This post is a transcript of the thoughts I recorded after I coached one of my clients through a difficult emotion. Keep reading or click the button below to listen to the audio.
After a really powerful coaching session today, where I helped my client to feel her feelings (which is the simplest and hardest thing for people to do), I have been thinking about how that relates to nature and the cycles of renewal.
How in different seasons we’re going through different things, so for trees in the fall they shed their leaves, the deciduous ones, of course, and if they didn’t, they would be carrying all of this dead weight, and they wouldn’t have anywhere for the new leaves to grow.
Those leaves have done their thing, they’re done, and I think of this like when we have emotions and we’re doing everything that we can to try to avoid them and get rid of them. It’s like we are just carrying them around.
They need to be felt. When we feel them, that’s how we shed them. That’s how we let them go. That’s how we release them.
So if you want to be open to renewal, to being open to new experiences, and not carrying all of the emotional weight of the past, what I told her was the only way through is through.
We were at this point where it was an emotion that had come up before and was resurfacing. She just hates it and wants to get away from it, because it’s shame, and that is a most awful emotion, which is not really an emotion.
It’s thoughts about things, because you could have primary emotions like feeling sad or frustrated or mad or afraid.
But it’s when we tell stories about what it means that we go into shame, and it’s too difficult to feel the feelings that we’re bringing up because they’re based off of these stories that we’re not lovable, that we’re not worthy, we don’t belong – these things that just nobody really could handle the emotions that come with that, but that’s never the truth.
Those are the stories that we tell ourselves, and when we believe those stories, then we believe we can’t handle the emotions that come with it. So that’s why we have to be willing to challenge the stories, and the way I said it was, you want to challenge the story, challenge the thoughts, but validate the feelings, because the feelings were generated by the story.
Those feelings are valid, even if they’re based off of thought errors.
Once the feeling is generated, it’s there, it needs to be felt.
Now, sometimes when you’re going through this process, you see that the thought that caused the feeling is not true, it’s an error, and then the feeling just dissipates.
Other times you still need to feel it.
So it’s being willing to stay with it, to understand it, and just to be with yourself, to be really kind and compassionate and caring, that you are hurting and the only way through is through.
So I told her it’s like we’re going through this dark tunnel together, and I know it’s really scary, but you’re not alone. We’re going there together, and you just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and the way that we do that is by taking one breath after another, and you’re breathing into your body, and you’re noticing all the physical sensations, and you’re allowing them to be there.
You’re not needing to fix it, get rid of it, even understand the stories behind it.
Oftentimes we do (understand), but you don’t need to do that.
You just need to be willing to be there with yourself and keep walking, keep going until you get to the other end of the tunnel.
Because a lot of times we go in and we’re like, this is really scary and dark, and I don’t know how long this tunnel is, and let’s just turn around and go back and distract myself with something else, so I don’t have to feel it.
But then you’re carrying all this stuff with you, you’re never setting it down, and you accumulate more and more and more, and it’s like, no wonder people are so tired as they’re carrying all of this crap.
It’s like, imagine the trees never shedding the dead leaves. The leaves die, but they just stay there.
There’s no room for the new, fresh, alive leaves to come in.
So I was thinking about this part of feeling your feelings, because it’s huge. It’s not all of it but it’s related to challenging your thoughts and directing your thoughts.
There’s a time to be directing your thoughts towards what you want.
There’s a time to be observing and potentially challenging your thoughts.
If you don’t do that, you likely won’t be able to feel your feelings, because you will have thoughts about how it’s so awful, and if you go in and start feeling it, you’re never going to get out of it.
If you don’t separate out the feelings from the thoughts, then you likely believe the thoughts (the stories that you’re telling yourself), and so then you have thoughts about the feelings being unmanageable, unbearable.
Unbearable.
So that’s a big thing – believing that you can feel anything, any emotion you can feel it, you can handle it.
It sucks.
You don’t want to, but you can if you believe that you can be with yourself, even when you’re filled with rage and anger or deep sadness, you will get through it.
And there’s things that take many rounds, like grief. You’re going to have waves of sadness, and you just still need to know that even though it might not feel helpful to be feeling that way, that there is a purpose to it, and you are capable of feeling it and when you do that, you provide space to feel immense joy, as well.
You can feel more of the positive end of the spectrum when you’re not carrying all of the negative emotional baggage, and yet most of us don’t know how to feel our feelings.
It’s innate.
We all knew it when we came into this world as babies, but we learned how to avoid it to survive in a world that didn’t welcome it, and some of us learned better than others.
Some of us really went into the suppression side, and just live in our heads, it seems safer there – it’s not, but it seems like it.
And I think at the other side, there are people who are so gripped by their emotions, they’re not suppressing them, they’re feeling them out of context. They don’t get it that it’s a temporary thing. It feels like life or death every time, and they’re just completely taken out by their emotions.
It’s just different ways to respond to living in a world that didn’t support us to continue to have a natural emotional response that we were born with.