Ep #30: Processing Emotions | Becoming You Again Podcast
This week I'm talking all about emotions. It's normal for women after divorce to feel like we are on an emotional rollercoaster that we can't get off. Our emotions can feel heavy, hard, exhausting and by the end of each day we lay down on our bed feeling emotionally and mentally overwhelmed wishing all the pain would just stop.
In today's podcast episode I'll be teaching you the three typical ways we've been taught to deal with our emotions and why those never work. I'll also be walking you through my 3 step method of processing through ANY emotion (even the hard and scary ones) so that you can step off the emotional rollercoaster of divorce and instead live a rich, full life.
Things you'll learn from this episode:
1. What an emotion actually is.
2. The three ways we've been taught to 'deal' with our emotions and why those aren't helping you to feel less emotional exhaustion and overwhelm.
3. My 3 step method to processing through any emotion.
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List to the full episode:
If you want to live your life without feeling emotionally drained, overwhelmed or exhausted -you can. I can teach you how and work with you until this becomes second nature. Think about how free you will feel to live your life knowing that you can handle anything because you won't be afraid to feel the emotions that show up with hard, challenging situations in life. If you want to know what it would look like to work with me to make this a reality, then schedule your free consult by clicking here and let's get you to living an even better life than when you were married.
Featured on this episode:
Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.
Are you lost and confused about who you are after divorce? Don't worry. I've got 51 Ways to Get to Know Yourself Again. Click here to download.
Want to know first hand how Karin can help you with your specific problems and create an even better life than when you were married? Click here to schedule a free consult.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome back to Becoming You Again. I’m your host Karin Nelson. I’m a certified divorce confidence coach and this is the podcast where I teach you how to reconnect with yourself, create emotional resiliency and live a truly independent life, so you can have an even better life than when you were married.
Hello my friends, welcome back to the podcast. We are going to talk about emotions today and specifically I’m going to be teaching you at the end of this podcast my three step method to processing through any emotion (and let’s be real – what I’m really talking about here is processing through any hard emotion, but you can use this method for the easy emotions as well). So make sure you stick around to the end of the podcast so that you learn my three step method.
But first let’s just talk about emotions in general, and as I go through this podcast you’ll hear me say emotions and feelings and I use those two words interchangeably but emotions are something that is unique to humans, at least in the a more sophisticated, complicated way. If you were to Google how many emotions are there, you will of course as only Google will do for us, get lots of different opinions on this. Some articles say 27, some say 8, some say 6. There’s articles out there that say there is 25 or 20 and I saw one go as high as 34,000 different emotions. And I really don’t think that knowing how many emotions there are is as important as understanding what emotions or feelings actually are.
An emotion or a feeling is one word. It’s like happy, sad, angry, frustrated, joyful, peaceful, anxious, surprised, disgusted, something like that.
But we get confused sometimes because often when someone asks us how we are feeling, we will give a sentence of an explanation for how we feel. For example, when I’m coaching a client and they tell me about something that their ex said and then I ask them how that made them feel – they might say, “It made me feel like nothing I ever do is good enough, even after the divorce. I just don’t feel like I can every do anything right.” And this is where I teach my clients that everything they just told me isn’t actually a feeling, even though they said, it makes me feel like…. What they told me are actually thoughts and those thoughts will make them feel something inside their body – that thing they feel inside their body is an emotion. It’s a feeling. So I ask them again, when you think “nothing you ever do is good enough even after the divorce”, how do you feel? What one word emotion do you feel? They might come back with something like I feel unworthy. I feel inadequate. I feel shameful. Something along those lines. I always want my clients to see and I want you to see the distinction between what are our thoughts and what are our emotions.
Our emotions will always be caused by something that we are thinking. What we feel inside of our body, the actual emotion is a series of chemicals and hormones that our brain releases instantaneously after thoughts that move down into our body and shows up in certain different ways. The idea of learning to process our emotions which is what I’m teaching you on today’s podcast is learning that when we feel an emotion – we process it by getting out of our heads and getting out of the thoughts and the drama that our brain is continually creating and instead paying attention to what is happening inside our body when we are feeling emotions. Again, I’m going to walk you through this 3 step method of processing an emotion in just a few minutes so don’t worry. If it sounds confusing I promise once I walk you through it, it will make so much more sense.
All right, so no one ever really teaches us how to process through emotions and that’s why when we feel some of the ‘hard’ emotions they seem really scary and they seem hard and they seem heavy. There are three ways that are typical in society that we deal with emotions.
And typically if we haven’t learned to properly process through your emotions, then you’ll feel an emotion that is uncomfortable you’ll one of three things:
1. We’ll try and avoid it.
2. We’ll act out on it.
3. Or we’ll push it down and try and go apathetic.
So let’s talk about each of these so that you have an idea of what they look like.
When we avoid our emotions it can look like seeking comfort from something outside of us. It’s like, I’m feeling this uncomfortable thing and I don’t want to feel it and so instead I’m going to eat some chocolate, or I’m going to go numb myself a little with a drink, or maybe I’ll binge that new show on Netflix so I can check out for a while, or oh this video game looks fun or how about some porn, or so many other things that we will use as a way to comfort ourselves in an effort to avoid feeling that uncomfortable feeling. Sometimes we do this subconsciously and sometimes we are consciously choosing to numb out from the emotion. This is something that is often taught as an acceptable way to deal with our emotions in society. So I want you to think about this. Did your mom ever take you to get a treat if you had a bad day or if you were sad she took you out to get ice cream to try to make you feel better? Mine did and I honestly used to do this with my own kids, before I knew any different. But the problem with this is when we try and cover up and avoid what we’re actually feeling we are essentially telling ourselves or telling our children that feeling our emotions, especially the hard, uncomfor