Hi everyone! My name is Diana Garcia and I’m a licensed mental health counselor in Florida and founder of a private practice called Nurturing Minds Counseling.
I’ve been doing 12 tips for the holidays. Today we’re on our fifth tip and, if you haven’t seen the other tips, I’d encourage you to scroll through or read the blogs. Today’s tip is allowing and validating your emotional experience, or your entire experience in general.
Watch Video: “12 Days of Tips for the Holidays: Day 5: Allowing & Validating Your Feelings”
Read Blog: “12 Days of Tips for the Holidays: Day 5: Allowing & Validating Your Feelings”
I’m going to focus on our emotional experience. Often, I find with people that we’ll have a feeling, and then we’ll have a feeling about our feeling, or we’ll have a judgment about why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling. This may cause us to invalidate ourselves, or we judge ourselves for having that emotional experience. Maybe we think we shouldn’t, and we think other people wouldn’t have this reaction to the situation for whatever reason. A lot of times we’ll tend to be harsh with ourselves when we’re having an emotional experience and not allow ourselves or to be sad or angry because we have been told we are not supposed to feel that way. This may happen from growing up in your home and receiving mixed messages about emotions.
For today’s tip I really want to acknowledge that you are allowed to have all your emotional experiences. Whether they’re right or wrong, emotions aren’t right or wrong, but it is important that you give yourself permission to feel the full range of emotions. It’s also important that you validate that experience for yourself instead of invalidating that by saying you’re not supposed to, or you shouldn’t.
A lot of the time it is not even your voice in your head! It might be someone else like an aunt, dad, etc. A good exercise is to write someone from the past that you’re hearing. However, I really want you to start validating your own emotional experience and allowing yourself to have it, whatever the experience is for you. Particularly through the holidays, I think that sometimes the perspective is that this should be a joyful time. I shouldn’t be feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or sad, but I don’t so what’s wrong with me? You may be feeling that you should be excited, and it doesn’t help everyone else on Instagram or Facebook. This makes it even harder to validate that if not fitting in to what our culture tells us.
Today’s tip is allowing and validating your emotional experience! Thank you to everyone and I hope that was helpful. We will continue our 12 Days of Tips for the Holidays!