Survivors of high-control systems often have trouble identifying or understanding their feelings. An essential part of healing is learning to pay attention to and understand what our emotions are telling us. This starts with recognizing that emotions aren’t good or bad. The way we choose to express them can be appropriate or inappropriate, but feelings themselves are not wrong. 

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Physical feelings inform us what’s going on within and around our bodies. In the same way, our emotions give us crucial information about what’s happening to us. Dysfunction is inevitable when we block or invalidate our feelings instead of taking them seriously. When we try to stop our feelings before we’ve processed them, they stay trapped inside our bodies, unable to serve their purpose. If we make a healthy habit of naming, accepting, and processing our feelings, we don’t just understand them better, we have more control over how we express them.

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Every emotion has two important things to offer: information about how we’re being impacted by our experiences and motivation to take some sort of action.

These are the basic, primary emotions and the information and motivation they each give us.