Insightful Play and Counseling

01/09/2025

Beautiful snow day in Texas and grateful for telehealth to be able to continue to support clients!

08/09/2024

Love this The Haven Wellness Center!! And all my clients know we talk about boundaries all the time!! 😀 I also love the quote by Prentiss Hemphill that “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

03/01/2024

Once again, it has been a LONG time since I've made a post and I'm really hoping to make it more consistent, but self-care takes priority and unfortunately this doesn't always make the list! But here we go again! 🙂

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What’s your initial thought when you see or hear the word *feelings*? For a lot or maybe even most, it likely isn’t a positive thought. However, feelings are not positive or negative or good or bad. Feelings are feelings. There are certainly more and less pleasant feelings to experience, but having any particular feeling is not good or bad.

What happens when we have the mindset of good vs. bad feelings is that we dismiss, push away, ignore, etc. the “bad” feelings in ourselves and for others. How many times have you experienced either as a child or an adult someone saying something like, “Don’t be sad about that, be happy for x, y, z” or “don’t be mad about that, they didn’t mean it that way” or “there’s nothing to be worried about”, etc, etc. These types of comments lead us to believe that we aren’t supposed to have those feelings or that it is bad or wrong to have those feelings. And then that can lead to specific attempts to avoid or ignore certain feelings or shame when we inevitably do feel those feelings.

And here’s the thing, the more we push away or hide our feelings, the stronger they get. They get pushed in some corner of our body and that ball of emotion just keeps growing. It does not disappear as much as we might think it does or wish it would and at some point it will make its impact (an emotional explosion, unhealthy coping skills, health problems, difficult relationships, anxiety, depression, etc).

So back to the point of this post in changing the mindset of good vs. bad feelings is recognizing and allowing yourself to simply feel what you feel in any given situation regardless if it what you are *supposed* to feel or *want* to feel. And when you let yourself feel what you feel (vs. trying to stuff it away), then it will do its thing and go through your body as it is supposed to do. Again, I recognize it may not be pleasant to feel all feelings, but the more that we feel what we feel, the less uncomfortable it will be because we have more experience in feeling them.

You feelings are communicating something to you, so listen.

And side note, you can also work on processing through and shrinking your stuffed away ball of emotions. And that’s what I’m here for. :)