Permission to Feel

Part two in the 5-part series on Grief - Finding Steadiness in Loss

This article is the second of a five-part series exploring grief through the lens of neuroscience and healing practices. If you haven’t yet read the first article, here’s a convenient link for you to access it: The Weight of Grief

Image Credit: Marek Piwnicki (Canva)

Permission to Feel

There’s a moment in grief that can feel hollow; when the tears have stopped, but the ache remains. You might find yourself judging your own reactions, perhaps feeling guilty for crying too much, and then guilty again when you can’t cry at all.

Others may tell you, “You just have to feel it,” as if feeling were a switch you could simply turn on or off. But when grief runs deep, the act of feeling can feel impossible. You may not know how to find those emotions anymore, or you may fear that if you truly allow them in, they’ll drown you, as though once you start, you might never stop.

This is that tender middle ground where so many people can get stuck; suspended between numbness and feeling, between the wish for relief and the fear of being overwhelmed by the emotional flood.

​The Physiology of Emotional Suppression

Grief is both a psychological and biological process (O’Connor, 2019). When loss overwhelms the nervous system, the body instinctively tries to protect us by dulling sensation. This is referred to as emotional numbing or dissociation, and it’s a form of self-preservation.

The problem is, what helps us survive in the short term can make healing harder in the long term. Suppressing emotion keeps the body in a state of tension: the stress hormones don’t complete their natural cycle, and the body doesn’t get the signal that it’s safe again.
Research from Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory helps explain why: when we suppress or avoid emotion, we prevent the necessary discharge that would move the nervous system out of a defensive state (sympathetic fight/flight or dorsal vagal shutdown) and back into regulation (Porges, 2011). But emotional expression, such as crying, shaking, trembling, sighing, and talking, is the body’s way of releasing and returning to regulation.
Feeling isn’t emotional weakness; it’s biology.

Why Allowing Emotion Heals

When we allow emotion to move through the body, we’re actually supporting our nervous system’s ability to return to balance. Neuroimaging studies show that naming and expressing emotion activate the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for awareness, reasoning, and emotional regulation). When this area engages, it helps calm the amygdala, which is the brain’s alarm system, always scanning for danger or distress (Ochsner et al., 2004; Lieberman et al., 2007). In other words, when we permit our feelings to exist, when we say “I feel sad,” or “This hurts,” the brain begins to find its balance again, gently restoring a sense of safety within.

This simple act of naming emotions acts as a bridge between the limbic system, where raw emotions are generated, and the higher cortical regions, where understanding and meaning are made. You could say that the act of naming emotions is a bridge between chaos and coherence: it gives structure to what feels overwhelming, and helps the nervous system shift from reactivity toward regulation.

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When Feeling Still Feels Hard

For some people, even acknowledging emotion doesn’t bring relief right away, and that’s not a failure of effort or awareness. Chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged grief can actually weaken the communication pathways between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, making it harder for the brain’s calming system to engage when emotions rise (O’Connor, 2022).

When this connection is disrupted, the amygdala continues to send strong distress signals, while the prefrontal cortex struggles to reassure the body that it’s safe. This is why you might understand logically that you’re okay, yet still feel emotionally flooded, numb, or on edge.

The nervous system needs repeated, gentle reminders of safety through breath, grounding, compassionate attention, and co-regulation with others to rebuild that bridge (Porges, 2011; Siegel, 2012; Ogden et al., 2006; Coan et al., 2006). Each time you name what you feel and meet it with care, you strengthen that pathway just a little more (Ochsner & Gross, 2005). Over time, the brain learns that emotion can move through without overwhelming you.

How to Begin (Gently)

If you’ve spent years holding everything in, please know that reconnecting with emotion isn’t something that happens all at once; that would be far too overwhelming for the nervous system. Instead, think of it as emotional stretching: slow, steady, and guided by your own compassionate care.

If you feel up for it, try one of these entry points:

Body check-in: Notice where emotion might be sitting in your body. Perhaps as a tightness in your throat, heaviness in your chest, or tension in your stomach. You don’t need to fix it. Just breathe into that space and notice what’s there.

Name it: Try to catch yourself when you say, “I shouldn’t feel this way.” (“Shoulds” are part of what I call the Deadly MOANS: Must, Ought to, Always, Never, Should. These are words that tend to close us off from what we’re really feeling.) Instead, could you try saying: “Something in me feels sad right now.” That small shift invites compassion rather than resistance, helping the prefrontal cortex (the reasoning part of your brain) stay engaged so emotion can move through more safely.

Permission-Giving to Emotion: If tears come, could you bravely let them? Crying releases oxytocin and endorphins, which is the body’s natural soothing agents (Hendriks et al., 2008). This is your nervous system’s way of self-regulating; it is releasing tension so that the stress response can soften back. Each tear signals that emotion is moving, sort of like your body’s way of saying, “I’m finding my way through this.”

Safe containment: When emotion begins to swell beyond what feels manageable, the nervous system may interpret it as danger. To steady and ground yourself, find something that signals now, such as the floor beneath your feet, the chair holding your weight, or the warmth of your palm on your chest. Breath in, allowing your out-breath to lengthen just a little, and say to yourself “This is emotion, not emergency. I’m safe enough to feel a small part of this.”  This grounding practice aids in containment, which refers to giving your nervous system enough steadiness and support to feel an emotion without being overwhelmed by it. Containment isn’t shutting feelings down but rather about helping your body stay anchored so the emotion doesn’t have to sweep you away.

These small gestures activate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, harnessing the body’s built-in pathways for calming and emotional integration.

Closing Reflection
Grief can only move at the speed of safety, and there is no timeline for healing. When you give yourself permission to feel, even for just a few seconds, you’re letting your nervous system know that it’s safe to hold both the pain and the love that created the pain. You can honour the ache of loss while still cherishing the moments of joy, laughter, and connection that came before it.

And slowly, through this permission, your system begins to trust life again. You start to reclaim the fullness of being alive — one breath, one feeling, one moment at a time.
When you feel ready, join me for the next article in this series: Living Alongside Loss, where I’ll share information on how grief reshapes identity and how we begin finding meaning in a world forever changed.

Thank you for reading.

References

• Hendriks, M. C. P., Rottenberg, J., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2008). Can the Distress-Supportive Function of Crying be Discovered in Experimental Research? Emotion, 8(6), 862–869.
• Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., et al. (2007). Putting Feelings into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
• Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Thinking Makes It So: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Emotion Regulation. In Handbook of Self and Identity (pp. 229–255). Guilford.
• O’Connor, M. F. (2022). The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. HarperOne.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.