Feelings
Feelings
Some of us feel so much, become overwhelmed and unable to process, others have switched our emotions off as a self protection, leaving us feeling numb. Our goal is to experience the full range of emotions in a healthy balanced way so we can live our very best life.
All too often, we label emotions as good and bad, desperately trying to grasp onto the good ones while we attempt to avoid the bad ones at all cost.
For some, the thought of dealing with the ‘bad’ emotions becomes so overwhelming that they switch them off altogether, living instead with a detachment, a feeling of being numb, because when you start to switch emotions off the mind doesn't differentiate between good and bad, it just shuts them all off, so we lose all the beautiful ones that make life worth living.
How exhausting just even thinking about the effort it takes to do that. The fact is, as humans we have been designed to experience the full spectrum of emotions. If you think about it, how would we really appreciate happiness, love, joy, achievement, excitement if life was perfect every single day, wouldn't we just become complacent? Without uncertainty and challenge, we would instantly lose the emotions of excitement, achievement and pride. Without fear and judgement, we would not know accomplishment and acceptance, you see if we can change the way we look at the ‘bad’ emotions and start to embrace them more as ‘challenging’ emotions, we can see them as the precursor to the ‘good’,we can begin to look at them with curiosity, and see the potential that lays the other side.
It’s important to identify the 6 emotional needs:
1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others
It’s also important to understand the emotions that are activated within us when these needs are not being met, as well as knowing what it feels like to embody these needs fully.
Feeling wheel
We can break the emotions into 6 main categories
Sad ~ Mad ~ Scared ~ Joyful ~ Powerful ~ Peaceful
From there, it’s great to look closer and identify the specific emotion so that we can understand our responses better. You can use the feeling wheel to help you when identifying your emotional state
When we are triggered by an uncomfortable emotion we will drop into a fight, flight or freeze mode.
Fight Mode
As someone who used to throw myself into the deep end and figure out how to swim in that moment, I know the power of activating the warrior to get you through challenges, the warrior mentality is incredibly powerful and like a well trained army, will keep you safe when faced with any threat to you or a loved one. However, when it is our sole response mechanism, it will activate over the smallest incidents. You would send an army to war but you wouldn't send it to deal with someone that parked in the wrong parking space, would you?!
Some people have their army set to auto pilot so it activates over the every challenge and the body becomes like a pressure cooker, ready to fight and blow over the smallest things.
We need to teach our army to stand down on command and only arise for emergencies only.
Flight mode
This is where we have felt a threat to our emotional/physical state and we need to get out the danger zone as quick as possible, our heart accelerates and space around can feel like it's closing in on you. You become completely overwhelmed, your only focus is to survive and keep breathing and you seek out a safe place to hide until the danger is over. The only thought process is survival, so just like the warrior, the adrenaline that courses through your veins remains stuck in your body.
Freeze mode
This is where we are either paralysed in the moment and unable to identify a course of action or we have become so numb that we have no emotional guidance to know what to do. It's a very dangerous place to be because our safety button has been deactivated and can leave us open to self harm or external harm.
Adrenalin
Continuous boosts of adrenaline can harm blood vessels, raise blood pressure and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, headaches, irritability, depression, anxiety, insomnia, the inability to concentrate, decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, muscle tension, acne and obesity.
So, now we know our responses, how do we start to allow emotions back in without opening the floodgates and being overwhelmed?
Challenging emotions inevitably come with a level of discomfort.
Baby steps… this is one of my favourite terms now.
This short video teaching you to calm down the system is a great way to regain control:
Moving forward, we want to call out our ‘lover’ and our ‘inner sage’ as we begin to first notice then acknowledge, understand, forgive and release these emotions.
Step 1. Notice
Who and what set off your fight, flight, freeze mechanism?
Throughout the day, I want you to pay attention to your body's response, when you were triggered did you want to fight, flight or freeze?
A trigger is anything that causes a reaction in you (we are focusing on the challenging emotions), any moments in the day where you felt pissed off, upset, hurt, rejected, unworthy, guilty, ashamed, jealous, fearful…
Now, if you are in the moment of the trigger and you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed with anger, fear or panic and the situation isn’t dangerous or threatening then there is a great technique to calm yourself down, refer to the video you just watched on calming down and regaining control.
Step 2. Acknowledge
Once you know who and what upset you, it's vital to ascertain why and what emotion they activated within you?
The response emotions are anger, sadness and fear, however, we want to go deeper than that and find the core emotion.
For example: if your reaction was anger, the underlying emotion may be disrespect.
Sadness may have activated rejection or unworthiness.
Fear may have triggered a feeling of being unsafe.
Use the emotion wheel to get to know the different emotions so it's easier for you to identify which one of your needs have been triggered.
Step 3. Understand
Once we have acknowledged the core emotion, we can understand why our F.F.F mode has been activated. For example: I was standing politely in a cue in the coffee shop, someone jumped the cue and got served before me. That created a F.F.F response, although at the time I was unaware so I just stood there being angry, while my body was preparing to fight. Later, when I sat and thought about it the emotion that came up was injustice and not being seen. So, those are the emotions I can look deeper into moving forwards. It's okay to reflect after the event, we are often consumed with emotions in the heat of the moment, rational thought comes later, but it's important to find the time to do this step.
Step 4. Forgive
It's important to understand that the person or event that sparked this emotion is now somewhat irrelevant, as they were just messengers showing us the emotion we need to heal within us, the whole time we have these unresolved emotions lurking inside we will keep attracting these experiences. Once you have healed the pain connected to these emotions you will no longer be triggered by the actions of those around you. The more we ignore the lessons, the bigger and more painful they become. So in order to heal it is crucial that we acknowledge the role in which the person delivering the lesson played, it is possible that once healed you can find gratitude for the experience and forgive the messenger and yourself. It doesn't mean you have to keep a person in your life that has brought painful lessons but by forgiving them it liberates you from any more suffering, leading to inner peace.
Step 5. Release
So, now it’s important to complete the ‘trauma cycle’ and with this, we can learn a lot from animals. If you watch a documentary in which a gazelle escapes the jaws of death of the leopard chasing it you will see once it realises its safe it stands and shakes its whole body, releasing all the adrenaline and fear from its body so that it doesn't become stuck in its cells, we need to do the same thing. Stop, shake and release. Sometimes our body will shake by itself, and that can be scary, so by becoming aware we are taking back control over our processing.