Episode Transcript Hey friends and welcome to the very first episode of Time to Feel, a podcast to increase your emotional health. I’m your hostess Holly Soulié. And today we’re going to talk about how to stop hating your emotions. But since it’s our very first episode, I want to tell you about who I am, what I do and why.  I am the owner of Holly Soulié Emotional Health, and I create emotional health resources for kind people so that you can embrace your emotions and reclaim your power. I’m also the founder of the Feel and Heal Crew, a healing community where I train you on how to work through one emotional health topic each month. We talk about things like people pleasing, codependency, setting boundaries, and lots more. My why, the reason why I do this is because, well, I want to. And it makes me happy.  But also because my whole life growing up, I suppressed my emotions. It was what everyone around me did, and so that’s all that I really knew how to do.  I honestly never thought about what I was feeling. Anytime I felt something, I would get very annoyed with myself and would push the feeling away, and just tried to go on my life the best I could. But that stopped working for me when I was 17, because my dad went to prison for committing a white collar crime.  And my entire world came crumbling down around me.  My dad and I were like two peas in a pod. He was my rock, he was pretty much the world to me. We were highly codependent, but that’s a story for another time.  When my dad went to prison, my mom relied heavily on me for emotional support. So, I basically became the parent to my mom at that age. And since my siblings were all out of the house already, it was just the two of us. On top of that, I was about to graduate high school and felt very alone with my dad gone. I was about to go out into the world, and I didn’t feel like I had any guidance or any idea about what to do with my life. With all that, I broke down pretty hard. I stopped eating. Getting out of bed was a daily battle. And I felt like I had no purpose or support.  It was the darkest point of my life.  I didn’t have the skills to manage all the things I was feeling.  But somehow I managed to barely make it out of that period. But I was completely numb, suicidal and was weighed down by years of suppressed emotions.  Fast forward two years to when my friend called me up. He told me that his mom had just done some group therapy program and that he had never actually seen her happy before. Then he invited me to try it out with him. So we went with a group of friends to this weekend program for self-realization. And at one point, the group facilitator had us address our own anger. They walked us through how to work through all these pent up emotions. And their method was to have us hit pillows or a chair or to yell. It was a safe space where they coached us through it all. That was new for me. But I really went for it.  After that exercise, I felt so different. I felt alive again in a way that I hadn’t in years, if ever. And I felt so connected to myself.  And I was hooked. The only thing I wanted after that was to make that feeling last as long as possible, the feeling of being me. Of loving myself, of feeling so proud and radiant in my own skin.  Little by little, I started tuning into my emotions.