#7: How To Practice Feelings Boundaries With Heavy Emotions
You do not need to hold space for it all.
You do not need to hold space for every emotion,
reads the post-it note on my mirror. The purple slip is a reminder, a visual siren for when I notice myself holding space for too many heavy feelings at once.
As a sensitive person, I’m accustomed to embracing feelings freely. It doesn’t matter if I’m already processing other emotions (aren’t we always?); I simply make room for more. Joy intertwines with pain, rage colors grief, empathy and apathy learn to dance.
I’ve always preferred it this way, and I assume many other sensitive people do as well. I’m most comfortable feeling all the feelings simultaneously (I’ll take one of each, please), yet I realize this comes at a high cost.
It’s easy to open my arms wide to every emotion until I end up wading too deep, quite literally drowning in a sea of my feelings. I can’t process it all; the weight is too heavy. Trying to feel everything at once results in feeling nothing at all. And this is especially true for more challenging emotions, like a…
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