The Importance Of Talking About Your Feelings

While TEEN LINE offers help to teens in crisis in many ways, I have found that often the most helpful aspect of TEEN LINE is simply that it’s a place where you can talk openly about your feelings and let out your emotions, especially ones that have been bottled up inside you for extended periods of time. As a TEEN LINE listener, I have talked to countless teens who, once the call is over, openly voice to me the relief that the call has brought them, having been able to get certain things off their chest. Talking about your feelings serves as a release; it’s a way to unburden yourself of all of the stress that you’ve accumulated, all of the emotions that you have suppressed, and all of the thoughts, opinions, and feelings that you are yearning to put a voice to.

While talking about your feelings might sound relatively simple, the truth is that it can often be a very scary and intimidating thing at first, and it’s not surprising that a lot of people tend to suppress their emotions and not talk about them openly. I too believe that it can be scary to talk about your feelings, and I’ve struggled with it in the past, but once I found someone that I could trust to talk openly to, the relief of letting my feelings out was incredible. Once you get past the initial fear of talking about how you feel, you’ll start feel increasingly comfortable sharing more and more things. I still wouldn’t feel comfortable going around and telling everybody how I feel all the time, but you don’t have to. All that you really need is to find one or two people who you really trust. It could be a close friend, a family member, a school guidance counselor, or really anybody you would feel comfortable talking to and sharing your feelings with. And if you are in a situation where you feel as if there is really nobody that you can talk to, there are always hotlines or chatrooms and forums online that you could try out, like the message boards on the TEEN LINE website.

In addition to being extremely therapeutic, talking openly about your feelings is also a good way to problem-solve. For instance, if you’re in a difficult situation that has been on your mind for a really long time and is all that you can think about, talking to somebody about it could not only help you see the situation more clearly, but the person you talk to might even be able to offer some insight that you’ve been searching for or a different perspective on the situation. When something is left unvoiced, it can fester inside of you, causing you even more stress than if you just talk about it. It’s a way to see things more clearly, to unburden yourself of stress, to clear your mind of upsetting thoughts, and in some situations to get closure. So even if you’ve had a bad experience with talking about your feelings in the past, the next time you’re upset, try it out; it’s worth a shot.

– Jeremy 17 years old