Episode 89 - Things that Matter Most Right Now

It’s normal to want to bypass feelings of fear, worry, and sorrow during this uncertain time, but we miss the opportunity to create a vulnerable, trusting relationship with ourselves and our feelings if we send these big emotions into exile. In this episode, I discuss how moving forward starts with processing our emotions. Here’s what I cover:

• Why distraction from difficult emotions is not a bad thing when it’s balanced with emotional connection to yourself
• A visualization exercise to help you process your feelings in a way that builds deep emotional trust
• Taking the time to be with your emotions will help create the sense of safety and security needed to move forward in a way that feels good to you
• How I processed the uncertainty I feel with understanding and care for myself
• Why cultivating vulnerable trust with yourself is one of the most important things you can be doing

I can’t wait for you to listen.

Giving Tuesday is December 3rd, and if you have the ability to give I hope you'll consider donating to Yapay Bolivia. I have worked with this charitable organization for the past 8 years, and 100% of the funds donated go towards lifting women and children in Bolivia out of poverty.

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Transcript

You are listening to the Ex-Good Girl podcast, episode 89.

00:05

It has been almost two weeks since elections in the US, and it continues to be one of the things that comes up in a lot of the client sessions that I'm doing and in a lot of my own work.

00:17

And so this is a reminder episode about some of the things that are going to matter most because a lot of people are still asking the question, what do I do?

00:27

How do we move forward? It's a lot of uncertainty and fear and dread and worry and sorrow and anxiety.

00:35

And if you are feeling those things, that's right.

00:40

And it's part of being a human.

00:43

It's part of living a human life.

00:47

It sucks.

00:50

I'm right there with you.

00:53

But it's part of how this is life is set up, and it's actually an opportunity.

01:00

And I want to talk to you about kind of how I see the opportunity in this, because so many of us want to know how to move forward, but we want to go around these feelings.

01:12

We want to figure out how to bypass a lot of the fear and worry and sorrow and just what's going to happen.

01:23

That's totally, totally normal and also not going to get us what we want.

01:30

Because when we try to go over our feelings or around them, we miss a couple of things.

01:37

We miss creating a vulnerable, trusting relationship with ourselves, with our feelings.

01:46

And we send these big emotions kind of into exile.

01:51

We try to cover them up with entertainment,or distraction or eating something.

01:59

And that's not entirely wrong.

02:02

It's also not entirely right.

02:04

So that's kind of the really nuanced space that I want to talk about, because there's nothing wrong with not being in those big feelings.

02:15

And also processing and being in those big feelings is the only way to move forward with the kind of trust that we need with ourselves.

02:27

So we break that apart and give each of those two states some meaning.

02:32

First state, not being in those feelings, not processing.

02:37

It's important.

02:38

We need activities that take our minds off of the really hard feelings of the reality that we are in.

02:47

We need to laugh and feel lightness, joy.

02:50

We need to be entertained and take pleasure in things.

02:54

And that gives us a break from the heaviness.

03:00

Where it begins to kind of go sideways is when we are doing those things like tearing all of the contents out of a closet because we just want to have control over something, becomes how we're spending all of our time.

03:20

Now, is there anything wrong with pulling all the contents out of a closet?

03:23

No, I'm talking autobiographically.

03:26

I did that because we want to have control over something.

03:31

And even if it's just the control over all the junk in this closet right now that I want and I'm looking for to satisfy that urge, there is nothing wrong with it.

03:42

I also want to be checking with myself because we can tell in our bodies when we are distracting because we don't want to feel something or don't know how to feel something.

03:57

That's the difference.

03:58

If I need a break, if I have been kind of working through and feeling my emotions and I need to take some time off, there is nothing wrong with that.

04:09

We need to do it.

04:10

We need to be able to feel numb to pain that surpassesour ability or our, it's like our metabolism to feel it, right?

04:21

We can't push and push and push into feeling all the time, the same way that we can't distract from feeling all the time.

04:31

So in your body, you can tell the answer to this question.

04:38

Is this an emotion that I need to feel or do I need a break right now?

04:45

Is there something for me to learn from this emotion that I'm a little bit scared of?

04:51

Or do I really just need to take a little break?

