How to feel your feelings and improve your emotional intelligence
Feeling your feelings is a hard skill, and I just want to say that before you continue on reading. I want you to be kind to yourself if you feel like you are struggling with identifying your feelings and feel like you are emotionally stunted. Emotional intelligence is a skill and it just like with any skill you can get better at it with practice and effort.
What exactly is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is a two part ability. The first part of emotional intelligence is being able to identify your feelings, understand your feelings, and respond appropriately to and with your feelings. The second part is being able to use these skills to understand others and in situations where emotional intelligence is important. Emotional intelligence is what helps us feel connected and grounded within ourselves and in our relationships. Couples therapy or individual therapy can help you build on this skill.
Working on your emotional intelligence can help you cope with depression, anxiety, and process unresolved traumas. Emotionally immature people often struggle with knowing how to process their feelings and often take it out on others or themselves in harmful ways. Working on being more emotionally intelligent can help.
Situations where emotional intelligence is important
Improving your emotional intelligence can help you be the best parent you can be
Being the best parent that you can be looks different every day and looks different as we go through different seasons of life. Parenting is tough work. And being the best parent is really aiming for good enough, not perfection. Being the best parent requires us to self-reflect, cope with our own feelings and stressors, and still show up for our kids with as much love and competition as we possibly can. Did I mention parenting is tough? Working on your emotional intelligence won’t make parenting easy, but it will help you feel more calm and confident.
Increasing your emotional maturity can help you fight less with your partner
Everyone in long term relationships or marriages fight sometimes. Having higher emotional intelligence can help you and your partner fight less often and fight in a healthy way. Emotional intelligence partners tend to resolve augments not only faster but report that the argument brings them closer together. Emotional intelligence allows us to sit in uncomfortable conversations with a person we care deeply about with the goal of understanding. The goal is not to prove a point or to win the argument. Emotional intelligence can help you and your partner heal attachment wounds and help you create a more secure relationship. Couples therapy with an Emotionally Focused Therapy therapist who understands how past trauma can impact how we fight, can help you and your partner gain the skills you need to fight better.
Emotionally intelligent people tend to navigate stressful family get togethers better
Family get-togethers are stressful. It can be the holidays, birthdays, or just getting together for dinner. Working on your emotional intelligence can help you know what is within your control and what is not. Emotional intelligence can help you know when you need to take a break or duck out early before you get emotionally flooded. And emotional intelligence can help you tolerate others and still find ways and moments of connection, which can help you feel more grounded. As a Latina therapist, this is an area I often help fellow BIPOC couples and individuals navigate. In therapy we work to balance boundaries while holding space for our cultures and also removing the dysfunction from our lens of our culture. It isn’t easy but working on this can help you learn to love your culture and family again.
Emotional intelligence is a huge skills for being an effective leader in a company
I am sure you have had your fair share of bosses who are not great leaders. Oftentimes it is because these bosses don’t have emotional intelligence. It is hard leading a group of people. Whether you are in a startup or in a large fortune 500 company, emotional intelligence will make you a better boss. Having and continuing to work on your emotional intelligence will make it easier for you to handle difficult situations and help you not feel like an imposter. High achieving people of color often struggle with imposter syndrome, particularly women, and therapy can help.
How therapy can help you get in touch with your feelings in a safe way
This is probable one of the areas I work hardest on with my couples in therapy in my online Scottsdale private practice. In my work with marginalized couples such as BIPOC couples, interracial couples, and queer couples, I have to remind them that it isn’t their fault that they weren’t taught these skills. Often we, speaking as a fellow Latina, were not taught to feel feelings. For some it could be dangerous to feel feelings, often leading to abuse and the withholding of love from a parent. And for some feelings can be a sign of weakness. And for some, not making a scene can protect them from the police, immigration, and other systems that cause them and their families harm.
Can I work on my emotional intelligence or am I stuck like this?
So many people wonder if they are stuck feeling impulsive, prone to anger, and doomed to be forever single because they can’t do feelings. The answer is no, you are not destined to be emotionally immature forever. Odds are, if you are reading this you are already on your journey to becoming more emotionally intelligent and emotionally mature. Even if someone gave you this to read. We all need gentle nudges sometimes. Below are the things I recommended nearly daily in my private practice online in Scottsdale Arizona where I specialize in BIPOC couples, interracial couples, and people who came from chaotic upbrings working to heal their inner child in therapy?
