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5 Reasons You Should Talk About Your Feelings

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What are the reasons you shouldn’t talk about your feelings? There are none. Yeah. That’s right. There is not a single reason on earth for why you should not talk about your feelings.

As a matter of fact, I can give you five reasons you should talk about your feelings.

1. Your feelings are important.

There are so many times that we invalidate our feelings. We say things like, “I’m so upset that I got a ‘B’ on this exam.” But then we start to think things like, “This is so dumb, why am I upset? I passed,” when in reality it is in no way dumb that you feel the way you do. You have reasons for feeling that way and maybe they seem small to you and insignificant as if there are bigger problems in the world, but if it is making you feel a certain way, then it is just as important as anything else.

2. Talking about your feelings allows you to acknowledge them.

From personal experience, I can tell you that one of the first steps of the healing process is acknowledging your feelings. A lot of the time, if you do not acknowledge when something is real, it is so much easier to just forget about it and move on, but to be completely honest with you, that does not solve anything. When you are able to accept and acknowledge that what you’re feeling is real, it allows you to begin healing by figuring out ways to manage those feelings and solve whatever issues it is that are causing those feelings.

3. Talking about your feelings can help you to feel relieved.

Holding in your feelings and letting them boil and build up inside of you, in the simplest of terms, sucks. Once you let them build up enough, these feeling start to become all you can think about and they almost in a way start to overcome you. You become a different person, one who is so self-consumed by these feelings that you start to not care about anyone or anything else. When you let out these feelings, this wave of relief washes over you, because you are no longer holding all this in, you let it out.

4. Talking about your feelings allows you to receive support from those you share them with.

When you talk about your feelings, more specifically when you talk about your feelings with others, you will more times than not be met with more support than you would’ve ever thought. It is terrifying to open up about what you’re feeling to anyone but it will make you feel a million times better when you do it and you receive all this support and you realize that there are people here for you and people that care about you.

5. Talking about your feelings allows you to take control of them.

When you just hold in your feelings, they start to consume you. How you feel determines how you think, which determines how you act. When you let these feelings take control of you, they also take control of how you think, which takes control of how you act. So, if you are the one that decides to actually talk about how you’re feeling, you are no longer letting your feelings control you but instead you are controlling them and you are able to try and do what you can to change them.

Talking about your feelings is not easy. Many things in life aren’t easy. But, the day you start doing it will be the day you start the rest of your life.

Header image via Katarzyna Bialasiewicz/Getty Images.

Originally published: February 17, 2019
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