Emotions Explained: Why Feeling Them Is the Key to Real Healing

The Moment I Didn't Have Words For

Years ago, I sat at my desk in the front room of our house, windows facing the yard. I was working. Nothing unusual about the day.

Then a kid walked by with a backpack, headed to kindergarten with a parent at their side.

And a sensation hit me. That would have been Adeline.

My daughter was stillborn at 40 weeks and five days, after a completely normal pregnancy. That day, she would have been starting kindergarten.

I had to stop. I stepped away from my desk, away from my corporate job, and I let myself feel what was there. I noticed where it lived in my body. It was heavy. I allowed the tears to stream down my cheeks.

And afterward, I realized something. That moment of grief was also a moment of honoring her. Of remembering her. In the sadness there was also connection.

That's what feeling your feelings actually looks like. Not fixing. Not moving past. Just letting it exist.

Why We Were Never Taught to Feel

If you grew up anything like me, you weren't given space for this. I'm a Gen Xer, and as I grew up, we weren’t given permission to feel our emotions, let alone encouraged to express them.

Don't cry. Suck it up. Put on your big girl panties on and keep going.

We've spent decades being told the mind runs the show. That intellect is what matters. That clarity comes from thinking harder, not feeling more. Mind over matter, over and over, until it became the water we swim in.

Most of our parents didn't understand emotions any better than we did.

They weren't withholding on purpose.

They simply didn't have the language, and they didn't know what happens in our bodies when feelings get pushed down for years.

So we learned to suppress.

We learned it was weak to feel. Even scary.

Something to manage rather than something real and natural.

What Emotions Actually Are

In some ways we’ve come a long way. I know the news and the world doesn’t always make you feel that way, but under the surface there’s a deeper knowing emerging.

One that holds space for our emotions.

Emotions are information. They're your brain's attempt to make sense of what's happening in your body and in the world around you.

Say you're walking a trail and you see something on the ground. Your body has a sensation. Your brain searches your past experience to predict what that sensation means. If you've encountered a snake before, your brain might flag danger, and you feel fear. If you haven't, your brain might decide it's just a stick, and you feel nothing at all.

Same moment. —> Different sensation. —> Brain gives it meaning based on the sensation.

What you feel is valid and real, even when they aren't fact.

Your whole body might feel fear if your brain has concluded there’s a threat and that fear is real. But that doesn’t mean there’s a snake on the ground.

In my second pregnancy, at 38 weeks, I got some blood work back that didn't look good. My body had an immediate sensation. My brain went straight to my only other pregnancy that reached 40 weeks, and my brain began to tell me this one was going to end the same as the first.

The fear I felt was completely real.

But it wasn't a fact.

My doctor helped me understand that those numbers didn't mean we were repeating the past. But I still had to allow myself to feel scared. I had to allow the feeling of being afraid to work its way through and out of my body, because my body remembered what happened before, and that fear made sense.

Of course it did.

When I let that fear exist instead of pushing it away, something shifted. The emotion moved through me, and my mind cleared enough to think so I could make a rational decision about what to do next. Not a decision made from panic or fear. A decision made from a clear place, after the feeling had somewhere to go.

Where Emotions Go When We Don't Feel Them

My dad was a physicist, so bear with me while I get a little nerdy here.

Emotions are energy.

And if you know anything about physics, energy doesn't just disappear.

If we don't express our emotions, that energy doesn't dissolve.

It has to go somewhere.

It resides in our bodies.

For most of my life, I carried chronic fatigue. Utter exhaustion. Depletion. I used to think it was just the grief. But looking back, I felt that exhaustion long before my loss.

What I understand now is that so much of my life, I wasn't feeling and expressing my emotions.

I was managing them. Understanding them. Writing about them. But not feeling them.

Understanding Isn't the Same as Feeling

I've journaled since I was sixteen, the year my mom remarried and I lost some of the room I had to express myself. Writing became my way through everything since.

If I die tomorrow, someone is going to read four decades of exactly how I felt about everything. That'll be quite a read. 🤭

I've also spent real time in therapy, and I believe deeply in what it offers. Having a place to talk, to understand where a feeling comes from and why it shows up, matters.

But here's the distinction I had to learn the hard way. Understanding your emotions is not the same as feeling them. Writing about a feeling isn't the same as welcoming it and feeling it process through your body. Talking through a feeling in a session isn't the same as allowing it to move through your body.

There are experiences that have no words at all. I know that firsthand. The night I went into the hospital in labor, expecting to come home with a baby, and walked out without one, there was nothing I could say that touched what I felt. We can talk about grief all day and understand exactly where it comes from, and still not have allowed ourselves the grace to truly feel our feelings.

What It Means to Actually Feel

So how do you do it?

Here's what I've learned after over a decade of grief and loss.

• You give yourself permission to feel whatever arises, without deciding it's wrong. Whatever comes up is valid, simply because it's there.

• You witness what's present. You notice where it lives in your body. You let it exist without rushing to explain it or fix it.

• And afterward, if you want, you can ask yourself what that experience gave you. Not to analyze it to death. Just to notice.

This isn't about dwelling in the past or reaching for some future version of yourself who has it all figured out. It's about staying with what's real, right now, in your body, in this moment.

The Life That's Actually Yours

When I started Truth After Loss, I built it around this exact belief. That your body holds wisdom your mind can't reach on its own. That most of us have been taught to override that wisdom, to think harder instead of listen.

If we don't witness our grief, it lives in our bodies. And when grief is stored there, it becomes very hard to hear your own inner knowing underneath it.

You don't need to heal your grief.

We learn to carry it and feel it as it comes, so it doesn't run the show from beneath the surface.

If this is something you want support with, I'd love to help.

Book a discovery call or grab a free 10 Day Center and Reset as a simple place to start reconnecting with what matters most and hear what your body has been trying to tell you.