Your emotions and feelings are not up for debate.

Kristina Kotouckova
Jul 28
4 min read

Sometimes, we have the ability to like people because, despite the way they act and treat us, we see something special. Small parts of them that shine out, that they themselves may not even see.

The pain and grief of loving the wrong person.

Over the past few months, I've been going through a pretty intense emotional situationship (I mean, when are they not emotional). Something that should've ended the day it started lasted for over 7 months. Weeks on end filled with overthinking, obsessing, fantasising, romanticising... all to leave me feeling worthless, emotional, unworthy of love and attention, and most of all invisible.

And this wound only deepens every time I would see him walking, smiling, or chatting to friends, seemingly without a care in the world. While I still carry wounds of feeling worthless and flawed from being ghosted by him, even after he told me he likes me and wants to see me. I deepen my own pain by accepting self-inflicted narratives about him having moved on to seeing other people, while I’m still emotionally drawn to him, and struggle to walk past places he goes to, to avoid being made to feel invisible by him all over again.

Throughout these few months, I’ve had periods of feeling like I've messed up. Like, I've crossed some line and offended him by sharing my feelings with him? Like I've bothered him, and unrightly taken up space where he is? Only to realise that it was not because of him at all. I felt like I had messed up because I didn't listen to myself while running on emotions. I’ve crossed a line because I pushed and obsessed more than I was meant to, leading my nervous system into prolonged hypervigilance.

We need to meet our own emotional needs first.

But that's what happens when we begin to chase. We lose sight of ourselves. We digress attention from our own path, desires and goals, to desperately get the attention and validation of someone who continues to play hot and cold with us. Why? Well, once we hand over the power to people to decide on our worth, we begin to believe they’re the only ones who can give it back to us once we lose sight of it.

But we could not be more wrong. The only way forward is not them. It’s to stop and realise that the power to choose and determine our own worth forever lives within us. We need to validate ourselves. We need to give ourselves that attention and kindness we’re craving. We need to see ourselves by listening intuitively to what we need and not doing what we think we need to do, but what we want to do. We need to bring that aliveness back into our own internal world; we so much seek to have others bring to us.

We can’t give ourselves everything we crave from others. But if we don’t even provide the basic needs to ourselves, we’ll be forever running and chasing bare minimum because we’ve let ourselves to starve from the lack of primal emotional needs we need to give ourselves.

When it feels stupid to care.

We don’t naturally develop deep feelings for people who mistreat us. Sometimes, we have the ability to like people because, despite the way they act and treat us, we see something special. Small parts of them that shine out, that they themselves may not even see. And that in itself is a beautiful thing we should appreciate about ourselves.

And I’ve been through a number of similar emotionally draining and gut-wrenching situations in my life, such as this one. But for the first time, I’ve allowed myself to accept how I feel in the aftermath, even if it seemed and felt like I was the sucker who still cared. I chose not to run away from the emotions that still reminded me that I genuinely care and like the kind of person who treated me with superficial and performative affection.

Once we choose to respect and value our emotions as worthy, we open ourselves up to reality. And we can begin the process of cleaning our emotional blocked- up world, heal our wounds and continue moving forward. What I used to do was suppress and overlook how I felt to avoid the embarrassment of liking someone who treated me with unsteady and erratic behaviour. But it only left me feeling exhausted because the emotions always resurfaced in different ways, stronger and bigger than before.

Feelings made of gold.

When we’re going through emotional moments, grieving situationships, broken relationships, just remember what you're feeling is valid and it's good that you let yourself feel everything. Your naturally occurring emotions and feelings towards another person should remain pure in their original state, like gold. Whether you melt, shape or stretch gold, its original intrinsic value never changes. It forever remains valuable and worthy. And that’s what our emotions are.

Other people’s unkind actions, or lack of actions, should not force you to alter the way you care, love and feel. The love, kindness and thoughtful actions you gave them should not be forgotten.

One day, the right person will see these emotions- will see you and will never let you go because they’ll see the gold-like value within you. The pain and ache we feel may bring us to take on new forms in how we approach future relationships. But if you allow other people’s actions to deter you from your own emotions and feelings, you’ll allow them to diminish your inherent value.