are your feelings "good" or "bad"?

your feelings are not good or bad - they're just feelings. in today's episode, we'll discuss how easy it can be to label feelings as "good" or "bad" and how this is harmful to our mental health healing. then, we'll figure out how to reframe this talk and have a healthier relationship with our emotions. let's feel some feelings!

Welcome back to Feel Your Feelings with Ethan Jewell! I'm not a psychologist, a doctor, or a mental health professional. Instead, I'm here to guide you through the world of mental health from a casual, relatable lens. I've been there, I've felt that, and I understand what you're feeling. Let's feel some feelings.

Poetry book and more on my website:⁠ ⁠⁠www.ethanjewell.com⁠⁠⁠

IG: ⁠⁠⁠@jewellboi_

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Your feelings are not bad. It doesn't matter how they may
feel. They may feel uncomfortable,
they may feel loud, they may feel overwhelming, but they're
not bad. Just because they don't feel
good doesn't mean that they're abad thing.
Every feeling has its purpose and every feeling exists for a
reason. My name is Ethan Jewell and

(00:23):
welcome back to Feel Your Feelings.
Today's episode is something that I've talked about before,
and I'm talking about it again because I feel like it is such
an incredibly important and underrated topic of discussion.
And that is the fact that your feelings are not a bad thing.
And I think it's very easy to label them as good or bad.

(00:45):
Even my first episode of this podcast is titled How to Feel
Your Bad Feelings. And I got to admit, I regret
that title a little bit. It's also my most popular
episode by far. And I think I was wrong.
I think by labeling those feelings as bad, I think I was
adding to this idea that we're going to talk about today.

(01:08):
I want to remind you, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychiatrist,
I'm not a therapist, I'm not a professional in the mental
health industry whatsoever. I'm just a normal guy who feels
some big feelings and wants to start the conversation around
mental health. So thank you so much for being
here and let's talk about why your feelings are not bad.

(01:29):
We're taught from pretty early on when we're learning about our
feelings, when we're learning about emotions, we learn that
certain feelings are good and certain feelings are bad.
Happiness is good, excitement isgood, joy amazing, something
that should always be sought after and held onto.
But sadness, bad anger, dangerous fear, weakness, grief,

(01:55):
you need to just get over it. We're taught to run from the
so-called bad feelings, to hide from them, to bottle them up, to
just smile instead, to be OK even when we're not.
But here's the thing. Feelings are not on a scale.

(02:15):
They're not moral, they're not right or wrong.
They just are. They're messages from your body.
They're information from your mind, telling you what you need
to pay attention to, telling youwhat you need to feel.
They're telling you something important.
And calling them bad doesn't make them go away.

(02:37):
It just adds a layer of weird shame or or guilt or or pressure
or just a general negative context to what you're already
feeling. And when you start to believe
that your feelings are bad, you start to feel bad for even
having them. You get angry.

(02:58):
And then you feel guilty for being angry because you've
convinced yourself that that anger is a negative thing that
should never be felt. You feel anxious, and then you
feel ashamed for not being stronger.
You know, you cry and then apologize like your sadness is
something offensive to other people.
That extra layer of judgement iswhat really weighs us down.

(03:20):
Because by doing this, you're not just hurting, you're also
blaming yourself for hurting. You're not just sad.
You're you're telling yourself you're wrong for being sad.
And that keeps you stuck. It turns healing into hiding.

(03:40):
But what if you remove those labels?
What if sadness was able to justbe sadness?
What if anger was a signal that something crossed a line within
you? What if anxiety was your nervous
system just asking for safety, asking for you to step back a
little bit? You're not broken for feeling

(04:03):
these things, and they're not bad.
It's not a dysfunction. You're just human.
I think it's really, really easyto get caught up in the labeling
of these feelings as either goodor bad because let's be honest,
happiness feels good. Sadness feels bad.
And I think it's OK to say that these feelings feel bad, but to

(04:25):
label the feeling in general as just inherently bad.
Like there's no good that comes out of it.
Like there's no signaling from your body.
You know, that sadness might be telling you that you just need a
day off. That sadness might be telling
you that you just need to take it a little bit easier on
yourself and maybe telling you that somebody is hurting you.
Every feeling has a purpose, andevery feeling is important.

