Throughout my twenties, I hated my emotions.
They were overwhelming. Demanding. Insistent.
They hijacked my inner world, stole my sleep, distracted me from what I wanted to focus on, and sometimes made me do things I regretted.
So I tried to design my life around not having them.
I avoided situations that might upset me. And when uncomfortable feelings did arise, I pushed them away with food, books, busyness or whatever distraction was available.
As a Seven, I was particularly skilled at finding something more interesting or enjoyable to focus on.
But it didn’t make my emotional life any easier.
Instead, I found myself experiencing emotions in one of two ways. Either they were so overwhelming that I couldn’t think about anything else, or I couldn’t feel them at all.
I didn’t know how to experience the quieter emotions that existed somewhere in between.
And it took me a long time to understand that the problem wasn’t that I had emotions. It was that I hadn’t developed the skills to recognise, experience and respond to them.
The day I discovered that numbness was a feeling
I remember the day I wailed with grief.
The moment I locked all the doors because of my anxiety.
The time I boiled with anger.
And the extraordinary moment when I stood on an ordinary street in Toronto, Canada, on an ordinary summer’s day, and felt so happy it was as though the sun was shining just for me.
I remember those moments because the feelings were enormous.
They were so big that I couldn’t ignore them.
What I don’t remember so clearly are all the smaller emotions that came and went between those experiences.
Because for a long time, I wasn’t particularly aware of them.
I remember telling my therapist, “I feel nothing.”
And her suggesting that I say, “I feel numb,” instead.
That tiny change was a revelation.
I had been treating the absence of a recognisable emotion as an absence of feeling altogether.
But numbness was part of my emotional experience too.
And once I began to recognise it, I became curious about what else I wasn’t noticing.
What was happening when I said I was fine?
What feelings disappeared so quickly that I barely registered them?
And what was I doing to avoid experiencing them?
Through therapy, journalling, somatic work and eventually the Enneagram, I began to develop a different relationship with my emotions.
I learned that they didn’t always have to overwhelm me. And I didn’t always have to push them away.
Sometimes I could simply notice what I was feeling and allow it to be there.
Which sounds rather obvious now.
But at the time, it changed everything.
Our emotions have something to tell us
One of the reasons I think emotional development matters so much is that our emotions help us understand our relationship with ourselves, other people and the world.
They give us information about what matters to us.
Anger can alert us to a boundary that’s been crossed, an injustice, or something we want to change.
Sadness helps us recognise loss, disappointment and the things or people we’ve cared about.
Fear draws our attention to danger, uncertainty and our need for safety.
And happiness can help us recognise pleasure, connection, satisfaction and experiences we want more of.
Of course, our emotions aren’t always accurate interpretations of what’s happening.
We can feel afraid when we’re perfectly safe. Angry when someone hasn’t done anything wrong. Guilty about something that was never our responsibility.
But that doesn’t make the emotions bad or unhelpful.
It means we need to learn how to listen to them without assuming they’re telling us the whole story.
Our emotions provide information, but they don’t have to make our decisions for us.
We can acknowledge anger without yelling at someone.
We can recognise fear without automatically avoiding what frightens us.
We can experience sadness without needing to explain why everything will eventually work out for the best.
And we can enjoy happiness without worrying that something terrible is about to happen.
The aim isn’t to feel less.
It’s to become more comfortable experiencing the full range of our emotional lives.
What does it mean to have an authentic relationship with ourselves?
We hear a lot about being our authentic selves.
But I’ve often wondered what that actually means.
Most of us don’t think of ourselves as inauthentic. We try to be honest with the people around us, express our opinions, and live in ways that reflect our values.
But what about our relationship with ourselves?
What happens when we have a thought we don’t like?
When we feel jealous of someone we care about, angry with a person we love, or afraid of something we think we should be able to handle?
Do we acknowledge those experiences?
Or do we judge ourselves for having them?
For much of my life, my approach was to avoid, deny or suppress anything I didn’t want to experience.
I’d tell myself it wasn’t a big deal, or promise I’d come back to it later.
I rarely kept that promise.
And over time, it began to feel as though I was sitting on an overstuffed suitcase, trying to keep the lid closed while more and more things were being shoved inside.
It’s exhausting work.
But it’s also a strange way to relate to ourselves.
We’re willing to acknowledge the thoughts and feelings that fit with who we believe ourselves to be, while rejecting the ones that don’t.
And our Enneagram patterns play a significant role in that process.
As a Seven, I found it relatively easy to acknowledge happiness, excitement and enthusiasm.
But sadness, fear, frustration and disappointment?
Those were feelings I wanted to move through as quickly as possible.
I could often find a positive interpretation of a painful experience before I’d really acknowledged that it was painful.
Other Enneagram types have their own patterns of emotional avoidance.
