Most of us were never taught how to process our emotions. We were taught how to suppress them, control them, explain them or get on with life despite them.
You may have heard someone tell you that you need to “feel your feelings,” “sit with your emotions,” or “process your emotions”.
But what does that actually mean?
Does processing an emotion mean talking about it? Crying? Journalling? Understanding where it came from? Sitting with the feeling until it disappears?
These things can all be useful, but there is a distinction I believe is incredibly important.
Understanding an emotion isn’t necessarily the same as experiencing and processing it.
You can have an enormous amount of insight into yourself and still find the same emotional reactions, behaviours and patterns showing up again and again.
Learning how to process emotions is about moving beyond simply knowing what you feel or why you feel it and giving yourself an opportunity to actually experience what is there.
When I talk about emotional processing, I’m talking about allowing yourself to experience emotions connected to an event, memory or experience that may not have been fully felt or expressed at the time.
There are many reasons this can happen.
Perhaps you didn’t know how to process what you were feeling. Nobody had ever taught you. Maybe emotions weren’t expressed in your family, or the adults around you didn’t know how to process their own emotions either.
Sometimes there simply wasn’t space.
Something happened and you had to keep going. You had children to look after, work to get through, people relying on you or another problem demanding your attention. Perhaps the experience was overwhelming and suppression was the way you were able to move through it at the time.
The emotion didn’t necessarily disappear simply because the moment passed.
This is what I mean when I talk about an emotion being unprocessed.
The experience happened, but you didn’t have the opportunity, knowledge, space or capacity to fully experience and process what you felt.
Think about how much you were taught growing up.
You learned how to read and write, solve equations, drive a car, use a computer and perhaps cook a meal.
But how much were you taught about what to do when you’re furious with someone you love? What happens when grief hits you unexpectedly? How do you move through resentment without pretending everything is fine? What do you do when something that happened twenty years ago still creates an immediate reaction in your body today?
For many people, emotional processing simply wasn’t role modelled.
Instead, we learned other strategies. We kept busy, stayed strong, distracted ourselves, thought positively, talked ourselves out of what we felt or decided there were more important things to deal with.
None of this means you did something wrong.
It simply means that emotional processing is a skill, and like any other skill, it can be learned.
Current psychological resources similarly describe emotional processing as something people can learn rather than an innate ability, although different therapeutic approaches define and practise it differently.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see is the belief that identifying an emotion means you’ve processed it.
Awareness is important. Being able to recognise that you’re angry, disappointed, ashamed, resentful or grieving gives you information.
But knowing the name of the emotion isn’t necessarily the same as experiencing it.
This is particularly important when people begin exploring the relationship between their emotions and physical experiences. They often want to know:
“What is the emotion behind my symptom?”
They may search online, open a book or look at a chart that tells them a particular body part or diagnosis corresponds to a particular emotion.
But I don’t believe emotional work is that simple.
Two people can have exactly the same diagnosis and completely different life experiences. Even the physical presentation of the same condition can differ enormously from one person to another.
This is why I don’t believe the goal is to find the “correct” emotion and tick it off a list.
Your experience is individual.
This is another place people can become stuck.
You may know exactly why you feel the way you do.
Perhaps you’ve spent years in therapy. You’ve journalled, meditated, read the books, attended workshops and talked about your childhood. You understand your parents. You recognise your patterns. You know where your triggers came from.
That awareness can be incredibly valuable.
But if you asked me, “Jin, how do I know whether I’ve actually processed it?”, my answer would be very simple.
Let’s go and find out.
Emotional processing doesn’t necessarily need to take hours. Using the Release Process®, an experience can sometimes take only a few minutes to explore.
So rather than deciding intellectually that something has already been processed, we can become curious.
What happens when you return to the experience?
What is still there?
Is there anything that still needs to be expressed?
And perhaps most importantly within my work:
Is there a message you haven’t yet received?
When something difficult happens, the mind loves to get involved.
We replay the conversation, analyse what the other person meant, decide what we should have said, imagine what we might say next time and try to work out why the experience affected us so much.
That can feel like emotional work because we’re spending an enormous amount of time thinking about the experience.
But thinking about an emotion and experiencing an emotion aren’t necessarily the same thing.
This distinction appears beyond my own methodology too. Some current psychological explanations of emotional processing differentiate experiencing feelings from rumination or repeatedly analysing the event.
Within The Art of Listening to Your Body, we bring attention back to the experience itself.
Rather than immediately asking why, we become curious about what is actually there.
Emotions aren’t experienced only as thoughts.
