"Feel it to heal it" has become a familiar phrase within the therapy world. It’s easily memorable, but doesn’t necessarily make space for enough nuance. For many clients in psychotherapy, there is a sense that they are carrying around ‘unfelt feelings’ – perhaps from past experiences where there wasn’t the time, space, or permission to have the relevant feelings expressed and responsed to. And there is power and value in revisiting these feelings – not in an intellectualising or cognitive way, but experientially. But that’s not the same as saying that allowing ourselves to experience difficult emotions, through the act of crying, expressing anger, or revisiting painful memories, and saying that that is inherently therapeutic.
Emotions are an essential part of being human. From an evolutionary perspective, they help us to respond to the world around us. Fear prepares us to react to threat, sadness draws us towards comfort and connection, anger helps us recognise when important boundaries or values have been violated, and joy engages us fully with experiences that benefit us. In an ideal world, emotions arise in response to experience, are processed by our nervous system, and then shift and change to respond to the next circumstance we face. However, this ideal scenario isn’t always the reality of our lives and histories.
Many of us encounter situations that are emotionally overwhelming, particularly during childhood when we are dependent upon others to help us regulate our emotional experiences. When an emotion is too overwhelming, or when there is nobody available to help us make sense of it, our nervous system adapts. We may dissociate from our feelings, suppress them or intellectualise them. These are all survival strategies which allow us to carry on with getting on with life. This isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong; it shows the creative ways our minds and bodies protect us.
The difficulty is that protective strategies developed in one context do not always remain helpful in another. We may find ourselves becoming anxious in situations that are objectively safe, feeling emotionally numb when we would like to feel connected, or reacting with an intensity that seems out of proportion to what is happening in the present. Often these reactions can feel confusing, particularly when we understand, intellectually, that we are no longer in danger.
This distinction between intellectual understanding and emotional experience is one that I encounter frequently in therapy. I talk often with my clients about recognising things up in their heads, but struggling to drop that understanding down into the experience of their bodies.
Contemporary neuroscience suggests that traumatic experiences are processed differently from ordinary autobiographical memories. Experiences that occur when we are overwhelmed aren’t fully integrated within us, meaning they can easily be activated by present-day situations. Healing is not just repeating this process of being triggered over an over, in fact this runs the risk of traumatising further. Instead, when we talk about the importance of “feel it to heal it”, we mean allowing previously avoided emotional experiences to be heard, seen, and accepted within a context of safety. The therapeutic relationship provides one such context. Within a person-centred therapeutic relationship, difficult emotions are not judged, dismissed or hurried away. Instead, they are met with empathy, acceptance and a genuine attempt to understand your unique experience. Together with a therapist, it becomes possible not just to experience the reactive emotions, but the full nuance of every element of the feelings which were and weren’t felt in the past.
What I am suggesting is that healing can occur when emotions that were previously too difficult to process can finally be experienced under different conditions. When you don’t feel isolated and alone, when you feel safe and secure, when you feel received and accepted. Don’t underestimate the power of feeling emotions from the past while in the presence of another person who is attempting to understand, and who remains alongside you as you make sense of what those feelings mean.
Experiencing feelings is only helpful when it happens at your own pace, a pace that your nervous system can tolerate. To revisit traumatic experiences without sufficient safety or support risks reinforcing rather than resolving distress. The aim is not emotional flooding, but emotional integration. For some people this may involve tears, whilst for others it may involve recognising an emotion that has remained unnamed for many years. There is no particular emotional experience that signifies successful therapy, it’s unique to you in your personal situation.
Perhaps, then, "feel it to heal it" is best understood not as an instruction, but as a reminder that emotions which have been excluded from awareness often continue to influence us until they are acknowledged. Within a safe therapeutic relationship, those emotions can begin to find their place within the broader narrative of our lives. They do not disappear, nor should they. Rather, they become integrated into our understanding of ourselves, allowing us to respond more freely to the present, rather than remaining organised around experiences from the past.