Emotions Are Information

Kerrie Jones • September 17, 2024

Emotions are information. Sometimes the information is relevant to today, and sometimes the information is old but somehow still directing our lives; either way, the more connected we are to our emotions, the more information we have about ourselves, and the greater control we have over our decision making. Fear, for example, is a really strong emotion. It has the capacity to stop us in our tracks, propel us into defense of ourselves, or to simply get us to run away. All of us are afraid of one thing or another, and if we don’t confront our fear, not by fighting it, but becoming intimately relational with it, the fear will always exist and possibly even grow; and whatever it is we are afraid of will continue to elude or control us.

 

Becoming relational with your emotions is as simple as sitting with them. I say simple, not easy, because it’s simple to understand, but not always so easy to do. Sitting with our emotions looks like sitting with the feeling that comes with the emotion. In the example of fear, you may feel a drop in the pit of your stomach. Sitting with the fear is sitting with the sensation in your stomach. The next step is then inquiring within yourself about the fear. Some questions you could ask yourself are, what am I really afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? These two questions alone could reveal to you that you’re dealing with fear that’s rooted in your past, and no longer relevant to who you are, or the circumstances you’re in today. On the other hand, you may discover that what you’re afraid of is smaller in magnitude than the thing you actually want. Either way, it’s difficult to know what’s happening in you when you run away from the fear you’re feeling.

 

Typically, when we feel unwanted emotions (i.e., heart racing, tightness in chest, etc.) what we want more than anything is to make the feeling go away. The most logical way to do this is to give into the cries of the emotion, and in the case of fear it would be to fight the thing, run from it, or stop in our tracks. For many of us, the desire to push away our emotions is compounded by messages we’ve received from others to not feel whatever it is we’ve felt, if it wasn’t happiness. What many of us haven’t learned is that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, if we sit with the emotion and attend to ourselves in it, the feeling will pass and we have the benefit of the information we’ve gained that we would have otherwise not known about ourselves, enabling us to overcome fear or work through our emotions.

 

As I mentioned, this work isn’t easy. For some, sitting with emotions and feeling bodily sensations can be traumatizing; so please exercise caution and be compassionate with yourself if you find this to be difficult, or even impossible to do. For the rest of you, it will likely take some time to build your tolerance of your emotional experience and your focus to attend to yourself; patience and persistence is key. Awareness of your emotional experience is key to really knowing yourself. 

What's The Deal With Boundaries

By Kerrie Hudson • December 21, 2025
Most of us are trying to improve our lives, and as such, we can cling to ideas and concepts that we believe will help us to get there. A lot of times these ideas and concepts lose their true meaning and become a crutch that we lean on to resist change, instead of a skill we develop to become a better us. Boundaries is one of those concepts that’s often used, rarely understood, and often weaponized in ways that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns; that changes for you today. Simply put, boundaries are our deeply held, internal ‘no’, and when our boundaries have been violated, you feel it. Think about the feeling you get in your body when you’ve waited for a parking space, and someone steals it, or when you’ve loaned someone money that they fail to repay; these are boundary violations. Boundaries are the line we’re not willing to cross in our interactions with others, and that line is your responsibility to maintain. For example, you may have a boundary that dictates you don’t loan money; but, if someone asks you to borrow money and you give them the loan, you have violated your own boundary, and that feeling is far worse than violations from the outside. When you don’t know and/or do not articulate your boundaries you are hurting yourself, and that type of behavior sets you on a course for a world of pain. When you fail to take responsibility for your boundaries it becomes difficult to trust and depend on yourself; and if you can’t trust and depend on you, who can you really trust? Bottom line, boundaries are ingrained into the fabric of our person, they don’t go away; and boundary-setting and protection are necessary skills to develop in order to become a confident and self-assured human who is fulfilled in life. If you struggle with identifying and honoring your boundaries, Becoming Her Again is the gamechanger you need to step into the woman who no longer shrinks or settles for less than she deserves. The course is coming soon, join the waitlist to be the first to access this powerful resource. (P.S., it comes with 2 bonuses: The Boundary Starter Pack & Scripts for Difficult Conversations)
Dirt path winding through green, grassy mountains under a partly cloudy sky.

Why Heal?

