Sunny is struggling with the mental and emotional pressure of divorce.
Welcome to Friday Flip on the Becoming You Again podcast. Every Friday I take your divorce problems, conundrums and questions and do a quick flip around to empower you to show up as the best you after divorce.
Sunny is struggling with staying sane and handling the emotional rollercoaster of emotions during divorce.
Listen in as I give Sunny some guidance on being able to handle the mental and emotional pressure that comes with the divorce process.
List to the full episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Friday Flip on the Becoming You Again podcast. Every Friday I take your divorce problems, conundrums and questions and do a quick flip around to empower you to show up as the best you after divorce.
This week’s question comes from Sunny. She asks, “How do I keep my sanity during this process? There are so many ups and downs with the court process and lawyers. I am having a hard time working through all of the emotions I’m feeling like anger, sadness and grief.”
Thanks for submitting your question, Sunny, because the majority of people going through divorce are struggling in much the same way that you are. It will be helpful to question what you mean when you say, keep my sanity during this process. What would that look like to you? How would we know that your sanity has been kept? When you answer those questions I want you to get really specific when answering this question because this will look and feel different to everyone. What you think your sanity will look like will be different than what I think that will look like. Once you know specifically what this looks like for you, then you are going to have a better target to aim for when it comes to intentionally choosing thoughts that will serve you and help you feel what it is that you’re wanting to feel on purpose.
But I think the underlying thing that is going on here is the confusion around how to deal with feeling the whole rollercoaster range of emotions. The tendency when it comes to feeling more negative emotions like anger, or sadness or grief is to push them down and pretend they’re not present or to cover them up with a lot of buffering techniques like drinking, social media scrolling, eating, Netflix watching, eating – something like that. We just want to check out and not feel for a minute. We want to give a rest our brain and our body.
When we feel negative emotion we think that something has gone wrong and we need to ‘fix’ it somehow – or get rid of it somehow or change it. And thought work is helpful and useful and like I mentioned before you definitely can learn to intentionally choose thoughts that will create the emotion that you are wanting to feel. There is a caveat to that because often trying to think our way out of feeling and emotion is not going to work and it isn’t the answer. Sometimes and it is actually more often than not as I am learning and have learned through working with my clients and doing this on myself is that you are going to have to open yourself up and allow yourself to feel and process the negative emotion before you can even get to a place where changing the thought is going to work for you. It is like you are on one side of the tunnel and the emotion is that tunnel and you are trying to change your thought to feel better and you are trying to do that by going around the tunnel but you actually have to go through the tunnel and allow that emotion to be present to be able to get to the other side where you can change the thought and feel better overall.
So you said you are having a hard time working through these emotions. It may be that you haven’t quite learned how to properly process through your emotions. It may be that you’re resisting them without even realizing it. But the awareness that you have and your desire to work through them is a really great first step. Even just recognizing I am feeling this anger, I am feeling the sadness, I am feeling this grief and I want to know how to handle it. That is a good place to be because there is some awareness there and that is always the first place we have to start. Right.
So the next step will be opening yourself up to those emotions and allowing them to be with you without needing to act out on them, without needing to change them or fix them. If you’re not sure how to do that you can listen to my episode on processing emotions. I talk about that and teach how to allow your emotions to be present without acting out on them. But also just be willing to notice that they are there is a really great first step. So you are doing great. You are on your way. Keep going.
Thanks for that great question, Sunny. I’ll be back next week.
That’s your Friday flip! Stay tuned for the weekly podcast episode that comes out every Monday. And remember if you want more one on one help from me as your divorce coach to help you create an even better life than when you were married, then you need to schedule your free consult with me by going to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com Remember that’s Karin with an ‘I’.