138. How to Feel Your Feelings

You can cry easily, snap quickly, or feel “flooded” all day and still not be truly feeling your feelings. That sounds backwards, but it explains why so many of us walk around exhausted, reactive, and secretly ashamed of how big our emotions get. In today's episode, we slow this down and unpack a simple truth that changes everything: having feelings isn’t the same as feeling them, and resilience grows when we learn to stay with an emotion long enough to understand the message it carries. Then we get practical. I walk you through a four-step skill you can use right away: name the emotion (affect labeling), notice where it shows up in your body, get curious about what matters underneath the surface reaction, and bring compassion so you can choose your next move instead of being hijacked. If you want more confidence, calmer leadership at home, and deeper connection, start here.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

 https://leighgermann.com

Transcript

It's common that the women I work with come to me thinking they are too emotional, when actually the opposite is true. In today's episode, we're digging into why most of us were never taught to really feel our feelings, what the research says about why this matters, and a practical skill you can start using today. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Really Feel Your Feelings.

Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful, and then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.

Hello friends, and welcome back to the Leadership Parenting Podcast. Today I'm talking about something that sounds simple, maybe too simple, but it's one of the most transformational skills you can ever learn. That's how to actually feel your feelings.

If you're anything like me, you grew up thinking you knew how to do this. I certainly did. I've always been what I would say is an emotional person—big reactions, sensitive, big joy, and big worries sometimes. And if you had asked me as a young mom whether I knew how to feel my feelings, I would have said, of course I do. They're right here, spilling out everywhere.

But years into my training, years into my own healing, and years of parenting my five kids, I realized something very humbling: having feelings is not the same as feeling them. And for most of us, especially us moms, this skill is often lacking—not because we're doing anything wrong, but because we were never really taught, and sometimes not allowed, to stay with our emotional experience long enough to understand and take in what it's telling us. And today I'm hoping to change that.

I want to start with something that might surprise you. You can have huge feelings and still not actually be feeling them. Most of us push them away without realizing it. We intellectualize them, we act them out, or we numb them. Or we stay so busy we never sit with them long enough to hear and understand what they're actually telling us. In other words, we often try to solve them instead of letting them be and feeling them.

I think this is evolutionary. It's part of our design because our brains evolved not to help us deeply feel, but to help us stay protected and motivated to act in certain ways. We're wired to move toward what feels good and away from what feels bad. That's survival wiring, not necessarily something geared toward emotional reflection.

So when I say I feel my feelings, what I often mean is I notice I'm having a reaction, and then I do something—anything—to try to make that reaction go away. This is a normal human response, and it's exactly why we get stuck. The bigger the feelings are, the more we want them to stop. But the magic—the resilience—is in learning to stay with our feelings.

Things changed for me as the science in psychology continued evolving. It's getting more comprehensive and asking different questions about why our emotions happen and what we can do with them so we feel stronger and act more in line with what we value. Everything reframed for me when I learned how to look at emotions differently.

Emotions are not actually designed for reflection the way we often think of them. They are designed, in an evolutionary sense, for action. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying the relationship between emotion and decision-making. What he found is that emotions evolved as survival signals. They're meant to move us, not to have us slow down and analyze the emotion.

When something happens, your brain doesn’t pause and say, “Let me think about this carefully.” Instead, it scans for threat, assigns quick meaning, and launches a response—sometimes in less than a second. Positive emotions signal that something good is available and we should move toward it. Negative emotions signal that something might be threatening and we should pull back or avoid it.

The catch is that your brain prefers fast decisions over accurate decisions. It's working from patterns and habits, not always from what's most useful or helpful in that moment.

What does this mean in real life? It means we tend to sort things into two categories: safe and threatening. Some of it makes sense. If you see a fire in a building, your brain quickly categorizes it as dangerous and immediately signals you to move away from it. But sometimes the system misfires. Your child rolls their eyes and your brain reads that as disrespect. Suddenly you have a threat signal and a rush of emotion before you've even had time to take a breath.

This happens in relationships too. A friend doesn't text back and your brain fills in a story. Now you're anxious, withdrawn, convinced something is wrong. Messages come into our brains through our senses. We make meaning of them, we search for patterns, and much of this happens beneath our awareness. We begin having thoughts about these experiences, and our bodies receive signals telling us whether we are safe, excited, panicked, fearful, or angry.

All of these emotions are essentially data. We don't experience them as data, though. They arrive and reshape our moment—sometimes our entire hour or even our day. But when you study the purpose of emotions, they are signals meant to help us make survival-based decisions, guiding us toward safety and away from danger.

So emotions, in many ways, are information. But that's not how most of us learned to think about feelings. Feelings capture our attention and bring with them bodily sensations. We feel them physically. They can feel pleasant or unpleasant, and then our instinct to move toward pleasure and away from discomfort takes over. That becomes the loop we often find ourselves in with emotions.

The reason I want you to see feelings differently is that it creates a little space between your emotions and your choices. When you understand that feelings are information, you can respond to them differently. You can experiment with new ways of experiencing emotions and make decisions that aren't purely driven by emotional impulses.

Research from Matthew Lieberman at UCLA found something fascinating. When people simply name what they are feeling—just put a word to it—the activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center, decreases. He called this process affect labeling. Naming an emotion helps regulate it.