By Kerrie Hudson • October 8, 2025
Why Heal? Healing has become a buzzword in the company of words like self-care, peace, and mental health. They’re certainly a bit overused, but are nonetheless vital components of the life we all want to live. So, what is healing? Healing is wholeness. What makes us “unwhole”? Trauma. Many of us don’t believe that we’ve experienced trauma, and that’s understandable because this type of trauma is so common it doesn’t seem very traumatic. But here we’re talking about what we call “little t” trauma. Some examples are the separation or divorce of parents, emotional neglect (no one to talk to/childhood loneliness), or a parent suffering with mental health challenges (anxiety and depression are most common). When children have experiences like these, they often have parents or caregivers who are unavailable or incapable of providing for their needs, and instead of the parent taking responsibility, the kid blames themselves – that’s the trauma. When you are at fault of anything, you naturally correct or fix yourself; so, when you blame yourself for something you weren’t responsible for you overcorrect and rid yourself of attributes and qualities you actually need. There’s no way of knowing this process is taking place in childhood, the damage is done. The good news, however, is it’s reversible, and reversing the damage is called healing. There’s also no way to instinctively know what we need to heal until we begin living; life tells us where we need to heal. The easiest way to identify areas where healing is needed is when we want something, especially basic life necessities like love, and we can’t seem to achieve it, we do the same thing we did as kids, we fix ourselves. And when the fixing doesn’t work, we either settle, or we give up. We settle, because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have this than nothing, or we quit because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have nothing. There is some truth to the idea it doesn’t get better. The truth is, this is the best you can get if you don’t change, and change comes with healing. This is why you may feel stuck in certain areas of your life. You’ve fixed everything you believe needs fixing, but you haven’t healed. We can see this very thing play out currently with Cardi B who within the past year has separated from her husband Offset, had a baby, met a new man Stefon, and is currently pregnant again. In her new album she reflects on the events of the past year, and likely before. She’s gotten a new man, new clothes, and upgraded her body, but she hasn’t described any updates on her heart. Same Cardi, different man, same problems; and the same is true for us all. When we invest heavily in the superficial things that we believe will get us what we want (and we will undoubtedly start with the superficial things) yet we fail to do the real heart work, we’re deceiving ourselves. Why heal? Because it’s necessary to achieve our goals so we can live the life we truly want to live. 
Group of women in red and gold outfits against a green backdrop.

Leaning Into Self-Love

By Kerrie Hudson • October 8, 2025
You’re pretty amazing! Yes! You. In spite of everything you’ve been through, you’re still killing it in life; and the one thing that’s stopping you from accessing your fullest potential is you. You’ve mastered achievement, and if we’re being honest, you’ve limited yourself there as well, but where you can’t seem to win is in love. The reason is simple, you’ve never learned to love yourself. You learned instead, that the failure of the people who were entrusted with the responsibility of loving you was a reflection of you, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. All this time you’ve believed that there was something inherently unlovable about you. What you never understood, because no one ever told you, is their behavior was never a reflection of you, it was a reflection of them. They didn’t love you because they didn’t know how, and now it’s on you to break the cycle of lovelessness for you and the generations that follow you. This is your time; your time to experience love because that’s the one thing we’re all longing for. It’s the purpose of families, friendships, and romance; and you’ll never truly experience it until you learn to love yourself. I know what you’re thinking, “I already love myself”, and to some degree you do, but not for the reasons you’re giving yourself credit for. You’re thinking about all the achievements and the ways in which you take care of yourself, and quite frankly, those are all performative or surface-level at best. Meanwhile, at your core, you are lonely and deprived of real heartfelt love, even in a crowd; and that’s not love. The easiest way to detect your love for yourself is in how you show up for yourself with others. People pleasing, a lack of boundaries, an inability to say “no”, and giving without reciprocity are all symptoms of a person who lacks self-love. These behaviors indicate you are forsaking yourself while looking for someone else to love you, and they never will. The truth is you can’t tolerate real love from others and you’re stuck in a cycle of inviting people in who reflect the lovelessness of those who reared you. That sword cuts both ways, and it’s time to put it down. You want love, and it’s time for you to realize that it must come from you. The most important step in loving yourself is choosing to love yourself. No one explicitly told you that you were unlovable, you simply surmised it from their actions. (And let’s be clear, you’ve always been smart – brilliant even. Wise? That’s a newer skill that comes with setting aside a childish mindset.) As a child, you couldn’t properly understand the actions of those around you without intervention, and you’ve been carrying around false beliefs about yourself your entire life. The assumption that you’re unlovable has led you to years and years of pain. All of your choices have stemmed from this belief. By shifting your mindset to self-love, a mindset that recognizes your worth, you are unlocking the joy and fulfillment you always knew was possible, but thought only existed in the arms of another. When you stop relying on others to love you and you begin to love yourself, you guarantee yourself love, and all of your choices will align. Your love for yourself will attract love, just as your lovelessness has piled on pain.