Hello beautiful one,

Many of us have found ourselves highly emotionally activated around our families.

Maybe it comes in the form of intense dread at seeing them, or a non-specific sensation of being unsettled, or we feel anxiety about being around them and are hoping they don’t say certain things.

Maybe we have some simmering rage that we are afraid might come up, or we feel so awkward and perhaps ashamed about ourselves and our life choices when family appears.

All of these are common emotional reactions around the people who are some of the (or perhaps the) most significant people in our lives.

And the reason we have these feelings around our family is down to a few important things. One of the most significant is that when we feel intense emotions it’s a sign we have unresolved emotion in our bodies.

When big emotions come up, and they keep coming up over and over, it’s a sign that the emotions we are experiencing are very old and are looking for release.

Why do they do this? Because emotions want to be seen, felt and heard – and then they will be released.

But how most of us learn to deal with our emotions – some or all of them – is to not see them, not feel them, not hear them.

So many of us have learnt to try and suppress them.

Push them away.

Try and talk our way out of feeling how we do.

Pour them on other people by shouting or blaming.

Numb ourselves so we stop feeling – through overwork, over drinking, over socialising, overeating etc.

Attempt to rationalize or explain them away.

Or any other way we attempt to push the feelings away.

And we learn this from our families. If our parents didn’t know how to deal with their feelings in a healthy way – they couldn’t teach us how to deal with our feelings in a healthy way.

They couldn’t create an atmosphere where feelings were seen as natural expressions of being human. Emotions are normal things to have, and one of the reasons why humans are able to have such close, connected relationships.

But when we are punished for experiencing anger or fear.

Or told to stop feeling anxiety or frustration

Or made fun of for feeling sadness or disappointment

Or banished to our rooms for feeling frustration or shame

Or however our families dealt with emotions

We are giving our brain the signal that emotions aren’t safe and natural – but in fact things that create friction and problems with our families.

Our brains get the message that emotions are a problem, a threat to our connection with our parents and our families.

So we come into adulthood not knowing how to experience healthy anger, healthy shame, healthy sadness, healthy fear.

And we spend so much time trying to manage our emotional reactions in unhealthy ways that it stop us from truly thriving.

Maybe we try to avoid situations, people or experiences that bring up emotions we struggle with. Making our lives smaller.

Maybe we try to numb our feelings or try to control them, making us fear things where we feel we might lose control.

Or we repeatedly feel a little of them and push the rest away.

Or we go on long rants to people to try and relieve the intensity of these emotions so they go away.

But the feelings return in other forms. At other times, never fully resolving.

And our families are at the source of many unresolved, unprocessed emotions. They were there when we had big emotions that weren’t supported, weren’t seen, and so they stayed stuck in our bodies.

And it just takes a throwaway comment by a sibling, or a stern look from a parent, or even the idea of seeing our uncle, and that old, very tender, still raw emotion activates and we are immensely uncomfortable.

The good news is that we don’t need to change the behaviors and the actions of the people in our families in order to have better relationships with them.

We don’t need them to be different to transform how we feel about them, and how we experience them.

What we do need to do, though, is spend time really working through those old, big, hard and tough emotions that stay unprocessed in our bodies.

Can you imagine seeing your family and not feeling angry at what they say to you, or scared about their response to your new job/partner/children’s behavior/financial situation?

Because it’s the feelings that stand in the way of stronger relationships, deeper connections.

And of course sometimes when we go through our feelings we realize, you know what, this isn’t a healthy relationship for me so I will enact some healthy boundaries here. That’s totally legitimate.

But what many of our relationships need in order to feel good, to develop into those closer, safer and more loving relationships – is for us to process through those hard feelings so we can:

Feel empowered to be who we are around our families

To release the protective mode we go into around our families

To release the blame & shame loops we might fall into

To support ourselves in these big activations so we feel confident

Change the perspective of our relationship with them

This for me is the second step of working with these complex situations with our families. The first being what I talked about yesterday, acknowledgement.

So now we have:

1. Acknowledging the feelings you have around your family
2. Understanding these are your feelings that are unprocessed and need to be worked through towards release

Tomorrow I will talk about how we start this process of processing our feelings.

I would love to know what you think. Can you resonate with these ideas? And do they remind you of any feelings you have about your family? If you feel like sharing, please do by hitting reply.

As always if you have any thoughts or comments about this piece, I’d love to hear them.

Much love to you and yours,

Diana