.png)
Recognising emotional safety
Our emotions and bodily responses give us information about what we're experiencing in the moment, including what feels comfortable, uncomfortable, right or not quite right. They can tell us when something feels good, when something doesn't sit right, or when a situation is asking more of us than we're comfortable with. Learning to notice, understand and interpret these responses helps us become more familiar with our own emotional experience and what our feelings may be telling us.
​
Sometimes, we can lose touch with this information when we've learned it's not safe to express what we feel, or have become used to putting other people's needs and expectations before our own. We may suppress, deny or push away what we're feeling, or simply not have learned to recognise emotions as they're felt in the body.
​
Learning to notice these responses can bring us back into contact with what feels emotionally safe and what doesn't. Something can feel familiar without being emotionally safe, especially when we've become accustomed to a certain way of being or relating. As awareness grows, we can begin to trust ourselves in making conscious choices about the people we spend time with, the environments we're in and the situations we face.
Understanding your emotional experience
Once we begin to recognise what we're feeling and how those feelings are experienced in the body, we can start to understand what is happening for us in the present moment. Staying with what we're experiencing, rather than immediately trying to explain it, change it or push it away, gives us an opportunity to notice what is actually being felt as it happens.
​
We don't always have the time or circumstances to sit with an emotion as it arises; we may be at work, in the middle of a conversation, caring for someone or simply needing to get on with what we're doing. Even when we do have the space to notice what we're feeling, an emotion may be difficult to name, several feelings may be present at once, or what we experience may sometimes seem out of proportion to what's happening, while at other times we may feel very little because we've become used to disconnecting from what we feel.
​
Becoming familiar with our emotions as messages, rather than something to suppress or dismiss, can help us understand our emotional experience without needing to judge it or have an immediate answer. Over time, this can make it easier to recognise what matters to us, what we need and how we're responding to what is happening around us.
Our experiences can influence the way we react to people and situations, including what we expect or need from others and how we protect ourselves. Over time, some reactions can become so familiar that we may no longer notice when or why we react in a particular way.
​
We might learn to please, withdraw, stay quiet, avoid conflict, anticipate other people's needs, keep our feelings to ourselves or become highly alert to what is happening around us. These responses may once have helped us manage difficult circumstances, even if they no longer serve us in the same way.
​
Understanding where our reactions come from can help us recognise what is happening when familiar patterns arise. With greater awareness, we can pause, notice what's happening and choose how we want to respond, rather than automatically reacting as we have done in the past.
Learning to sit with discomfort
Many of us are used to living primarily in our heads, thinking about what we feel rather than actually feeling what is happening in our bodies. This can make it difficult to stay with emotions when they become uncomfortable, particularly if we've grown up learning to push them down, suppress them or reject feelings that were seen as weak, too much or inconvenient.
​
Learning to sit with discomfort involves becoming more familiar with how emotions feel in the body and allowing ourselves to experience them without immediately trying to push them away. This doesn't mean staying with something that is harmful or accepting what isn't right for us. It means giving ourselves the time and space to stay with what we're feeling, without needing to change it, explain it or make it go away.
​
As we become more familiar with the experience of feeling uncomfortable, we will find that we don't need to fear or resist difficult emotions in the same way. We can allow them to be felt without immediately judging, suppressing or rejecting them, giving them space to move through us rather than becoming something we have to carry. With practice, this can help us feel more at ease with ourselves and more trusting of what we experience.