How to stop intellectualizing my feelings?
Some people think they are feeling their feelings but what they are really doing is intellectualizing their feelings. We all do this from time to time. Why? Because it is safer and we have been conditioned to see it as more socially acceptable. Feeling your feelings often means we have to get in touch with our bodies and senations. This can be hard to do with traditional talk therapy and this is where I will often suggest to my clients that we try EMDR therapy, IFS therapy, or inner child therapy. All of these approaches help us get more connected with our subconscious and sub cortical areas of our brain, which is fancy talk for accessing the parts of our brain that actually light up in brain scans when we feels our feelings. Not everyone feels their feelings in the same way and a tailored therapy approach can help.
7 simple steps to start feeling your feelings for higher emotional intelligence and to be more emotionally mature
Meditate. You knew this was going to be on the list. I know. I know. But please consider picking up a meditation practice. My suggestion is to simply practice for two minutes a day and increase it if you'd like. The main goal is to just notice your breath and thoughts. That is it. Don’t push the thoughts away. Don’t push the planning part of you out of the way. Just notice. This is what I tell people and this helps reduce the pressure of trying to meditate in the right way.
Get yourself a feeling wheel. I would suggest a google search of “feelings wheel '' and pick whichever you like. The first time I saw a feeling wheel, I was overwhelmed. There are lots of feelings, and I was guilty of knowing and using only like five. When you reflect on your day or journal you can practice trying to see what feelings you felt.
Rewatch your favorite movie or show and see if you can pick out the feelings of a character. See if you can really put yourself into the shoes of the character. If something brings you to a deep belly laugh, ask yourself why? If a scene brings you to tears, again ask yourself why?
When someone asks you how your day is going, don’t say fine or good. Believe it or not, good and fine are not feelings, but we use them all the time. Instead say things like calm, slightly annoyed about the weather, or exhausted but in a good way after meeting up with family and friends. Play around with your response.
Read self help books. Bibliotherapy or reading self help books is so underrated. But there are some great ones out there. Pick up a few and you might be surprised about how common sense it seems. That's the thing, until someone puts it into words for you, it isn’t really common sense. So read!
Use a guided journal or therapy workbook. Prompts can help you get in touch with thoughts and feelings that you never really gave space for. This practice can help you bring up the stuff that bothers you the most so that you can let it go.
Go to therapy with someone trained in helping people address emotional blocks. As an EMDR and relationship therapist, I often work with people who have trouble accessing their feelings. Many of them have “blocks” and EMDR therapy can help them get in touch with their blocking parts. This is where I often blend in IFS therapy. EMDR and IFS therapy can help you connect with your feelings and your body in ways that your thinking brain might struggle with.
Inner child therapy can help you improve your emotional intelligence and well being
As a therapist who is trained in EMDR & EFT, I often blend in parts work or Internal Family Systems. I often call this inner child therapy and the clients I have worked with report that this helps them address things in a way that feels safe and deeply healing. BIPOC folks know how hard it can be to talk about the things we go through and our inner child can really accumulate a lot of hurt and pain. Approaching healing with inner child therapy, addressing blocks and body sensations, you finally heal that inner child or inner teen. Often the things we are bothered by and dealing with today have its roots way back and helping your inner child let go of that can make a huge difference in the present day. If you would like to learn more read my other blogs or reach out and I would love to set up a time to chat to talk about how therapy can help. The most important thing is finding a therapist you connect well with and I am happy to see if its the right fit and if not to help you find one.
With Warmth,
Elisa Blair
Hey there, I’m Elisa Blair!
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist + Founder of Mindfully Minding Me Therapy.
I am a Latina therapist specializing in couples counseling and anxious individuals struggling with relationships. I have a special focus working with BIPOC folks, interracial partnerships, or those who came from chaotic childhood homes who want to break cycles and step into a more peaceful way of doing life. Childhood trauma and attachment wounds are my thing!
I am a mental health therapist who is licensed in Arizona and California, meaning I can see people in either state from the comfort of their home.
Check out my about page to see if we are the right fit, explore my specialties page to see if I can help you creating and sustain thriving relationships. Ready to set up a free consultation?
