Let It All Be True

A Road Map For Feeling Your Feelings

Hello 🖤,

One of the most freeing things I find my clients resonate with in learning to listen to how they feel is this simple idea: Let it all be true. 

We so often feel like we need to pick one feeling or another, and we live in false binaries. “I need to love him or hate him,” “She is a good friend or a bad friend,” “I want to take the new job or I do not.” When the reality is we may feel fifteen different things about the same decision or relationship at the same time.

I sometimes think of all the different feelings like the varied contents of a basket of fruits and vegetables. They’re not the same thing, they may not even blend together well, but they are in the same basket.

The relief comes in no longer litigating how we feel, but allowing it all to exist at the same time. 

I have laughed with clients about how this should be mandatory teaching in schools and churches, where we are often looking for advice on how to live. We are very rarely ever taught that we don’t have to think in “all or nothing” ways, and we don’t have to pick between false binaries.

It can all be true at the same time.

And what you will find is that as you listen to all your feelings, allowing all of them to have a seat at the table, you will feel less angst about deciding which feeling is ok, and which is not. Leaving more room for clarity. 

Finally, I love the way Dr. Hilary McBride describes listening to your feelings, she wrote in The Wisdom of Your Body, “If I could sum up all my years of clinical training and research in one statement, it would be this: We heal when we can be with what we feel. In other words, trying to make feelings go away, and in a very authoritarian, cognitive, and seemingly disconnected manner, wouldn’t do it. It is ironic that turning toward our emotions instead of exiling them is what helps us move through them.”

Let it all be true.

And so listening to how you feel, and allowing it to exist, is not just a woo woo idea, it is a healing agent. It is the means by which we not only name what we are feeling, but find our way through the feelings and even to healing.

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

What feelings have you exiled that it might be time to allow to return?

What is an area you can “let it all be true?”

With you,

Monica

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Also,

Are you familiar with the incredible work of Terence Lester, and Love Beyond Walls? You still have a chance to pre-order his new book, and that is a great way to support authors too! (Pre-orders are a big deal I have learned). I had the great honor of endorsing it, and I can’t recommend it enough.