I once spent nearly three weeks trying to buy white curtains.
Three weeks.
I found some on Amazon. I read the reviews. Looked at customer photos. Worried about the shade of white, the sheen, the texture.
But I couldn’t just pick the white curtains because I also wanted blue curtains for several large picture windows in different rooms, with the white curtains hanging alongside them as a second, more sheer layer.
And I hadn’t picked the blue curtains yet.
Then there was the length.
Did I want them to fall all the way to the floor or stop at the bottom of the window? Did I want the curtain rod mounted above the window or closer to the frame?
Because that changed the length I needed.
And if I hung them one way in that room, what did that mean for the curtains in the next room? Would everything still flow together? Would it look balanced?
So I measured.
Then I measured again.
I checked Amazon. Then Wayfair. Then back to Amazon.
I read more reviews. Asked someone what they thought.
Then asked them again.
Every decision seemed to depend on another decision I hadn’t made yet.
And underneath all of it was this fear of getting it wrong. Because if I ordered them and hated them, I’d have to take them all down, package them back up, send them back, start over, and spend even more time on something I was already spending way too much time on.
So instead, I kept researching.
Kept measuring.
Kept thinking.
And didn’t decide.
Meanwhile, I was getting busier. Talking faster. Fussing over things around the house. Giving my kids extra jobs. Getting irritated over things that normally wouldn’t have bothered me nearly as much.
Eventually, I realized I was doing exactly what Richard Carlson describes in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff (1997).
I was sweating the small stuff.
Except looking back now, I don’t think the curtains were really the small stuff.
I think they were just the place all the bigger stuff had landed.
Sometimes the Small Thing Isn’t the Thing
I’ve noticed a pattern in my life.
When something big feels too painful, uncertain, or overwhelming to face, I can become incredibly focused on something much smaller.
Something I can control.
Something I can fix.
Something with Amazon reviews.
I’ve seen the same pattern play out in much bigger areas of my life.
At one point, I was dealing with betrayal in a relationship. There were things I didn’t want to see and decisions I didn’t want to make.
Leaving meant facing one kind of pain.
Staying meant facing another.
So I kept trying to figure out how to make staying the right decision.
Maybe if I understood more.
Maybe if I tried harder.
Maybe if things changed.
Maybe I was overreacting.
Maybe I just needed to give it more time.
My mind could come up with a hundred reasons to stay in something my body was screaming at me wasn’t okay.
Sometimes I wasn’t indecisive because I needed more information.
I was indecisive because I didn’t want to face what I already knew.
And that’s where I see the connection now.
Obviously, choosing curtains and deciding what to do after betrayal aren’t remotely the same thing.
But the pattern underneath them can be.
What if I choose wrong?
What if I regret it?
What if I have to undo the decision?
What if dealing with the consequences is harder than just staying where I am?
So we keep thinking.
Keep researching.
Keep asking other people.
Keep waiting for enough certainty to finally make the “right” choice.
Sometimes we think we’re looking for more information when what we’re really looking for is a guarantee that we won’t regret our decision.
And unfortunately, Amazon reviews can’t give us that.
Neither can most things in life.
What Are Unprocessed Emotions?
“Unprocessed emotions” isn’t a medical diagnosis.
I use the phrase to describe emotions and experiences we haven’t fully allowed ourselves to feel, understand, express, or work through.
Sometimes we know we’re avoiding them.
Sometimes we don’t.
And sometimes avoidance is exactly how we survive for a while.
We stay busy. We overthink. We clean. We work. We scroll. We eat. We drink. We shop. We take care of everybody else. We obsess over a decision. We rearrange the house.
We find something, anything, that feels easier to deal with than what’s underneath it.
I’ve done more than one of those.
Sometimes distraction is healthy. Sometimes you genuinely need a break from something painful.
But there’s a difference between giving yourself a break and escaping.
A break gives you some space and lets you come back.
Escaping is when you keep finding ways not to come back at all.
And when that becomes a pattern, the feelings don’t necessarily disappear just because we’ve gotten really good at avoiding them.
