Malec and Associates

Have you ever wondered what it means to “process your feelings”? For some people, they think it means you will end up “wallowing” in feelings, spending an indefinite period of time “feeling sorry for yourself”. The belief that experiencing your feelings is an excessive, self-indulgent process is a common excuse some people use to resist their own feelings (and maybe to keep others from doing so, also).

Processing feelings is a way to integrate our emotional experience into everyday life. It provides valuable information about how we are interacting with the outside world. Its feedback and it’s meant to help us adjust to “real life”. It helps us learn to “label” our experience which improves our ability to make better choices in the future. Confusing? Let’s use an example.

You begin attending college and you are interested in making new friends. However, you enjoy gaming at night with your friends from home and often are up very late. You find early morning classes to be difficult and often you sleep either in class or can’t make it to class because you are too tired. Your grades reflect your lack of investment and your lack of friends on campus begin to cause feelings of anxiety and isolation.

Without processing your emotions, you could deny that staying up late had anything to do with the poor grades; instead, blaming your professor or the type of tests used or some other reason. Or you could try to suppress anxiety by using alcohol to numb those feelings.  If you process your emotions, you admit you feel anxious and isolated (without judging them). You acknowledge that the feelings seem to be connected to poor grades and you use these feelings to look for ways to reduce them by working on improving your grades. As you make changes in how many nights you are up late, you begin to see an improvement in your participation in class and subsequently your grades improve. In addition, you admit that you’re also feeling lonely on campus, and you decide to join a local group that can provide a social outlet.

Processing emotions can give you a way to understand yourself and make changes in your behavior. Processing emotions requires us to not judge the feelings as good or bad, but they help guide us in making decisions.