This is why the first step in emotional skill-building is simply putting a name to what you're feeling. When we understand emotions as information, it becomes easier to acknowledge them without feeling like we must obey every emotional impulse.

Emotions are a bit like waves in the ocean. You can't control a wave, but you can read it. You can decide how you're going to interact with it—whether you ride it, move with it, dive under it, or brace against it. But you can't stop the wave from existing.

That's where we often get lost. We think the goal is to eliminate emotions or create only positive ones. But what we actually control is how we interact with them.

This is especially challenging for mothers. We carry immense responsibility. We need to stay functional and lead our families while managing constant demands. Emotions can feel overwhelming in that context, and many of us have learned that our job is to stay strong and appear fine.

We move through our days carrying everyone else's emotional needs while setting aside our own. Sometimes we ignore the messages our emotions are trying to give us, hoping they won't overwhelm us.

And it's not only difficult emotions that we avoid. Often we avoid positive ones too. We downplay pride or pleasure in our accomplishments. Many women feel like they're supposed to stay humble and not celebrate good things too openly.

We may even brace against joy, anticipating that something might go wrong. Brené Brown calls this foreboding joy. When we experience happiness or contentment, we quickly imagine losing it, trying to protect ourselves from possible disappointment. Ironically, this defense can rob us of the joy itself.

When we struggle with feeling our emotions, we cut ourselves off from both ends of the emotional spectrum. We miss the information emotions are trying to give us, and we often react instead of responding thoughtfully. We repeat patterns without understanding why, and we sometimes miss opportunities for meaningful connection because real connection requires us to be present with our own emotional experience.

Managing emotions without truly feeling them is exhausting.

Let me give you a familiar parenting example. Imagine you've asked your child three times to pick up their backpack or put their dishes in the sink. On the third request, something inside you snaps. Your reaction feels much bigger than the situation itself. You might even hear your own voice and wonder why you're suddenly so angry.

That gap between the situation and your reaction—that's information. The surface emotion might be frustration or anger, but if you pause and notice what’s happening in your body—the tension in your shoulders, the tightness in your throat, the heat rising in your chest—you may discover deeper feelings underneath.

Perhaps you're exhausted. Perhaps you're thinking that no one listens to you. Maybe you're worried about your child's responsibility or feeling lonely because you feel like you're the only one holding everything together.

Suddenly it becomes clear that it's not about the backpack at all. When you recognize these deeper layers instead of reacting immediately, something shifts inside you. You understand the emotion more clearly and can choose how you want to respond rather than simply reacting.

This same process applies in marriages and relationships. Imagine your partner comes home and immediately looks at their phone. You feel a sharp sense of hurt or irritation. The surface emotion might be anger, but if you pause and get curious, you might discover deeper feelings like longing for connection, missing your partner, or fear of drifting apart.

Emotions rarely tell the whole story right away. Our bodies are still processing the initial reaction. What we want to learn is how to slow down enough to read the message the emotion carries.

So how do we actually do this?

The first step is naming the emotion. This falls into our self-awareness pillar. Gently name what you're feeling. It doesn't need to be perfect—just close enough. You might say, "I think I'm sad," or "I'm overwhelmed," or "I'm irritated."

The second step is feeling it in your body. Emotions have two parts: the label we give them and the sensations that show up in our bodies. Maybe your chest feels tight, your jaw is clenched, or you feel pressure behind your eyes. Simply noticing these sensations begins the process of emotional regulation.

The third step is getting curious about what the feeling is trying to tell you. Ask yourself questions like, "What matters to me here?" or "What value is being activated?" Beneath anger you might find hurt. Beneath irritation you might find fear. Beneath withdrawal you might find longing or love.

The fourth step is bringing compassion. Speak to yourself the way you would speak to someone you care about. Sometimes placing a hand on your chest and saying something like, "This is hard, but I'm here with myself," can be powerful.

This process is what I call the emotional body scan: What am I feeling? Where is it in my body? How strong is it? What am I thinking? What do I need? What choice do I want to make next?

When you practice this skill over time, something remarkable happens. You stop being hijacked by your emotions. You stop avoiding discomfort. You stop repeating patterns without understanding why.

Your confidence grows. Your relationships soften. Anxiety decreases—not because life gets easier, but because you're no longer spending so much energy running from your own inner experience.

I want you to know something important. You don't have to be afraid of your feelings. They are not going to swallow you whole. You are not too much, even if your emotions feel big. Learning to feel your feelings is a skill that many adults never learn, and that's why I'm so passionate about teaching it.

It brings you back to yourself and opens the door to deeper connection with the people you love.

I'm so glad I got to spend this time with you today. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I look forward to talking with you again next time.

If these ideas resonate with you but you're not sure how to apply them in your own life, I want you to know you don't have to do it alone. I'm currently opening a few one-to-one coaching spots for moms who want personalized support as they build resilience in their lives and families.

If that sounds like something you're looking for, visit leighgermann.com and click on one-to-one coaching. We'll set up a free call to talk about where you are, where you'd like to be, and whether coaching is the right next step for you.

The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not replace working with a qualified mental health professional. The information shared here is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease, and it is not legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances.

Thanks again for listening, and take care.