Your Body Might Be Part of the Conversation
This is where somatics became important to me.
Somatics, in very simple terms, means paying attention to what’s happening in your body instead of treating everything like a problem you have to solve with your thoughts.
You might notice that your jaw is clenched. Your chest tightens around a certain person. Your stomach drops when you think about a situation. You’re holding your breath without realizing it. You feel restless, heavy, numb, or like you want to get the hell out of the room.
For a long time, I could intellectually explain almost anything.
My body was harder to bullshit.
That doesn’t mean every uncomfortable sensation is some secret message from your subconscious. And it definitely doesn’t mean every physical symptom is caused by unresolved trauma or emotions.
The research doesn’t support making claims that broad.
But there is some interesting research showing that hiding an emotion doesn’t necessarily make the body’s response disappear.
Researchers have actually tested what happens when people are told to hide or suppress their emotions during stressful situations. Overall, their bodies showed a stronger stress response than people who weren’t told to suppress what they were feeling (Tyra et al., 2024).
Think about getting upsetting news right before you have to walk into work.
You pull yourself together. Smile. Answer emails. Sit through the meeting. Nobody around you may even know something happened.
You look fine.
But looking fine doesn’t necessarily mean your body has stopped responding to what just happened.
That doesn’t mean suppressing an emotion will make you sick. Sometimes we need to put something aside temporarily because we have to function.
But appearing fine and actually feeling fine aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Trauma Can Make This Even More Complicated
Trauma can teach us to disconnect from ourselves for very good reasons.
Sometimes noticing everything you’re feeling isn’t safe or useful when you’re in the middle of surviving something.
You get through it.
You function.
You do what needs to be done.
The problem is that the strategies that help us survive one season can follow us into the next one.
You might learn to ignore discomfort. Question your own reactions. Stay hyperaware of everybody else’s mood. Keep the peace. Numb. Control what you can.
Or convince yourself that something is fine because acknowledging that it isn’t fine might require you to do something you’re not ready to do.
I understand that one particularly well.
And this is one reason I’ve become interested in somatic approaches alongside the more traditional ways we work with thoughts and emotions.
The research on body-based approaches to trauma is still developing, and I’m not interested in pretending every claim you hear about “stored trauma” has been proven.
But after my own experiences, years in nursing and coaching, time in the recovery world, and years exploring holistic health, I’ve become pretty convinced of one thing:
Don’t ignore your body.
I don’t believe every sensation is a diagnosis or that your body is giving you some perfectly translated message about exactly what you should do. But I do think we’ve gotten really good at living from the neck up.
We analyze. Rationalize. Explain. Push through. Tell ourselves we’re fine.
Meanwhile, our bodies are part of the experience too.
For me, the answer isn’t choosing between science, thoughts, emotions, intuition, or the body.
It’s paying attention to all of them.
The body doesn’t need the only seat at the table.
But it sure as hell deserves one.
Thinking About Your Feelings Isn’t the Same as Feeling Them
This one took me a long time to understand.
I can analyze something endlessly.
Why did this happen? What does this mean? What should I do? What if I’m wrong? What if I regret it?
That can feel like emotional processing because you’re thinking about the situation constantly.
But sometimes overthinking is the avoidance.
Underneath 47 different thoughts might be one fairly simple feeling:
I’m hurt.
I’m angry.
I’m scared.
I feel betrayed.
I don’t want this.
Or maybe:
I already know what I want to do, and I’m terrified to do it.
Those are much harder sentences.
There’s research that helps explain why constantly pushing emotions down may not be particularly helpful either.
In one well-known study, researchers looked at how people typically handled their emotions. People who regularly tried to hide or suppress what they were feeling tended to report poorer well-being and more difficulty in their relationships than people who more often changed how they thought about and interpreted a situation (Gross & John, 2003).
Imagine you’re hurt by something your partner did, but every time it comes up you say, “It’s fine.”
You don’t talk about it.
You don’t acknowledge that you’re angry.
You don’t set a boundary.
You just keep trying to act normal.
Saying “it’s fine” doesn’t necessarily make the hurt disappear. Now you’re trying to have a relationship while also trying not to feel part of what’s happening inside of it.