04:54

Is there something from this emotion, some information that I need to be able to understand?

05:03

Or do I need a break?

05:05

If we're always distracting, we don't develop the relationship of trust with those emotions and the vulnerability with ourselves to be able to learn why those emotions are there and to care for them lovingly without judgment.

05:23

And I promise you, you can feel the answer to that in your body.

05:29

When the answer is, you know what?

05:31

I just need a break.

05:33

This feels like too much.

05:34

This feels overwhelming.

05:36

Then that is exactly when you go toward one of the activities that feels good, that gives you that much needed break.

05:45

Other times you will feel in your body that you need to feel in your body because feelings, emotions have information for us.

05:56

And so let's talk about what that's like.

05:59

Processing an emotion just means to let it be in your body with no judgment, to let it percolate and bubble and zap and sting and feel heavy without adding any meaning to it, like this emotion is bad, or I am bad for feeling this, I shouldn't be feeling this.

06:23

Scraping off those layers of judgment and putting them to the side and just letting the emotion be, letting it be felt, noticing the sensations, noticing any story that comes up around it, noticing colors,that attend it, noticing any kind of images or memories and just letting them be there, because that is your emotional self trying to have a conversation with you, with your logical, conscious self.

06:59

And if you feel like you have the capacity, you can actually have that conversation.

07:06

And let me give you an example.

07:08

One of the overwhelming feelings that I have is just uncertainty.

07:13

What's going to happen next?

07:14

What's going to happen next?

07:17

And so a lot of times I try to shove that emotion away.

07:20

I turn off social media.

07:21

I don't watch the news.

07:23

I try not to have any kind of contact with something that will ping that uncertainty.

07:31

And so on Saturday, I decided to sit down and do some emotion processing andI'll be honest, in the beginning, it was just a lot of grief, a lot of sadness, a lot of sorrow.

07:45

And I processed that.

07:49

And then next was this uncertainty.

07:51

And the uncertainty was what I decided to have the conversation with.

07:53

And I imagined that that uncertain part of me was really young.

07:59

It was a little version of me that was just asking, Are we there?

08:04

Are we there?

08:04

What's gonna happen?

08:05

What's gonna happen next?

08:06

What's gonna happen next?

08:07

I don't know what's gonna happen next.

08:10

And that I, as a loving adult, could have a conversation with that little version of me with no judgment.

08:21

And I encourage each of you to imagine that your big feelings are either you as a small child, or if that doesn't feel good, another small child that you love very much, and I imagine myself in my mind's eye going to the little version of me and just wrapping her in a big hug and saying, I know.

08:41

Ooh, I know this feels really terrible.

08:44

I know that you want to know what happens next.

08:47

I'm right here with you and I'm listening.

08:51

Tell me why you're worried about what's going to happen next.

08:56

And that little emotion version of me all up in her uncertainty said, I just want to plan.

09:02

Like, if we don't know what's going to happen next, how can we plan?

09:05

How are we going to know what to do?

09:06

How are we going to know what we need?

09:07

How are we going to know who we should talk to?

09:11

And I imagine myself hugging her tight again and saying, I know those are all really, really good questions, and I can understand why those are coming up right now.

09:22

I'm just going to sit here with you and we're going to try to answer them together.

09:27

I know that you think you need to know about everything that's going to happen next so you can plan.

09:34

And that's one of the hard things that we're going to have to feel together is that we don't know.

09:39

But what would help?

09:42

And then my uncertainty said back, It would really help if we at least had a few details, like a few things that we know we might need to do and how we might make those things happen.

09:54

Okay, I said, we can do that.

09:57

We can come up with a few details of a plan to take care of people we love who might be feeling threatened, people we love who might run into obstacles that they're not going to know how to overcome.

10:10

We can do that.

10:11

And so I wrote a few things down.

10:14

Here are some concrete things that we know we can do, that we know how to accomplish, that we're writing down as a plan.

10:26

And my uncertainty went down a notch.

10:31

So I kept asking, what else?

10:34

What else?

10:36

And my uncertainty said, you know, I just need you to listen to me.

10:39

I need you to know that I'm here and that I'm scared and that I'm worried.

