Why it is important to express your emotions with Samantha Flook

In society there can be a lot of pressure to push through a feeling and "get on with life”, can you speak about redefining what it means to be emotionally strong and why is it so important to express your emotions?

We can’t heal, what we pretend not to feel. We flow, when we give our emotions somewhere to go. Stored emotions can create us quite a bit of grief, inner turmoil, stress, worry and feelings of anxiety when not expressed or given an outlet to be seen or understood. Each emotion we have created meaning around as we have grown, conditioned from our varying experiences and external influences being completely unique to us, meaning we all feel and express differently. Some feelings we crave, others we don’t wish to look at or accept, which we subconsciously categorise into good or bad and replay said meaning or past experiences when certain emotions are felt, leading to depleting, self sabotaging habits, patterns and actions when felt, blamed on another, not accepted or taken responsibility of.

The pressure to continually deny how you feel, leads to living by your past, controlling your present in the aim “not to feel certain feelings”, easily taking on the emotions of others, creating a strong sense of fear and disempowerment to your motivation and flow in all areas of life, especially relationships. You can’t pretend to feel what you do, but you can take responsibility for your own feelings, not others, learn to understand instead of dismiss all emotions as enough, be the intention and positive guiding force behind them and express them in a way that respects you and intends the best in moving forward.
Communicating our true needs can be difficult at times, as a lot of us have been conditioned to please or make our feelings other than what they are. Our words create our reality and also bring our inner wants to life, so it’s important that we are expressing truthfully and clearly, what we truly want even when the needs of others may be different to our own.

Every emotion is energy, when you don’t speak it, your body will store it and say it for you. We end up carrying much unwanted worry, stress and anxiety from shaping our words to please another. The emotions you store will continue to play out around people and environments where we are pretending to feel other than what we do. This can lead to experiencing feelings of resentment, disconnect, frustration, anger, self doubt and even fatigue, burn out and sickness from denying our true feelings and having to control and present ourselves a certain way each and everyday... exhausting. You can’t fake or outrun a feeling, but you can learn to support and express them differently.

Every emotion is teaching, when we learn to go underneath our emotions instead of judge them we can learn a great deal from our own experiences and see clearly that we play the most important part in our lives, as it is only us that can ever be emotionally responsible for ourselves.

There is great freedom in creating personal boundaries in emotional communication, to explore opportunities & solutions rather than problems. Even when they are difficult conversations, we must remember the bigger purpose of effectively communicating is to move forward with the best intention, learn to hear each other out, respect our own inherent needs and those of others, acknowledge both opinions and the changes each and every individual is experiencing, which is why communication is a constant. So as I say to my clients we need to learn to name it, not blame it, as I have learnt greatly too. To learn to effectively express ourselves outward we need to learn to understand and express within ourselves first. Learning to accept the emotions that we usually deny helps us to create more freedom in communicating and helps us to make more tangible steps forward, as we are learning to work with what is and what we can do.

So moving forward learn to give this task a go