Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 85
Where do you try and intellectualise your emotions so that you don't have to feel them?
I think quite often a lot of us can try and downplay our emotions by saying things like, "oh, well, I should know better", or "well, I know I shouldn't think feel this, but it just crossed my mind", or "I don't really believe this, but I'm going to say it anyway". Where do you kind of put these prefixes and suffixes and pad out your emotions with words that try and downplay the feelings that are actually going on for you?
Because in my experience, and frankly, in a lot of stuff that I've read, if you don't allow your emotions to rise and feel and explain themselves out into your life, then actually they become louder and they become bigger because your body is trying to give you a signal. And if you're not listening to it, your body thinks, well, obviously, there's a problem here. I'm going to have to try and get their attention somehow. And so whilst we think that we are clever enough not to have to feel the horrible things, we don't actually disperse emotions by overthinking or intellectualising or rationalising ourselves out of them. They don't disappear. We just shove them deeper.
The problem with things being shoved deeper is they're able to set more seeds and get roots down into more things in our lives and show up in more places. And if we have a feeling that we don't like very much, let's say it's fear. Fear is a fairly common one. You would try to squash that fear down, whereas it might be that you're just worried about a relationship problem that's going on for you. Suddenly, when you try and pretend that that isn't there, you might find yourself feeling a bit anxious about work, or a bit anxious about a family situation, or a bit anxious about money. And you can't quite work out why this feeling is coming up, but suddenly, everything feels a lot more agitated.
Even though we're telling ourselves we don't have time for this stuff, what we're actually creating is a sort of dispersing. The vision that's coming to mind is putting a sort of drop of ink in some water. And the way that it just spreads out into everything. And the irony is that when we try and intellectualise ourselves out of feeling our emotions, what we actually cause is a whole load more emotions. Because your body receives the message that having emotions isn't safe, that your natural feelings that have arrived out of natural human responses to everyday life occurrences are being received as dangerous, and it's like, get me the hell out of here. And also, why are we not responding in a way that is perfectly human? There must be something wrong. So you try not to feel your feelings and end up feeling a lot more feelings.
And the last reason really I think that it is worth looking at how to process your emotions and why you might want to is if you have an emotion that you don't want to feel, or you just want to try and shove away with big clever words or ideas that you've heard from someone else, or you tell yourself you don't have time to deal with this right now, then the idea of telling yourself that you don't have time to deal with this creates more of the "this" for you. And what I mean by that is, if you don't deal with the symptoms of what is coming up for you from any particular circumstance, you're just going to get more of the same.
If you have a pattern in your life where you keep doing the same thing, you're going to get more of the same results. In order for us to be able to feel something differently, have a different life experience, we're going to have to change some of the components of this menu of the ingredients of the way that things are done, of the game plan.
And so if you want to be able to feel more of your emotions in a way that is accepting, loving, compassionate, kind, what you actually first need to do is acknowledge that they're there and allow them and not try and push them away and not try and push them away with sneaky little words like, "oh, I don't really believe that". "Oh, I know I shouldn't think that", or "this isn't really what I believe". And yet here we are. Notice when you use these sort of dismissive little phrases about things that are coming up for your own feelings, and then from there, at that point, you can decide what you want to do with them.
Over at SelfCareSchool, I have a course which is beautifully entitled How to feel your feelings without feeling like shit, which teaches some. It was initially done as a five-day course, and now it is open for you to do it; however, in whatever time frame you want. But each day it teaches you a different mini process for you to be able to deal with your emotions as they come up and just sort of extract them a little bit and look at them in isolation and just decide what you want to do with them.
And I think anything that makes us feel like we have more choices, and we have more availability to be able to deal with things in a way that we would like to deal with them offers us a sense of liberation, a sense of freedom, and a sense of calm.
So if you would like to apply more calm into your life, I'd love to see you inside SelfCareSchool. And even if that isn't right for you right now, I really hope that you're able to treat your emotions with the same level of compassion as you would that of a friend having their feelings, for example.
Your emotions are there trying to give you messages, and it's quite likely that some of those messages might just need a bit of love and care too. I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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