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“The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Trauma is not terrible things that happen from the other side—those are traumatic. But the trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions. So, the real question is: ‘How did we get separated and how do we reconnect?’ Because that’s our true nature—our true nature is to be connected. In fact, if that wasn’t our true nature, there would be no human beings. The human species—or any species—could not evolve without being grounded in their bodies.” —Dr. Gabor Maté

The only thing feeling anger, sadness, grief, bitterness, guilt—or any of the other myriad emotions you might feel—proves is that you’re a normal, functioning human.

There’s nothing to fix, turn off, or control. There’s nothing wrong with you.

The first exercise may have brought up some intense, uncomfortable, and perhaps unwanted emotions. When those kinds of feelings come up, we tend to be in a hurry to get rid of them. This means we “act” without allowing ourselves to fully feel, express, and most importantly, see what they are trying to teach us.

We have a tendency to think that if we allow ourselves to feel painful emotions, they will never go away and they will overtake us. In fact, the opposite is true. When you can make room for painful emotions, actively accept them, and not be in a hurry to change them, you learn something that you wouldn’t have otherwise learned.

Emotions are energy in motion—vibrations in our bodies that we can feel physically—that are usually described in one word. Happy. Sad. Angry. Scared. Happiness has a vibration. Anger has a vibration. Sadness has a vibration. Fear has a vibration.

Emotions are not thoughts or ideas. They are not concepts with long, vague descriptions. They are not opinions or judgments.

The way emotions feel in my body may be different than the way they feel in your body.

Sometimes emotional vibrations are uncomfortable. I’ve learned that allowing myself to feel an uncomfortable emotion has never, ever hurt me or anyone else. The earth didn’t open up and swallow me whole, nor did I explode into a million pieces.

And while emotions themselves are not thoughts or ideas, in the vast majority of cases they come from our identity, beliefs, and thoughts. Something happens, and our brains assess what happened and assign meaning to it. That meaning then informs how we feel. All of this happens in an instant, usually without our awareness.

Here’s a pertinent example. A few years ago, my mother sent me an email asking a question about my grandmother’s trust. I immediately became angry. Seething, even. The reason I became angry wasn’t because she sent an email and asked a question. I became angry because of what I made her question mean. I made it mean that I was an incapable, stupid lazy-ass (and we’ll get into more details about this email in upcoming chapters).

That’s how it works: something happens, we think a thought about it, assign a meaning to it, and voilà—the feeling arises. The more often we repeat these thoughts and feelings, the more automatically this increasingly “hardwired” pathway of emotional processing happens. It becomes a habit for our brains because brains like to be efficient.

How many times have you wondered what it means to feel your feelings? Or to “sit with” them? The reason this can be so confusing or difficult is that we’re used to acting on the emotion without fully noticing it.

This is because we were not taught to notice or otherwise pay attention to emotions. In fact, we were pretty much taught the opposite—to ignore, resist, and even distrust them.

But here’s the thing: every human being has the capacity and the ability to literally feel every human emotion. Even the ugly, uncomfortable ones. We’re built to feel all of them, so it stands to reason that we’re capable of feeling them without harming ourselves. Our bodies are great at feeling emotions, and they are amazingly efficient at it.

Consider the story of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neurologist who had a stroke. In her book, My Stroke of Insight, she describes that after her stroke, she was unable to resist feeling emotions. Without that ability, but all the while retaining her curiosity about the human mind, she found that for her, an unresisted emotion would last about ninety seconds.

We feel surges of love. Surges of anger. Surges of grief. And then they recede. Even an emotion as intense as grief or anger gives us a break. Sure, they come around again, and as long as we let them flow on through, they will again recede.

But sometimes, because we’re afraid to feel a feeling—or because we think certain emotions are bad or wrong—the fear intensifies the already uncomfortable emotion. When we resist anger, we create more anger. We get angry at our anger. We worry about our anxiety. We’re disgusted by our hate. We create more pain by telling ourselves we shouldn’t be in pain. We don’t want to feel that uncomfortable feeling!

And so, because we assign a negative meaning to emotions like anger or jealousy, we tend to spend a lot of time avoiding, stuffing, distracting, and intellectualizing these emotions—so we don’t have to feel them—because we consider them ugly and uncomfortable.

Now, consider the difference between resisting an emotion and just letting it vibrate. Imagine that you’re about to experience an emotion you find uncomfortable, like panic or terror, but you will only experience it for two minutes. Once the two minutes is up, you’re done. What would it be like to just experience it? Without avoidance, resistance, numbing? What might you notice?

This is what I mean when I talk about safely feeling an emotion. And yes, it takes practice, but it’s fascinating to experiment with this.

The more you experiment with feeling your feelings, the more you will learn from them. Even better, when you focus on literally feeling the emotion in your body, the faster it goes away! The more you practice noticing and feeling emotions, the easier it gets.

I figure that if your body is capable of feeling all the emotions, then all feelings are valid and worthy of being felt. They’re all useful. They all have messages or even lessons for you.

Now let’s talk about safely expressing emotions, which includes verbal and non-verbal expression.

