Feeling — The Language of Relationship
I grew up in an emotionally volatile environment. Not just the push and pull of my parents’ hot-and-cold relationship, but a larger web of unpredictable emotional landscapes—family members, friends of the family, caretakers—each with their own emotional weather system I had to learn to track.
Without anyone teaching me how, I became an emotional barometer. I learned to anticipate tone shifts, brace for outbursts, and prepare for silence. When things got too unpredictable, I shut down—not because I didn’t feel, but because I felt too much. Feeling deeply, without safety, can become its own kind of trauma.
There were moments when emotions came out sideways—anger disguised as jokes, blame cloaked in “concern,” sadness swallowed until it spilled out as resentment. I internalized the lesson early: that other people’s emotional projections might be dumped onto me without warning, and I had to be ready. The term I use now is “emotional vomit,” but back then it just felt like being caught in the blast.
Over time, I began to question what was mine and what wasn’t. What was safe to feel and what needed to be hidden. What was allowed and what might get me blamed. But through it all, one thing remained true: I was deeply in tune with feeling. I just didn’t yet know how to work with it as a language, rather than a threat.
What Is Feeling, Really?
If sensation is the body’s communication with the self,
feeling is the heart’s communication with the world.
Feelings are not random emotional states. They are messengers of connection, separation, meaning, and memory. They arise in response to what we touch, what we care about, what we fear losing, and what we can’t fully name.
Grief means we’ve loved. Joy means we’ve touched something meaningful. Fear means we’re approaching something we are afraid to lose. Anger means a boundary has been crossed.
But in our culture, feelings are often reduced to categories—good or bad, positive or negative. We’re encouraged to amplify what looks palatable and suppress what doesn’t. We learn to mask sadness, swallow disappointment, and replace anger with politeness. We perform the “right” feelings and apologize for the “wrong” ones.
Eventually, we stop trusting our own emotional truth. We lose fluency in the language of the heart, instead of noticing that feelings are the echo of relationship.
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The Function of Feeling
When we judge feelings as good or bad, or wrong or right, we completely miss the messages coming to us. When we spend our energy categorizing or even shaming ourselves for our feelings, we find ourselves distracted from the information we need to respond to.
Feelings have so much to tell us and they often showcase:
• Where we long to belong.
• What matters deeply to us.
• What wounds still live in us.
• What truths we’re afraid to say.
When we dismiss them, we miss the message.
When we over-identify with them, we confuse its meaning and we enmesh ourselves with responses rather than our true identity. This is what happens when our feelings get stuck and we spiral without letting the message come as it is without our need to filter.
But when we allow them to speak—without trying to make this feelings pretty and neat—we begin to reconnect with the depth of our relationships and how we want to relate to the world around us with authenticity and intimacy.
Empathic Intelligence and the Mood of a Room
Feeling is often conflated with sensation. We say we “feel” things deeply in the body. That’s because feeling and sensation are closely related, but distinct. Sensation is physical; feeling is emotional. And yet, many people experience emotions as parallel body sensations—because they live close together in the nervous system.
As social beings, we also feel the emotional landscape around us. We sense others—their joy, their grief, their fear, their tension—even when nothing has been said aloud. This is emotional resonance. For those of us raised in unpredictable environments, this skill develops out of necessity, not choice.
We can feel:
The mood of a room shift when someone walks in
The emotional weight in someone’s silence
The tenderness beneath someone’s anger
The grief hiding behind a smile
This is empathic intelligence, but it is often mistaken for weakness or fragility.
For those of us who grew up tracking other people’s emotions to stay safe, this skill often becomes overdeveloped and overwhelming. But when brought into balance, it can become one of our greatest gifts.
Relearning Emotional Trust
Feeling is the heart’s portal, and it works best when it’s allowed to stay open.
That doesn’t mean we express everything to everyone, or get swept up in emotion without grounding, it means we learn to stay in relationship with what we feel, rather than fighting it, fearing it, or faking our way through it.
You don’t have to label every feeling correctly or explain it in words, but you should be present with it without trying to justify it.
Try asking yourself:
What am I feeling right now, and where do I feel it in my body?
Is this feeling mine, or might I be absorbing something from someone else?
What is this feeling asking me to witness?
Is there something I need, or something I need to name?
There is no scorecard for “feeling well.” There is only your willingness to meet yourself where you are, without bypassing or blame.
A Final Note on Emotional Fluency
Feelings deep down are frequencies shared in the field between each of us bridging the space between us and the world. They show us what we care about, where we’ve been hurt, and what still matters to us. When we allow them to move through us, we find that our capacity to feel becomes our capacity to love. When we become more emotionally literate by understanding our feelings, it impacts all our relationships and we create a stronger more resonant network of connections—within us, around us, and between us.
Next: Thought – The Language of Consciousness
The mind’s portal for meaning, reflection, and discernment.