I’ve been discussing emotions in my membership this week, and one key theme I’ve emphasised is the importance of welcoming all our emotions, even the ones we don’t like.
Many of us are in conflict with our emotions; we wish we could control them, hide them, or make them disappear.
Essentially, we feel emotions about our emotions!
We feel shame after an angry or rageful moment. We feel frustration from constant rumination and loop-thinking. We feel guilty for blaming or criticising others. We feel judgemental for shutting down and reverting to childish behaviour.
Here’s the thing: the best way for us to navigate through our emotions is to feel them in our bodies—not to try to solve or think them away. We need to allow ourselves the space to get curious about them, to investigate, and to ask ourselves how we can meet our needs in that moment, allowing ourselves to express them in a healthy way.
Most of us have spent our lives trying to avoid feeling our emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones.
We've learned maladaptive coping mechanisms:
- Dumping them on other people (blame).
- Becoming hyper-vigilant and anxious, imagining all possible scenarios.
- Withdrawing and shutting down or adopting a people-pleasing mode.
- Suppressing and consciously holding them in.
- Repressing emotions without being aware.
- Numbing them with work, food, alcohol, scrolling, etc.
Do any of these sound familiar to you?
When it comes to emotions I often come back to the quote by Viktor Fankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”
Would you like to stop reacting the way you do and create space between the stimulus (circumstance, person, trigger) and your current way of responding?
I have created a PDF with over 50 bite-sized practices you can do in the moment to help regulate your emotions and your nervous system, shifting your state from flight, fright, or freeze to regulated.
This freebie also includes a checklist for the fridge that you can refer to in those deregulated moments. I pretty much created this for myself in those moments I needed a state change!
