Anne lives an incredibly active life. She’s an office manager for a thriving company, goes to school at night for her business degree, sings in the local choir, sees her many friends on weekends, and travels frequently with her partner of five years. Needless to say, Anne doesn’t have much spare time.
Each night before Anne goes to sleep or when she’s home while her partner is out of town for work, an aching feeling creeps up inside her. She hates this feeling. The thought of experiencing the ache at night terrifies her. So, she continues to stay busy and focused on the hectic life she has around her and sleeps with the television on loud each night until she falls asleep.
What is this achy feeling inside Anne? It’s what many therapists call a “core feeling.” It’s so deep-seated that its firm grasp over your life can affect you without you even knowing it.
A core feeling is an emotion that visits you often and throughout all stages of your life. It’s a feeling that develops in childhood and tends to be powerful and visceral.
Core feelings are everywhere. They are inside you and most people around you. Even though we all can experience them, no one seems to talk about them. It’s a feeling you probably experienced the most often, or more intensely, in childhood. It’s been inside you for a long time and is always just right around the corner, waiting to be touched off.
A child is heavily influenced by the environment they grow up in. Their parents’ rules, expectations, norms, values, and feelings become integrated into a child’s wiring. What they learn and absorb from their family becomes a large part of who they are. What a child feels consistently in their upbringing will follow them into adulthood.
While we all have core feelings, some people are more vulnerable to being ruled by them. These people are the ones who grew up with childhood emotional neglect. In this type of environment, a child is not taught how emotions work. Their feelings go unaddressed, unacknowledged, and sometimes even invalidated or pushed to the side.
Without a parent to teach you how to identify and name, tolerate and manage, or express and communicate your emotions, these feelings stay inside you—unprocessed and waiting to be noticed. Old, unprocessed feelings are more likely to follow you into adulthood if you experience childhood emotional neglect.
We know that Anne from the example above has a core feeling that nags at her. As a child, Anne’s parents were extremely entrenched in their careers. She would be left home alone and had different nannies who took care of her, even on family vacations. She felt alone. Despite feeling this way, her parents didn’t seem to notice her yearning for their presence. So, Anne learned to push this feeling aside, too. And she continues to do so in adulthood as she stays busy and distracted.
It’s common to experience your core emotion as unpleasant and burdensome. In an effort to get rid of it, you do all that you can to keep it down, whether it’s through distracting, ignoring, avoiding, or denying.
Unfortunately, these are tactics you most likely learned from your emotionally neglectful environment. You weren’t given the tools to effectively deal with powerful emotions around you or inside you. But, it’s never too late to learn the essential emotion skills to deal with these feelings.
1. Your core feeling is directly connected to your childhood.
In fact, when you allow yourself to feel your core emotion, you gain access to memories from your past. This is because your core emotion is a pipeline to your unresolved issues. It’s the key to healing old wounds.
2. You make your core feeling stronger by ignoring it.
Imagine you have a deep cut from an accident. If you choose to ignore it, chances are high that you could get an infection and have to deal with more serious issues down the line. If you tend to the cut—disinfect it, stitch it, and bandage it—it’s easier for it to close up and heal.
3. A surefire way to heal your core feeling is to allow yourself to feel and process it.
The only way out is through. Below are the steps to properly process your core feeling.
Through this process, you will increase your tolerance of discomfort, gain self-awareness, and heal old wounds that have been following you for decades.
If you relate to Anne, you might feel like you are running away from something. It’s probably difficult to be still and breathe because a painful emotion could be lying in wait. When you start to process your emotions, you are increasing your capability of handling difficult emotions in the future. You are taking your power back.
So, no more running. Turn around and look at what you’re running away from. You won’t regret it.
© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.
References
To determine if you might be living with the effects of childhood emotional neglect, you can take the free Emotional Neglect Questionnaire. You'll find the link in my bio.
Here's How a "Core Feeling" Is a Pipeline to Your Past
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07.05.2024
Anne lives an incredibly active life. She’s an office manager for a thriving company, goes to school at night for her business degree, sings in the local choir, sees her many friends on weekends, and travels frequently with her partner of five years. Needless to say, Anne doesn’t have much spare time.
Each night before Anne goes to sleep or when she’s home while her partner is out of town for work, an aching feeling creeps up inside her. She hates this feeling. The thought of experiencing the ache at night terrifies her. So, she continues to stay busy and focused on the hectic life she has around her and sleeps with the television on loud each night until she falls asleep.
What is this achy feeling inside Anne? It’s what many therapists call a “core feeling.” It’s so deep-seated that its firm grasp over your life can affect you without you even knowing it.
A core feeling is an emotion that visits you often and throughout all stages of your life. It’s a feeling that develops in childhood and tends to be powerful and visceral.
Core feelings are everywhere. They are inside you and most people around you. Even though we all can experience them, no one seems to talk about them. It’s a feeling you probably........
© Psychology Today
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