How to Build Emotional Awareness: Feelings as Feedback
Building emotional awareness requires us to be in touch with our feelings, and not avoid them. When it comes to negative emotions, no one likes to be in pain and so there is a tendency to push our feelings down. Our avoidance could also be that we don’t like being seen as “emo” on the assumption that we need to appear strong. However, when we are in the habit of suppressing our emotions for too long, a host of problems can occur; ranging from depression and anxiety to substance abuse.
After realising about the importance of getting to know ourselves, we may encounter problems with accessing our emotions at first. It was certainly what happened to me. For a start at one stage, I was not able to distinguish and to identify what I was feeling. In fact, I had to ask for help.