I’ve been talking about — in various articles — speaking your truth and from my perspective, your truth is your feelings, your collection of feelings. And expressing those feelings, I think, is important in living a more balanced, whole life. What surprised me, was that I had in my conversations some people say to me, “But what if you don’t know what your truth is? What if you don’t know what your feelings are?”
And that made me stop and reconsider. I think of myself as knowing my feelings. But as I started thinking about and researching the topic, I realized I’m not always in touch with my feelings. So, if I, someone who thinks I’m in touch with them — realizes I’m not, then what about the people who don’t have connection to those feelings? They are missing out on a lot. So, let’s talk about why you want to be in touch with your feelings to know your truth, and there are three primary reasons: it is for your resilience, your emotional intelligence, and for making better decisions.
Resilience isn’t just for our military and first responders, for our medical staff. We think of resilience as the antidote to PTSD — for avoiding it or getting past it. I don’t know enough about PTSD to know if resilience helps you get past it. But in my studies as a medic, I have heard, and studied, and learned, that when you’re resilient, you don’t burn out and experience PTSD, as readily. So that’s a real good first start for having resiliency, but if you’re not in the military or not a first responder, why would you need it?
Well, because life happens to us all. We lose jobs, we lose loved ones, we get sick. All those kinds of things we handle better when we have resiliency. And our daily challenges also are better managed when we have resiliency. Resiliency is developed by having good habits that keep us in a routine, by having community — people we can interact with, we can lean on, and talk to when our emotions are out of control. So you have to know the emotion before you can reach out to the community. That will be enough to describe what resiliency is for, for this video.
And then there’s your emotional intelligence. The more connected you are to your feelings — and feelings rise from emotional sensations… If you ever had that feeling in the pit of your stomach, or in your head, or in your heart, and you don’t know what to do with it, and if it’s too intense or foreign — if you’re uncomfortable with it — you kind of push it away. No, don’t do that. You want to feel it. Emotions pass in 90 seconds, so sit with the physical sensation. Get to know it. Where is it? I’ve named three logical primary places, but I don’t see why your physical sensation that creates an emotion can’t arise from anywhere in your body.
And once you’re connected to it, then you can start having words to describe it, especially its nuances. And the more connected you are, the more words you can have. And I’m talking nuances like: if we have many words for wind or snow. And when the wind or the snow is a big part of your life — it can be the difference between survival or destruction — you’ve got those subtle nuances. And having the same familiarity with your emotions can give you the same connection so you can express them.
Having a higher emotional intelligence, having more connection between the emotion and the experience and the feeling, that gives you an insight into your psyche, into what makes you tick. Have you ever noticed how some people get happy or angry at one situation and you don’t? Some of that could be the level of emotional intelligence, how much you’ve been willing to let yourself feel this sensation and know the emotion. So you can see why emotional intelligence could be important.
And the third reason that you want to know your truth or your feelings, is you make better decisions. When you’re overly emotional, you don’t make as good a decision. You also don’t make as good a decision if you aren’t connected, if you’re under-connected to your emotions, underly emotional. (I don’t know if “underly” is a word, but I’m using it now, so it must be). And I think that when you know your words, you’re making better decisions, that let’s you have better self-integrity. You can tell people or yourself what your values are, what you believe in, what you think is right and wrong.
But if you don’t have words for your feelings, your emotions, you may live out of integrity with yourself, because you won’t realize that something you’re feeling and acting on — you’re not feeling at a conscious level, but you’re acting on a subconscious level — might go against your values and your beliefs, and that makes you out of integrity with yourself. So, the more you can get in touch with your feelings by knowing your sensations, physical sensations, the more you can choose self-integrity.
So there’s a quick rundown, from my perspective, on why it’s important to know your truth, to know your feelings.
The original article on Knowing Your Truth: The Why