feel your feelings - by Isabel - Mind Mine

Something I have noticed in myself (and many of my smart, self-aware friends) is that we sometimes try to outsmart our emotions instead of just surrendering to them. This “adult way” of dealing with emotions can both help and hurts us. We like to intellectualize, understand, and identify the source of our feelings. We like to pattern-match, notice similarities and differences between them. We like to categorise and explain our feelings. What we don’t like to do is sit with them—feel them, in all their vulnerable, gripping and inescapable glory. Our tendency to over-intellectualize our feelings detaches us from them, characterizing them as data or a science project instead of a valuable personal signal. It sanitizes them of their humanity and puts them in a box as far away from our identity and ego as possible. It is startling to be taken over by emotion as an adult—we feel as though we should be past that! Beyond it! We should be grown ups, able to rein in our emotions on command! The

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• Uyên Phạm Thu