The Strength Is in the Feeling, Not the Numbing

 

I’m reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle, and one line stopped me in my tracks.

She wrote about how she once believed that happiness was the only feeling we were meant to keep, and everything else was a problem to solve, fix, or numb.

I understood exactly what she meant.

So many of us were taught that if we’re not smiling, we’re broken.
If we’re not joyful, we’re doing something wrong.
And anything uncomfortable, anger, sadness, grief, anxiety should be buried, silenced, or quickly managed so we can “get back to normal.”

But what if those feelings are part of our normal?

When I was coaching, one of the things I was most passionate about was teaching my clients how to feel, not fix, suppress, or analyze, but just feel.

Because most of us don’t know how.
We were never taught.

We learned to hide.
To busy ourselves.
To smoke.
To drink.
To binge.
To people-please.
To take pills just to quiet the ache.

I’ve done it.
I used to take pain meds to escape what I didn’t have the tools to sit with.
But when I started my healing journey, I realized something:

The pain you refuse to feel doesn’t disappear; it just finds another way to control you.

And the moment I finally let myself feel, really feel:
The grief.
The rage.
The betrayal.
The abandonment.
The shame.
That’s when everything shifted.

Feeling my feelings didn’t break me.
It freed me.

Because when we allow our hearts to break, we open ourselves to real transformation.
We alchemize.
We turn pain into power.
Tears into truth.
Emptiness into purpose.

The journey of healing isn’t about feeling good all the time; it’s about feeling everything so we can move through it, not around it.

So the next time something hurts, try this:
Instead of rushing to fix it, feel it.
Sit with it.
Name it.
Let it pass through.
That’s where your power lives.