You might notice tightness across your chest, a lump in your throat, tension through your jaw, heaviness, heat, pressure, butterflies in your stomach or another physical sensation that appears alongside an emotional experience.
This doesn’t mean every physical sensation has an emotional cause.
It does mean that emotions involve physiological experiences as well as thoughts, which is why paying attention to what you notice in your body can give you useful information about what you’re feeling. Current psychological guidance on emotional processing also commonly includes noticing where an emotion is experienced physically.
This is part of what I mean by listening to your body.
You aren’t searching for a textbook answer about what a particular body part is supposed to mean.
You’re becoming curious about your experience.
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels angry, sad, disappointed, hurt, fearful or frustrated.
Nor do I believe the goal is to spend the rest of your life searching through your past for another emotion to process.
Emotions are part of being human.
Processing gives you a different way of meeting them.
Instead of automatically suppressing what you feel or becoming consumed by it, you develop the ability to recognise that something is there and give yourself the space to experience it.
Over time, this changes your relationship with emotion.
You don’t need every uncomfortable feeling to disappear immediately. You begin trusting your ability to experience what arises.
And that capacity becomes incredibly valuable when life doesn’t unfold according to plan.
There are many approaches to emotional processing. Depending on the modality, you may encounter practices involving mindfulness, labelling emotions, noticing bodily sensations, expressive writing, therapeutic conversation and other forms of emotional expression.
My own approach is the Release Process®.
The Release Process® is a simple four part verbal process that gives you a structure for experiencing and processing emotion. Specific prompts within the process help ensure you’re moving through the essential components rather than unknowingly bypassing the places that feel uncomfortable.
At its foundation are Scream Therapy, the One Way Conversation, the Two Way Conversation and the Inner Child or Younger Self Conversation.
The structure is simple, but there are countless variations depending on the person and experience.
And I deliberately don’t teach you the complete process on this page.
Because reading about emotional processing isn’t the same as experiencing it.
This is where my approach differs from simply expressing emotion.
I don’t believe the goal is only to cry, scream, talk about what happened or reach the point where the emotional intensity reduces.
Through the Release Process®, something else can emerge.
The message.
You may suddenly see why an experience has affected you so strongly. You may recognise a need you’ve never communicated, a pattern you’ve continued repeating, a place where you’ve been waiting for somebody else to change, or something in your life that you already know needs to be different.
This is what I call Deciphering the Message.
Processing the emotion is the Missing Link.
The message is the Key.
Because the message gives you something you can take forward into your life.
This is where emotional processing becomes much bigger than feeling an emotion.
The way someone moves through the Release Process® can reveal how they communicate, whether they ask for what they need, how comfortable they are receiving, where they minimise themselves and where they give their power away.
It can highlight the places where someone says they want one thing but continues behaving in a way that creates something completely different.
These patterns don’t remain neatly inside an emotional exercise. They can show up in relationships, work, business, boundaries, leadership and the way you pursue what you desire.
This is why I don’t see emotional processing as something you do simply to “clear negative emotions”.
The insight that emerges needs to become something you live.
Otherwise, you may simply recreate another version of the same experience.
Not always.
There are emotional experiences you may become very capable of processing yourself.
But there is a reason I believe support can make this work incredibly powerful.
Sometimes you need someone to see what you can’t see.
Human beings are remarkably good at bypassing. We can change the wording, skip the uncomfortable part, stay intellectual, rush to forgiveness or give the answer we think we’re supposed to give without realising we’re doing it.
This is why learning a process and being facilitated through that process can feel completely different.
I compare it to riding a horse. You can read the books, watch the videos and understand the theory, but eventually you have to get on the horse. Having an experienced horseperson beside you can reveal things you would never have noticed alone.
Emotional processing can be similar.
Start with curiosity.
You don’t need to uncover your deepest memory. You don’t need to know the “right” emotion. You don’t need to work out the emotional meaning of every symptom in your body.
Begin by recognising that there may be a difference between understanding what you’ve experienced and actually processing what you’ve experienced.
That’s the distinction I teach inside my free Missing Link Masterclass.
If you’ve spent years working on yourself, or you’re completely new to emotional processing, this is where I’d recommend beginning.
A free introduction to why identifying and understanding your emotions may only be the beginning, what emotional processing actually means and the piece that may have been missing from the work you’ve already done.
If you already know you want to experience the work rather than simply learn about it, you can choose the pathway that feels right for you.
Read about the Release Process® in Healing Beyond the Diagnosis, begin experiencing the work through Gateway, or learn the process with live guidance and support inside RELEASE.
There is no compulsory sequence.
Choose the level of experience and support you’re ready for.