If you have a habit of thinking your way through things, you may be preventing yourself from actually healing from it. In todays post, I am going to share with you my story and share 5 tips on how you can stop thinking, so you can start healing.
I use to think crying made you weak.
I would do everything I could to avoid feeling what was actually going on inside of me. I’d intellectualize it. I’d try to “make sense” of it. I’d distract myself by staying busy. Anything to keep from actually sitting in the feeling.
And it wasn’t until I let myself turn into a puddle that I finally started healing my feminine energy. I had to let go of this strong, controlled, masculine way of moving through life
The Crack in the Armor
Once I gave myself permission to start healing this part of myself, it was like a crack formed in my armor. And once that crack was there, the floodgates opened and I could not shut them again.
I cried for four years. I’m not exaggerating.
It was so hard for me, because I hated crying. I hated anything that made me look or feel vulnerable. I hated looking like I didn’t have it together. I hated not being in control of my emotions, because I had spent my whole life living in such a controlled way.
Once those floodgates opened, I felt completely out of control of my life.
This goes back to being a kid and learning from a very young age, that I wasn’t emotionally supported. So the only way I knew how to make things make sense was to intellectualize. To understand why someone did something instead of ever letting myself actually feel what was bothering me.
And on top of that, I’m Mexican, and in my culture, crying got you made fun of. There was a nickname for it “chillona,” which means crybaby. If you were to ever cry in front of kids, they would literally chant “she wants to cry, she wants to cry.” How mean right?
Another common line I’d hear was “I’ll give you something to cry about”.
So somewhere along the way, I absorbed the belief that crying = weakness. And I carried that belief for a long time.
In the middle of it, I remember asking myself, when is this going to stop? I just wanted to be done crying about everything.
But looking back, four years really isn’t that much compared to a lifetime of suppressed emotion finally being unlearned and processed. There were literally decades of unprocessed stuff that had to come up before there were no more tears left to cry.
I still cry now. I am the one now calling myself a crybaby. But it’s different. It’s not the same kind of release. It’s just being a person who feels things.
What I Learned About the Body
During this process, I went down a rabbit hole of somatic healing and nervous system regulation. I read The Body Keeps the Score, What Happened To You, The Vagus Nerve Reset, and The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Maté. The Myth of Normal really fascinated me. There’s research now showing that when we don’t process our emotions, it can show up in the body as inflammation, autoimmune conditions, and even certain cancers.
Everything in the body is connected. We’re not separate parts. And it shows in our bodies more than we realize.
You can literally see unprocessed emotion in people:
- Shoulders creeping up toward the ears, like they’re bracing for something
- Trouble making eye contact
- Migraines and tension headaches from a clenched jaw
- A body that’s tight and braced all day, but nothing is coming
That bracing takes energy. So much energy. Most people think its easier to not have to look at something, because they don’t want to have to face it or deal with it. Meanwhile, the body is the one paying for it.
I remember reading You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, which I’d first picked up years ago. Her theory is that almost any medical condition can be traced back to some kind of repressed emotion or stress. When I first read it, I thought it was such a unique way of looking at things. After reading Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, I remember thinking ‘wow, she was so ahead of her time.’ Because she wrote this book in the 80s. Now this concept is more widely accepted and there is more research on it. But can you imagine back then? There was so much separation from the mind and the body.
Lets look at anxiety for example. A common side effect that comes with anxiety is digestion issues. And although they may say, “I don’t know why I feel anxious” or “I’m just an anxious person.” It goes a lot deeper than that. When you listen to what your body is trying to tell you, its saying ‘something isn’t sitting right with me.’ So when you stop and listen and ask questions like…
- What can’t you stomach?
- What are you making yourself stomach?
- Are you staying in a relationship that isn’t safe for you?
- Are you swallowing things you actually need to say?
It can give so much information of where the anxiety is stemming from. It just takes time connecting the two.
The Trap of Intellectualizing
I’ve always loved psychology. I have a psych degree and a life coaching certification, and I have always been drawn to this world of self-development. But for a long time, I was processing everything from my left brain. Thinking my way through feelings instead of actually feeling them.
When I would reflect on things that happened to me as a kid, I’d do it from the perspective of my 25 year old self, with all my adult understanding and compassion for my caregivers. What I wasn’t doing was checking in with the five or six year old version of me who didn’t have any of that context. Who just had feelings. Sadness. Anger. Frustration. And no way to communicate any of it.
All that intellectualizing kept me disconnected from my body. I used my mind to move through life instead of listening to what my body actually needed from me.
Pushing through exhaustion Making myself sick in the process.
I decided I needed to go to therapy. I needed to sit with a feeling, a memory, instead of talking about it. And it turned out to be exactly what I needed. My therapist specialized in emotional healing, not just talk therapy. (Talk therapy has its place and helps a lot of people, I just knew I needed to get out of my head.) And this is what finally helped me stop crying. When I let myself release all of my emotions and honor what I needed, rather than resisting. Because that was a part of the problem. I was crying, but resisting it. Trying to figure out logically, why?
Now, when I cry, I don’t ask myself what’s wrong with me. I ask: what is my body trying to tell me? What needs to move through me right now? And I let it.
How to Start Becoming Your Own Support System
1. Stop intellectualizing
Stop trying to make sense of what you’re feeling. Stop trying to give it a reason. You don’t always know what’s been stuck in your body or what just got triggered. And your mind not understanding it doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be released. The more you try to figure it out, the more you’re abandoning yourself instead of supporting yourself. Sometimes things just need to be witnessed. It doesn’t have to make sense. Just allow it to flow.
2. Analyze Your Anger
Anger is usually a secondary emotion. Most of us are more comfortable with it than we are with sadness. But I also feel like its a shield we put on to avoid feeling whats really bothering us. But its an emotion, none the less. So first, let it move through your body. Scream into a pillow, go for a run, dance, shake it out. Then ask what’s underneath it. Do you feel hurt? Disrespected? Like a boundary got crossed? Figure out what is really bothering you.
3. Build a self-soothing menu
Notice what your body is asking for and have a go to list of ways to support yourself:
- Anxious: try box breathing
- Feeling rejected: give yourself a hug. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a younger version of you
- Tired: rest, instead of forcing productivity
- Stressed: take a warm shower
Just start listening to your body and have tools up your sleeves to help these emotions move through.
4. Stop numbing yourself
If you’re anything like me, you stay busy so you don’t have to feel what’s actually going on. I still scroll social media — I’m not saying cut it out completely — but if you’re using it (or TV, or podcasts, or constant background noise) to avoid checking in with yourself, that’s worth noticing. Try journaling, a voice note, calling a friend, or a walk in nature instead.
5. Give yourself grace
Emotional healing is a long process. Especially if you’re an intellectualizer or if you learned at a young age that emotions weren’t safe. It’s a whole new way of being. I know we want to rush past discomfort because it doesn’t feel good, but what’s coming up is necessary. Feeling through it, not just understanding it intellectually, is genuinely the fastest way through.
There’s Light at the End of This. You just have to go through it. You can’t rush it, and you can’t think your way around it. But you will get there.
And if you’re ready to start healing your own feminine energy and want support through it, I’d love to help.
