Transcription
Maybe you have the impression others feel things more deeply than you do, or different things altogether. Maybe you and/or your loved ones feel like something's missing in your relationships: more emotional connection. Or maybe you feel like an emotional essence is missing from your experience. Stay tuned to learn where this comes from and how to increase your capacity for emotional depth.
[Music]
Emotional depth is an important skill that, if you learn it, can drastically improve your experience of life and relationships. It's not an either/or: either you have it or you don't. But it's a skill you can refine if you've learned the basics, or build if you haven't learned the basics yet. If you feel this skill is lacking in your life, you might notice that you're not moved the same way when others are moved emotionally. You might notice that your friends and family find it hard to connect with you, or that they prefer to talk to someone else when they have problems. The way you interact might feel or come across as staged. You might find it hard to know what you're feeling and why. You might find it hard to show affection and tenderness. You might find it difficult to maintain loving feelings towards your loved ones.
All of this comes from turning away from feelings, which is something a person learns to do through experience. If you observe any infant, they're very good at feeling and expressing their feelings. If this little human, however, makes certain experiences, it'll learn to distance itself from emotions. This could be painful experiences and not having help processing them, or role models that are distanced from emotions, or a combination of both.
In the following, I'll give some examples. The goal is not to get stuck in blame, but to understand yourself better so you can better take responsibility for yourself. Maybe your role models discouraged you from feeling and expressing emotions. Maybe emotions weren't a priority in your family of origin, or even neglected. Maybe your role models held on to grudges, which sends the message emotions aren't something that can be worked through. Maybe your caregivers were dominated by impulses and emotional outbursts, so you resolved to never become like them, and that's why you detached from your emotions. Maybe your role models never learned what to do with emotional discomfort, so they couldn't teach you. Maybe you had to detach from your feelings to protect yourself for other reasons.
To work on this, as a first step, it's important to understand what you're still doing now that's keeping you detached from emotions. It could be any of the following. See which ones apply to you:
Ignoring or overlooking feelings in yourself and/or others.
Staying excessively busy so you don't have time to feel.
Excessively escaping into other worlds so you don't feel yours with books, TV, games.
Self-medicating uncomfortable feelings away.
Avoiding situations that make allow you to feel.
Hiding your feelings from yourself and others.
Wanting to be close to others but not wanting them to know how you feel.
Distracting from feelings with jokes or other ways to change the topic.
Trying to fix others' problems as soon as possible to make their feelings go away as soon as possible.
Skipping over empathy.
Isolating from others.
Changing details of what actually happened when you tell the story so it doesn't affect you emotionally.
Excessively pretending not to be bothered when you are.
Leaving stonewalling.
Zoning out whenever something's wrong.
Your first impulse when faced with a problem is to detach and leave.
Thinking others are being too sensitive when they're in contact with their emotions.
What these actions do is they keep you aloof and disconnected from your emotions and from other people.
To develop more emotional depth and become more emotionally in tune, start by practicing paying more attention to emotions first in yourself. Check in with your emotions several times throughout the day. Make room for them. Be curious about them: what they're like, where you feel them in your body, and find a name for them. Spend time with your emotions, even when they're uncomfortable. Allow yourself to feel whatever you're feeling, and if necessary, think about what you can do on the big and small scale to take good care of your emotions.
Then you can move on to being more open and vulnerable with your feelings and relationships. In the past, you may have experienced that this drives others away or that you're rejected for it. But not everyone is like that, and the only way to turn your pattern of disconnection from emotions around is to give your loved ones the chance to show you what your emotions mean to them. So dare experiments with trustworthy people and allow your fear of rejection to be positively surprised. As long as you hide the majority of your feelings, that creates too big of a secret about who you are, and that increases your unhelpful sense that you have something to hide, which makes you feel more isolated, lonely, and ashamed.
Next, you can move on to others. Start paying more attention to the emotions other people are expressing and the attachment needs behind what they're saying and doing. It's not difficult to understand others. We've actually got specific nerve cells to help us with that called mirror neurons. They allow us to get a sense of what another person is feeling. What it takes is a shift of attention onto emotional signals, and then you'll be able to pick them up. And just as you've practiced staying with your emotions, practice staying with the emotions of your loved ones. That doesn't mean that their emotions will become your emotions, but that you're willing to listen, understand, validate, and help them regulate their emotions. Often, we're too quick in wanting to fix the other person's surface-level problem when what the person actually needs is to feel emotionally close. Feeling emotionally close happens when the other person knows you understand them, and you can't understand if you don't listen intently and to all the details, and they can't know that you understand unless you express your understanding verbally.
Depending on how used to being detached from emotions you are, all of this might sound like too much right now. Your subconscious sense that emotions are to be avoided may be kicking in right now, creating an aversion to trying any of this out. Your conscious mind might be looking for rationalizations for this subconscious feeling, like, "Who has the time to do all of that?" The thing is, some things are worth the time and effort, and your emotions, well-being, and relationships to your loved ones certainly are. Also, the more you practice these skills, the more they'll come naturally to you, and it takes less intentional effort the better you get at feeling. The easier it gets. Another thing to consider is being detached from feelings will cost you a lot more time and effort further along the road because you'll have to deal with all the problems that creates, which can be very substantial.
Also, you can start in small increments. I've shared everything here so you can draw up a thorough plan, but that doesn't mean you have to start with everything right away. Pick one little thing that you'd like to work on over the next week. See how that goes, and when you're ready, pick the next little thing. You've got this. You were born to feel. You were born to be healthy, happy, and emotionally connected to your loved ones. It's so worth it.
All the best till next time. Take care.
[Music]