Have you ever noticed if you’ve left yourself behind?
I was surprised by this experience a few years ago, and it started me down a new path of groundedness and being present that I didn’t even know existed.
I was part of a workshop where we were exploring different kinds of attention: inward, outward, and something balanced in between. We started by finding Neutral. (Have you ever noticed that finding the middle can be harder than you think?)
As I shifted my attention from Neutral, then backward to myself, then forward toward the others, I had this strange sensation of someone behind me. Then I realized it was me. It was like I was in two places at once. It wasn’t theoretical — it was physical. Weird, but very curious.
The message was quiet and clear and helped me realize something I hadn’t been aware of on this level before:
Just because I think I’m present, or want to be, doesn’t mean my emotions are actually with me.
There’s a big difference between showing up and truly being there. And when our emotional presence isn’t part of it, something important gets lost.
The Middle Ground We Keep Skipping
We pay a lot of attention to our bodies — whether trying to look better and be healthier or get rid of pain, discomfort, or disease. However, in many cases, we’re not actually listening.
The multi-billion dollar health, medical and beauty industries are proof of our focus on optimizing our physical health. We spend time, money, and energy treating the body like a machine to be tuned and corrected. But something gets left out of that equation: our emotions.
Pain, fatigue, tension, and illness are real — and they often have emotional roots we’re not paying attention to. Our bodies might be trying to tell us something, but we’re so focused on fixing the physical symptoms that we miss the emotional message underneath. Without tuning in to that layer, we only get part of the picture.
It’s like having an Oreo cookie with no creamy middle, or two buns and no burger. The part that connects everything together is missing.
When emotions are left out — when we’re functioning from head and physical body but ignoring the heart — we end up stuck. Not in a dramatic way, but in this subtle, persistent rigidity. We can’t move fully into presence or connection, because we’ve left out the part that allows for movement: emotion. That disconnection has consequences.
Personally, when I’m operating from my head and body but not my heart, I might seem present. I can speak clearly, get things done, track what’s happening. But I’m not fully with myself.
Relationally, it’s even more costly. I can listen. I can respond. I can do all the things that “look” like connection — but if I’ve left my emotional self behind, the connection between me and the other person feels more like empty calories than real nourishment.
Presence without emotion is performance.
And it’s often what we’ve been trained to do.
Cultural Pressure and the Shrinking Self
Our society doesn’t reward emotional presence. It rewards composure. Control. The appearance of regulation.
We’re taught to be polite, not expressive. To be pleasant, not honest. To “keep it together,” even when we’re falling apart inside.
And when we do express emotion, we get told we’re too much.
Then we swing too far the other way and we shrink. We edit ourselves down. We learn to dial it down — to be just sensitive enough to seem intuitive, but not so expressive that we’re inconvenient.
Over time, “too much” becomes “not enough.” We get caught in this exhausting loop of trying to be palatable, contained, acceptable. And we lose the full spectrum of who we are.
Not only does that hurt us — it limits what others can connect to in us.
The parts we hide are often the very parts that others need to see in order to feel less alone.
The Compulsion to Solve
One pattern I notice in myself is this tendency to want to define and fix hard things rather than feel them. It’s a form of self-protection. My first instinct is often to move into solution mode. Find the reason. Make a plan. Solve the thing.
But that problem-solving comes at a cost — especially when the real invitation is to feel something first. Something vulnerable. Something I’d rather not touch.
One night when my daughter was about seven, I went in to kiss her goodnight and I could tell something was wrong. She told me that her friends had said something mean to her at school. I wanted to make her feel better — and the way I thought you were supposed to do that was to look at the situation from lots of different perspectives.
I didn’t want her to be in pain and I didn’t want to feel helpless. Instead of staying with her sadness, and letting her know I was with her in it, I gave her all the ways she might see things differently. Maybe they didn’t mean it the way she was taking it. Maybe it wasn’t meant for her.
That approach did not land well. She got more upset, not less.
Looking back, I know that what she needed wasn’t perspective — it was presence. She needed empathy, not a solution. And while offering a new perspective can sometimes be supportive, in that moment, it created distance instead of closeness. It made her sadness something to get over, rather than something I was willing to sit with.
When we skip the step of feeling, we also skip the truth. We miss the part where we encounter ourselves — and each other.
And that’s where the transformation actually begins.
The Illusion of Control
Here’s a question I’ve been carrying:
What if labeling emotions is just a way to feel like we’re in control of them?
When we name something as anxiety, burnout, or emotional dysregulation, it can feel like progress. We’ve labeled the discomfort. We’ve placed it inside a framework. We’ve made it manageable.
Certainly that can be clarifying and helpful. It can create space for understanding.
But sometimes, we use those labels to avoid the raw experience underneath. We turn emotions into diagnoses — not to help ourselves feel them, but to avoid having to.
Pathologizing gives us the illusion of control. It helps us keep things contained. Defined. Solvable.
But emotions aren’t puzzles. They aren’t errors in the system.
They’re the system’s way of speaking.
Feeling Before Fixing
Here’s the thing: naming an emotion isn’t inherently wrong. But the order matters.
If we name before we feel, we risk skipping the part that brings us into contact with ourselves.
If we feel first, and then name, the naming becomes an act of integration — not avoidance.
It’s the difference between saying “I’m sad” because I felt sadness moving through me… versus calling something “grief” as a way to make it neat and tidy before I’ve let it move through me.
Thinking is helpful. So is naming. But not at the expense of experiencing.
Because real connection — with ourselves or with others — depends on actually feeling what we feel.
Reflections to Sit With
These aren’t prompts for your journal — they’re invitations to feel into your lived experience. Let them guide you back to what’s real, not just what’s thinkable.
- Think back to a recent moment when something felt off — a conversation, a disappointment, a stuck feeling. Did you try to solve it before fully feeling it?
- Can you recall a time when you stayed with an uncomfortable feeling without trying to change it? What happened in your body, in your breath, in your connection to yourself?
- Remember a moment when you were told (directly or indirectly) that you were “too much.” Where did you feel that in your body? What part of you got smaller?
These are not questions to answer — they’re experiences to return to. Let your body respond before your mind does.
Final Thought
We’re not broken for wanting control and we’re not wrong for using thinking as a way to feel safe. Most of us were taught to rely on our minds to make sense of the world — and that makes complete sense.
Still, thinking is not the same as feeling. Emotional presence isn’t indulgent. It’s what helps us stay human. It’s what allows us to connect.
We don’t need to treat our feelings like problems to solve. Often, what they really need is our attention — not our fixing. When we allow ourselves to experience what we feel — without managing or analyzing it — something soft and real begins to happen.
We come back to ourselves. From that place, we can meet each other more fully.