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After I understood that I’d spent years going numb instead of finding calm, I ran straight into a new problem: I had no idea how to actually feel something on purpose. Nobody teaches this, not even your own parents. We’re taught how to read, how to drive, how to budget, and somehow never how to sit with our own emotions long enough to let them do what they’re supposed to do. So when I decided I was done numbing out, I didn’t suddenly know how to feel again. I had to learn it the way you’d learn any other skill, badly at first, one small step at a time.
The place I started was almost too small to count as anything. When something hard showed up, I tried to just feel it, not explain it, not figure out where it came from, just actually stay with what I was feeling long enough to understand it. That’s harder than it sounds when you’ve spent years doing the opposite. A researcher I read about once described most emotions as lasting somewhere around ninety seconds in the body if you don’t fight them or feed them with a story, and that lined up with what I started noticing: it’s the story we build around a feeling, not the feeling itself, that keeps it going. My wife and I started doing something that helped this stick: we’d sit down together and each pull a feeling at random off a feelings wheel, and I’d try to actually remember a specific time in my life I’d felt that exact thing. Half the time I couldn’t come up with anything, which told me how little practice I’d actually had at just being with a feeling instead of rushing past it.
From there I started building what I can only describe as a felt-sense vocabulary, because I genuinely didn’t have one. I’d ask myself where I felt something in my body, not just what I thought about it. Tight chest usually meant anxiety. A hollow feeling in my stomach usually meant loneliness. Heat in my face usually meant anger I hadn’t said out loud yet. None of this came naturally. I had to practice noticing it the same way you’d practice noticing anything you’d never paid attention to before, slowly and with a lot of trial and error. Journaling never worked for me, and I stopped trying to force it. What actually helped was saying it out loud, even just to myself, naming the feeling instead of just turning it over silently in my head. There’s something different about hearing yourself say “I’m angry” or “I’m ashamed” out loud instead of just thinking it. It gets the feeling out of your head instead of letting it loop in there.
This is slow work, and it should feel slow, because you’re building a muscle that never got used. Some days I still miss the signal and only catch the feeling after it’s already turned into something else. It doesn’t fully finish either. I’m twelve years sober now, and there are still stretches where I go quiet instead of saying what’s actually going on, where I stop communicating altogether, and I have to catch it, back up, and go through the whole exercise again: feel what I’m feeling before I try to talk about it. That’s not failure, that’s just what the work looks like this far in. The goal was never perfection, it was practice. Every time you let a hard feeling move through you instead of running from it, you get a little faster at recognizing the next one. You’re not behind for having to learn this late. You’re just building something now that should have been built a long time ago, and it’s never too late to start laying the foundation.
Spencer
