behind them to move through you.
When we allow intense emotions to flow, we often discover that the body has natural ways of regulating itself in response to what’s present. Sometimes that looks like crying; other times it might be shaking, laughing, yelling into a pillow, or becoming very still. We can also learn ways to self-soothe or to co-regulate with others.
Feeling does not mean creating drama, feeding mental narratives, or erupting emotionally toward others. That isn’t awareness, it’s unconscious reaction. Feeling, by contrast, creates space. Reaction collapses it.
With love,
Nat