Trusting Your Own Emotions

When it came time for me to truly face myself and really change the course of my life, I'd gotten myself hooked up with a new therapist and she blew my mind with a question I'd never been asked - why don't you trust your own feelings?

I self identify as someone who is painfully aware of their emotions and feelings and yet, I'd consistently let myself question every single thought and feeling I've ever had.

Why do I default to asking myself why I'm thinking something or feeling something? Why can't I just say, "I do like this, I don't like that, and I like this about this, but not that about that."

The initial problem with me not trusting myself comes from suffering with dichotomous thinking, which can force you to assign a "good" and a "bad" to any thought or feeling or emotion you may perceive. When you only think in those terms it's hard to "validate" and find a "middle ground" sort of feelings, let alone the addition of any other emotions.

Dichotomous Thinking

A few places where you can find yourself falling into black and white, or dichotomous, thinking are:

• Foods are good for you, or bad for you.
• People are either nice or evil.
• Clothes are either wearable, or unwearable.
• Emotions are only felt and perceived singularly and in ultimate totality.
• Jobs are either great or awful.
• I am either furious or sad or happy - pick one.

You get the point. Although it's also important to point out that the reasoning behind these "good" and "bad" assignments does not always have to be rational, nor does it have to stay good, or stay bad. At any time something can switch from bad to good or vice versa - however there is never a grey area.

One of those most dangerous parts of dichotomous thinking comes in to play when you're battling with your feeling regarding other people - people you love, people you want to love, and people you used to love. It's a challenge to overcome an initial banishing to the dark side knee-jerk reaction when someone does you dirty. It's also challenging to be a good judge of character when someone is initially kind to you, or love-bombing you (shout out to my abusive exes).

While dichotomous thinking is often linked to BPD, it can also be a comorbid condition witnessed in people with OCD and those with anxiety and/or depression (or all of the above and then some, in various combinations and ranges of severity, such as myself.)

Of course, this all stems from being traumatized, gaslit, and abused during childhood. When you are raised in situations that are threatening and dangerous and then told that you're overreacting, your brain starts to wire itself to not trust your initial feelings. When something traumatizing happens right in front of you, and the next day it's as if nothing ever happened, your brain wires itself to question your gut feelings. When the people who are meant to love and protect you begin to make you feel like you are crazy, an enemy, a threat, an inconvenience, etc., your brain tells you that your feelings and emotions are generally invalid and your perception of who is good and who is bad is skewed.

While I grew up, my brain was in a constant state of total confusion and my safety was constantly in question - this kind of consistent threat forced my brain to try and protect me, but instead it really made existing much more difficult.

Enter the most expensive therapist I've ever seen.

I paid over $100 a week, that I absolutely couldn't afford, to have telehealth appointments with a woman who finally asked me, "Why don't you trust your own feelings?"

I've spent years getting frustrated with myself for my own feelings an emotions. I tried to understand WHY I felt the way I did and I would try to change my thoughts and feelings and couldn't and just - well I just suffered. I suffered in my own brain prison, and to be honest I still do at times; once my therapist made me look at why I didn't trust myself, she provided me with a list of feelings and emotions that are able to exist with one another in harmony, in one person, one body. This list is something I refer back to constantly.

With this list, and other guidance through DBT with my therapist, I started to embrace myself and my thoughts and emotions.

Now, when a thought or emotion crosses my path I aim to let it exist there in harmony with others. When someone hurts or upsets me, I aim to assess who they are as a complex person with highs and lows intertwined.

I treat myself with kindness now - I trust my feelings, and even when they get extreme or scary I talk about them instead of try to fix them, act on them, or run from them.

It is possible to feel happy and sad at the same time, or upset with someone yet still love them.

If this all seems obvious to you, I am pleased to announce that you likely weren't traumatized as a child, at least not enough for your brain to wire you into a human shell with a tornado of feelings inside, forcing you to choose one and become that, and only that.

Trusting myself isn't always easy, and I don't always nail it, but it's led me to a great job, a great marriage, and the chance to choose to embrace myself every single day.

You deserve gentleness, grace, and patience. You deserve to trust yourself and your feelings. You deserve to live in a luscious beautiful grey area with the splashes of pink, stripes of red, swirls of blue, and boulders of yellow.

You are a complex being with complex emotions and you deserve to embrace all aspects of you.