10:43

And I said, I know, I know you're here and I know you're scared and I know you're worried and it's OK.

10:52

Let's come up with some beliefs that we are going to practice having so that we can move forward in a way that feels really good.

11:02

My uncertainty said, okay, I like that.

11:04

And I said, What about believing that we can trust ourselves to make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made?

11:17

My uncertainty said, that feels really good to believe that.

11:22

What about trusting that we can get the information that we need when we need it to be able to make good decisions?

11:31

And my uncertainty said, that feels good.

11:33

That feels better.

11:35

My uncertainty said, I just want to know that I'm going to be able to take care of the people that I love.

11:42

And I said, I get that.

11:44

I really get that.

11:46

So we're going to be watching for people that we love to have needs.

11:52

We're going to be checking on them.

11:54

We're going to be asking them how they're doing.

11:56

How does that feel?

11:58

My uncertainty said, that feels good.

11:59

That feels better.

12:03

And so as we had this conversation, my uncertainty felt cared for.

12:09

My uncertainty didn't feel judged, didn't feel like I sent it away because I couldn't handle it.

12:17

And that process took a couple minutes.

12:20

And I wrote some things down.

12:22

And I always do this with a hand on my chest, just feeling and focusing on the warmth and the weight of my attention on myself that is kind of represented by that hand.

12:37

Taking some deep breaths.

12:40

In and out.

12:44

Focusing on the air, filling my lungs.

12:48

and then all going out, in and out.

12:54

And I felt so much better.

12:58

And had I tried to just focus on getting the closet done, because I really did do that, if I focused just on putting things back where they belonged or getting rid of the things that I no longer needed, I would have missed the opportunity to have that emotional trust with myself and the vulnerability with myself, catching myself, being with myself, feeling safe and secure with myself.

13:27

And those are the feelings that we are going to need to have in order to move forward in the ways that feel good to us, in order to know what do we do with relationships that are important to us with people who might have voted differently than we did.

13:47

In order to know how do I continue to take care of other people and take care of myself?

13:54

In order to know what are the decisions that I need to be making, the information that I need to be getting and prioritizing?

14:04

That emotionship of vulnerable trust with yourself is one of the most important things you can be doing, and so I wanted to remind you about it.

14:16

Processing an emotion just means to let it be in your body with no judgment.

14:22

You can put a hand on your chest and just feel the breath go in and out as you imagine this emotion working its way through your body.

14:32

You will literally feel it like move down through your body or just evaporate or feel like it resolves.

14:39

And usually that takes 60 to 90, sometimes two minutes.

14:46

Sometimes, an emotion will feel very overwhelming.

14:49

I tend to feel my grief this way.

14:51

It's kind of this overwhelming black pool.

14:56

I used to be very, very afraid to go into it, that if I did, it would just kind of swallow me whole and I would never come out.

15:04

And what I have learned is that I can feel it a little bit at a time, almost like I'm just dipping my toe into the water that I can sit on the edge of that pool that is very real, that seems a little scary, and that I can dip my toe in, and then maybe my foot, maybe my ankle.

15:30

And when I'm ready to pull it out, I can pull it out and I can take some breaths, or I can shake.

15:35

I'm shaking my arms right now, and I can get up and move around, and that will take care of that feeling.

15:44

It'll make it go away.

15:46

And I did that with my grief a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, until I felt ready to tolerate it for longer and longer periods of time.

15:56

And it works.

15:58

It works with any big emotion that just feels like too much.

16:05

My heart is with you.

16:07

I know that so many of us are just trying to figure out how to get through.

16:14

What to do next?

16:16

The holidays are on us.

16:18

So many of my clients are just pulling out all the Christmas stuff this week or last week because, again, distraction is good.

16:26

Distraction is okay.

16:27

Distraction is needed.

16:30

What I want is for you to have a balance of that beautiful distraction and also the building of a deeper level of emotional trust with yourself so that we can have it with others.

16:45

Because one of the things I do know is that we need each other to be able to move forward.

16:52

And knowing what that looks like is something I'm still figuring out.

16:56

Knowing how to take care of myself and how to show up for others is a balance that I'm always trying to figure out.

17:03

And I'm with you as you do that, too.

17:07

I'll talk to you next week.