Some of us find anger unacceptable. Others struggle with vulnerability, fear or sadness. Some become so focused on other people’s emotional experiences that they lose contact with their own.
And these patterns are influenced by much more than our Enneagram type.
Our families, cultures, relationships and life experiences all shape which emotions we’ve learned to welcome and which we’ve learned to avoid.
Having an authentic relationship with ourselves means being willing to acknowledge what’s actually happening inside us, even when it doesn’t fit the version of ourselves we’re most comfortable with.
That doesn’t mean every thought is true, every desire should be fulfilled, or every emotion should be acted upon.
It means we don’t have to reject parts of our inner experience simply because they’re uncomfortable.
Learning to stay with what we feel
One of the things that surprised me as I began developing my emotional capacity was discovering that experiencing an emotion wasn’t always the enormous undertaking I’d imagined.
Sometimes all I needed was a little time to notice what I was feeling, name it, and allow the sensations to be there without immediately doing something about them.
Other emotions, particularly grief, shame or feelings connected to painful experiences, needed much more time and support.
And sometimes I wasn’t ready to experience something at all.
That’s an important part of this work.
We can’t force ourselves to feel something we’re not yet able to stay present with.
But we can gradually develop the skills and inner resources that help us become more comfortable with our emotional lives.
For me, that has involved several practices.
Learning to name what I’m feeling.
Developing a wider emotional vocabulary helped me recognise that I wasn’t simply happy, sad, angry or afraid.
I might be disappointed, lonely, resentful, apprehensive, relieved, content or hopeful.
And sometimes I might be feeling several things at once.
Noticing how emotions feel in my body.
Rather than immediately trying to explain an emotion, I’ve learned to pay attention to the sensations that accompany it.
Tension, heaviness, warmth, restlessness, tightness, agitation.
Sometimes those sensations help me recognise an emotion before I’ve consciously named it.
Recognising my automatic reactions.
When I feel something uncomfortable, what do I want to do?
Withdraw? Argue? Explain? Distract myself? Make a plan? Find something positive?
Often, that impulse tells me something about my Enneagram pattern.
And noticing the impulse gives me an opportunity to pause before following it.
Learning to stay present without becoming overwhelmed.
Sometimes that means sitting quietly with a feeling.
Other times, it’s talking with someone, writing, moving, painting, or finding support to help me explore something difficult.
The important thing is developing a relationship with my emotions that allows me to experience them without being completely overtaken by them.
And that takes patience and practice.
How the Enneagram helps us make friends with our emotions
Before I learned about the Enneagram, I’d already spent years in therapy and doing other forms of inner work.
I’d made considerable progress in recognising and expressing my feelings.
But I still didn’t fully understand why I avoided certain emotions, or how quickly I was doing it.
Learning about my Seven patterns helped me recognise the defensive strategies operating in my emotional life.
I began noticing the moments when I rationalised something painful, distracted myself from disappointment, or turned a difficult experience into an opportunity before I’d allowed myself to feel what had happened.
And because I could see the pattern more clearly, I had more opportunities to work with it.
This is one of the ways I find the Enneagram so useful.
It helps us explore not just what we’re feeling, but how our personality shapes our relationship with each emotion.
Which feelings do we welcome?
Which do we judge, minimise or avoid?
What do we believe might happen if we allowed ourselves to experience them?
And what protective strategies do we use to keep certain feelings at a distance?
Understanding those patterns gives us a starting point for both healing and growth.
We might discover emotional experiences that need compassion and healing, or develop the capacity to stay with feelings we’ve habitually avoided.
And sometimes the very act of recognising a feeling we’ve spent years suppressing can be an important moment of healing.
Becoming more comfortable with our whole emotional lives
I still have moments when an emotion catches me by surprise.
Sometimes I realise I’ve been sad for several days without consciously recognising it.
Or that I’ve been distracting myself from something I’m worried about.
My Seven patterns haven’t disappeared.
But my relationship with them, and with my emotions, has changed enormously.
I no longer think of emotions as something that hijacks my life and needs to be controlled or avoided.
I’m learning to appreciate the information they bring, even when I don’t particularly enjoy the experience.
And I’m more able to recognise when an emotion needs my attention, rather than immediately reacting to it.
If you’re interested in developing a different relationship with your own emotions, I’d encourage you to start small.
The next time you notice yourself reacting to something, see if you can pause and ask:
What am I feeling right now?
What is this emotion drawing my attention to?
What do I feel compelled to do, and what might happen if I didn’t immediately follow that impulse?
You don’t have to get it right.
You don’t even have to know the answer.
Sometimes the most important thing is simply becoming curious about an experience you’ve spent years trying to avoid.
Because making friends with our emotions isn’t about loving every feeling or letting them take over our lives. It’s about learning to listen to all of them, so we can become more present to ourselves and more intentional in how we live.
And the Enneagram can help us understand why some of those friendships are harder to develop than others.