It’s interesting to watch little children express emotion. Think about an angry or distraught toddler who throws herself to the floor, kicks her legs, and flings her arms. What she is doing is letting her body feel and express the emotion. Or if she’s sad, she cries, sobbing and shaking, using her whole body. The same goes for expressing joy with a full-body laugh! Our culture and our families down through the generations have taught us, however, that some emotions are bad—or at least that certain expressions of certain emotions are bad and wrong.

For instance, we teach toddlers that the grocery store floor isn’t the best place to express anger. And somewhere along the way, we also learn that some people don’t like the way we express certain emotions. If we want attention, love, or approval from them, we quickly learn to stop expressing these emotions, or maybe even feeling them altogether. And sometimes we see someone (our mothers?) expressing an emotion we deem ugly, and we decide we don’t want to be like them!

So how do you safely express emotion? Especially, how do you safely express an emotion like anger, which can also feel dangerous? It’s important to remember that feeling anger (or other so-called “negative” emotions) does not make you a bad or “un-evolved” person. You are never “above” having feelings. Emotions like anger become a problem if we pick up a knife and stab someone with it because we’re angry. Or if we scream at them. It’s okay to let it take as long as it needs to take to feel your pain. It’s not okay to treat people poorly while you’re doing it.

A while back, my husband and I had a minor argument that escalated into raised voices with both of us wanting to be right about something. This is unusual for us. I noticed, pretty much right away, that I had some anger going on. I realized that this anger had nothing to do with the subject. This is why I practice…a lot! It wasn’t all that long ago that a situation like this would have derailed me, and I would have felt totally out of control with anger.

Step 1: Notice. Notice the vibration. Focus on how it feels, and let yourself feel it.

Step 2: Next, you want to acknowledge it to yourself. “I’m angry. I’m pissed. I’m frustrated.” Continue to feel the vibration. And start moving your body in a way that feels natural.

When I am angry, I like to stomp my feet and pump my arms up and down. In the situation with my husband, I chose to go for a walk with loud, intense music playing on my iPhone, and I pumped my arms and muttered under my breath. There have been other times when I chose to stomp around my basement and yell. And yet other times, when I went outside, threw rocks, and swore.

Cry if you need to cry. Scream if you need to scream. Punch a pillow. Take a walk. Swear out loud if it helps. Throw rocks. Let it take as long as it needs to take. This emotion, or energy in motion, will start to dissipate naturally—and probably pretty quickly, depending on how old it is.

Step 3: Be curious and fascinated about what you just experienced. Ask yourself what message your emotion had for you. As with most intense emotion, the message is usually from the past; the feeling isn’t new—it’s an old emotion that we’ve stuffed, and something triggered it. So now we’ve had an opportunity to heal it.

Step 4: Take responsibility for your emotion. This step may seem counterintuitive; at first, we might think, “Wait, my husband made me angry. He wasn’t listening, and he wasn’t agreeing with me.” But the fact is that my anger is my anger, not his. I’m the one feeling it, and I am the one responsible for the safe expression of it.

Now, that’s not to say that I didn’t talk to my husband about it later, after I expressed it on my own. I did, but after processing and fully feeling that anger, I was able to speak calmly and without blaming him.

So you’re probably thinking, “Wait…I’m supposed to remember all of that the next time I get pissed off?” Nope. It’s not all going to happen naturally and automatically, right off the bat. It’s a practice, not a perfect. This is something that you become aware of and try out. A little at a time.

The ugly, uncomfortable emotions you experience regarding your relationship with your mother aren’t necessarily going to go away. In fact, it is a safe bet they will not go away completely. You can, however, learn to feel and express them safely, without hurting yourself or your mother.

This isn’t a book for you to finish reading, put down, and then find everything you’re feeling afterwards is simply all “happy-happy-joy-joy.” Nothing is further from the truth. Instead, this is a process about allowing yourself to become emotionally fluent by understanding where your feelings are actually coming from and developing ways to manage them safely.

Allowing yourself to feel your feelings all the way through is the ultimate act of re-mothering yourself—of holding the space for yourself in a way that, perhaps, your mother couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

Something to consider: Avoiding, ignoring, resisting, stuffing, distracting, distrusting, or intellectualizing emotions will make them unconscious and chronic. This is how you hurt yourself (and sometimes others) with your emotions. Complaining, wallowing, and stewing are really just other ways of resisting emotion. It’s more profound to acknowledge and feel an emotion, rather than saying “I’m past that.”

Something to practice: Get to know what various emotions feel like in your body and then notice them. Practice letting them vibrate without doing or saying a thing. Breathe.

One more thing to consider: There are several emotion-like words that are actually not emotions, but rather opinions or interpretations. Here are some of those words (with thanks to Marshall Rosenberg and his book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life):

abandoned, abused, attacked, betrayed, boxed-in, bullied, cheated, coerced, cornered, diminished, distrusted, interrupted, intimidated, manipulated, misunderstood, neglected, pressured, provoked, put down, rejected, unappreciated, unheard, unseen, unsupported, unwanted, used

These words do not express emotion; they describe thoughts, opinion, and interpretation, which, when you choose them, create emotion. They express how you interpret others, rather than how you feel. This is a crucially important distinction to make, because this is how you start to take back your power!