(04:48):
I think it's OK to feel good or to feel bad, but I don't think
it's OK to say this feeling is agood thing or this feeling is a
bad thing. And it's a very small but
important distinction to make when we're healing our mental
health. So to help make this
distinction, I think that we should think about these
emotions a little bit like the weather, You know, sometimes it

(05:11):
rains and sometimes it storms. Sometimes it's sunny, but none
of that is bad. It's just the state of the sky,
and it passes. When you treat your emotions
like that, like passing storms instead of complete moral
failures, you can actually feel them instead of fighting them.
Anger can be a boundary that youdidn't know you needed.

(05:34):
Grief can be proof of love. Fear can be a sign to slow down
and protect yourself. Even numbness is a message.
It's your body trying to tell you something.
Even disconnection is trying to tell you something.
None of these feelings are trying to ruin your life.
They're not malicious. They're not a bad thing.
They're trying to protect you, to guide you, to teach you more

(05:54):
about yourself. They just might not speak in
ways you're used to listening to.
I mean, what a world it would beto not have to earn our
feelings, to not have to justifytheir existence.
You're allowed to feel deeply inthe same way you're allowed to
not feel deeply. You're allowed to be human
without apologizing for it because feelings aren't

(06:17):
problems, they're part of the process.
So if you've been calling your sadness bad, or your anger too
much or your fear pathetic, I want to invite you to shift
that. If you're feeling sad, if you're
struggling, instead of saying this is a bad thing to be
feeling or thinking that you're wrong for feeling this, instead

(06:40):
I encourage you to just TuneIn to listen a little bit closer to
understand what that sadness might be trying to tell you,
what that anxiety might be trying to tell you, what that
numbness might be trying to tellyou.
Pay attention to the messages that your body and your mind are
giving you instead of pushing them away and saying this is

(07:00):
bad. I need to be feeling good.
Remove those labels and just be OK with the feelings existing.
Feelings are meant to come and they're meant to go.
They're not meant to stick around.
They're not meant to make you feel worse for feeling a certain
way. Remove those labels.
Let the feelings exist. Let them do their job of passing

(07:23):
through. Take that feeling, sit with it,
understand it. Don't call it good or bad, and
then let it go. That's all that feelings are
there for. They are a powerful tool for you
to understand more things about yourself.
And if we can remove these labels of good or bad and just
let these feelings exist, we canuse that tool to better

(07:46):
understand ourselves, better understand our mental health,
and to better heal. And we're not going to do that
overnight. We're not going to do it
perfectly, but we can do it gently and slowly.
So the next time a tough feelingshows up, try saying this to
yourself. This feeling isn't bad.
It's just here and I can sit with it without shaming myself

(08:08):
for having it. You don't need to run from your
feelings, you just need to listen to them.
Because when you feel your feelings, and I mean really feel
them, you start to understand yourself in a whole new way.
And I think that's what healing really is, to just feel those
feelings, to use them as a tool to better understand yourself

(08:31):
and to not label them as good orbad, to just accept them as
feelings. That's going to wrap it up for
today's episode. Thank you so much for being here
and for feeling your feelings with me.
If you need help feeling your feelings, you should listen to
my music, Ethan Jewel on all platforms.
I almost guarantee it'll make you cry or bring up some kind of

(08:52):
feeling. Also, please drop me a comment
and let me know what you thoughtabout today's episode.
If you think that the labeling of feelings as good or bad is a
good or bad thing. Like I said, I'm not a
professional, so I would love tohear your thoughts on this as
well. So thank you so much for being
here. Thank you for understanding that
your feelings are not good or bad, they're just feelings.

(09:12):
And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings.
I'll see you next time.