That doesn’t mean we need to act on every emotion the moment we feel it.
There’s a difference between feeling an emotion, processing it, and deciding what to do about it.
If I’m angry, processing that anger might mean slowing down enough to recognize what I’m actually angry about. Maybe a boundary was crossed. Maybe I’m hurt. Maybe something feels unfair.
Once I understand what’s happening, I can decide whether I need to have a conversation, set a boundary, make a change, or simply let the feeling pass.
The goal isn’t to let our emotions control our behavior.
It’s also not to shove them down and pretend they aren’t there.
It’s learning how to listen to what they’re telling us and then choose what we want to do with that information.
So How Do You Process an Emotion?
I don’t think processing emotions needs to become another 12-step wellness routine you’re failing to complete correctly.
Sometimes it starts with noticing what’s happening instead of immediately trying to fix it, explain it, numb it, or make it go away.
Notice the emotion.
Notice what’s happening in your body.
Give yourself enough space to be curious about what’s underneath it.
You don’t have to immediately make a physical sensation mean something. You don’t have to analyze every emotion. And you certainly don’t have to make a major life decision based on one feeling.
But if you notice yourself obsessing over something small, getting unusually irritable, staying constantly busy, or finding a hundred ways to avoid being alone with your thoughts, it might be worth wondering:
Is the thing I’m obsessing over actually the thing that’s bothering me?
Sometimes it will be.
Sometimes it won’t.
And sometimes that question opens a much bigger door.
Your Feelings Are Information, Not Instructions
This is where I land now.
I don’t believe every emotion tells us exactly what to do.
Fear doesn’t automatically mean stop.
Excitement doesn’t automatically mean go.
Anxiety doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong.
And discomfort doesn’t automatically mean something is unsafe.
But I also don’t believe we’re better off continually overriding ourselves.
Our emotions give us information.
Our bodies give us information.
Our thoughts give us information.
Our values give us information.
Our experiences give us information.
Then we get to decide what we do with all of it.
That’s very different from either extreme: letting every emotion run your life or pretending your emotions don’t matter.
For me, healing has involved learning to hear myself again.
Sometimes that has meant facing betrayal.
Sometimes it’s meant admitting that something I desperately wanted to work wasn’t working.
And sometimes it’s meant facing myself and being really honest about what I see.
Maybe I didn’t show up as my best self. Maybe I hurt someone. Maybe I was selfish, fearful, inconsiderate, or so caught up in my own pain that I didn’t recognize the impact I was having on someone else.
Processing my emotions doesn’t mean using them to justify everything I’ve done.
Sometimes understanding what was happening inside me helps me have more compassion for myself.
Sometimes it helps me recognize where I need to take responsibility.
Both can be part of healing.
And sometimes I’ve had to ask myself a much harder question:
What do I already know that I’m trying to talk myself out of knowing?
That question would have saved me a lot of time.
Possibly even three weeks of curtain research.
Maybe “don’t sweat the small stuff” doesn’t always mean the small stuff doesn’t matter.
Sometimes the small stuff is a clue.
The curtain decision. The irritation. The thing you cannot stop thinking about. The tiny problem that somehow feels enormous.
Sometimes it’s worth asking whether the small thing is really the thing.
The point isn’t to become perfectly emotionally processed.
I don’t even know what that would look like.
The point is to become a little more willing to notice yourself.
To listen to what you’re feeling without automatically believing it, dismissing it, or running from it. To be willing to hear what your body is telling you. And to be honest enough to recognize when the thing you need to face isn’t someone else.
Sometimes it’s you.
Because sometimes, underneath all that thinking, something in you has been trying to get your attention for a very long time.
References
Carlson, R. (1997). Don’t sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small stuff: Simple ways to keep the little things from taking over your life. Hyperion.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Tyra, A. T., Fergus, T. A., & Ginty, A. T. (2024). Emotion suppression and acute physiological responses to stress in healthy populations: A quantitative review of experimental and correlational investigations. Health Psychology Review, 18(2), 396–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2023.2251559
