Mo' Feelings, Mo' Problems?
Written by: Dr. B
My husband was interviewed a long time ago when he was first starting his company. It was his first time speaking on a podcast and he was in the early stages of his work. There was a point where the interviewer asked how he was able to be so successful when he was dealing with the challenges that come with building a company and working with family. I remember it clearly, "I just take the emotion out of it." In the moment I was like, "WHAT?" Who can just "take the emotion out of it," just like that? This was years ago and I was still in the stages of exploring whether my husband might be a robot or just really out of touch with his feelings. If you're wondering, it's true. We enter this field to help heal other people's problems and our own.
We were eating dinner the other night and I brought it up. We both had a good laugh. "Yeeaaah, that was wrong", he says. Since that interview, we've experienced plenty of growth with many emotions to accompany it. I brought it up because I was remembering how absurd and spectacular it sounded. "Wouldn't that be nice?", I fantasized mid-chew. "If I could just cut this knot out of the center of my chest, that would be amaaaaaziiiiiiing." I can't even remember what it was, but clearly, something had been stressful that day and I really wanted to put down my emotions the same way I put down my keys. My husband has owned his own life path and company for a few years more than I have. He looks at me and goes,
"If you're going to do your own thing, it never stops. You just get better at it."
My mind wanted to latch onto the "it never stops" part. But my soul could feel relief in the truth that "you just get better at it." I had witnessed the evidence of that first hand. It made me remember that my coach had asked me to list my greatest accomplishments of 2017 and one of them was: I effectively held my emotions and human ego in self-compassion. I gave myself a well deserved pat on the back for all the dang work I put into being aware of my emotions so I could let unhelpful feelings simmer and keep my focus on my big audacious goals.
One thing I hear a lot from my clients is a desire to tame their emotions so they don't get overrun by them. They want less reactivity when they run into issues with their partners, they want to sleep better after a difficult interaction at work, and they want to doubt themselves less when it comes to stepping outside of their comfort zone. Just yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine who is an ambitious business owner and entrepreneur about how he has managed to evolve in his capacity to move through emotions when having difficult conversations at work:
"The feelings don't go away, but you just get more comfortable having that feeling and operating anyway. You just don't get frozen or paralyzed about it. You just feel that stuff and do it anyway. You start to think, 'I've been here before, I've felt this before, and I've gotten through it.' It's never like, 'I just love having to be the asshole that holds people accountable!' Just because I don't like it and it's uncomfortable doesn't mean I don't do it."
Whoa. HOW KILLER IS THAT?? I immediately started writing that down as a reminder to both myself and every other human being on this planet. I know the truth of this incredibly well, but some things you just have to hear a thousand times before it starts to sink in. The feeling can seriously suck sometimes, but it's just a feeling. It will pass and you will get through it. Just because it feels sh*tty and annoying, don't let temporary emotions stop you from moving into places of growth that require discomfort.
If you're wondering about how to start a new process in your relationship with your feelings, start with working on becoming aware of them. Therapy is like strength training. It's a process and you build up over time. We start by helping you better understand your mind, how you tick, and gain new strategies for how to engage with your world. As a team at Modern Therapy, we're huge advocates of mindfulness and talk a lot about strengthening our client's capacity to be the "Observing Self." If you want to start settling down the emotions that come up for you, begin a practice of gently noticing what you're experiencing. This will help you cultivate a healthy capacity to recognize what's moving inside of you. That way, you can make a more conscientous response rather than dive head first into reactivity. It's an absolute practice and it requires a shift in your mental lifestyle. The practice doesn't mean your feelings go away, they'll just become less severe and distressing in your experience of them. Your core self will remain intact as you notice the experiences that move around you. It's no surprise so many ambitious and driven people take the time to meditate every day. They have bigger sh*t to deal with.
If you're a skeptic of the mindfulness meditaiton movement, here's a final point to bring it home. I was reading an interesting dialogue last week by The Atlantic between Matthieu Ricard, a molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk, and Wolf Singer, a neuroscientist as they discussed their new book, Beyond the Self:
"So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace."
Sounds pretty epic to me and a solid encourager to get back on my daily meditation practice. On that note, a mindful break is calling my name.
Yes feelings, less problems.
- Dr. B