TOOL: Managing Difficult Emotions
From time to time, it’s not unusual for everyone to become overwhelmed by their emotions.
How can that be? You might think. Joe Smith is always cool, calm and collected. Or perhaps you are even thinking… naw… my emotions never bother me.
It’s important to remember two things:
Some people have poor emotional awareness, and have not spent very much time practicing, knowing, and understanding what they are actually feeling. They may feel confused about how they feel, or they may avoid it entirely. These types of people can lack awareness and how their poor awareness is impacting their behaviour, relationships, or life and…
The ways in which difficult emotions and stress manifest in each of us is as different as our genetic makeup. When angry, one person might clench their jaw and ball their fists, another may spew angry insults and throw objects around. The ways in which difficult emotions show up depends not only on our genetic makeup, but also on the modelling we received as children.
In an ideal world, we would have all had engaged and involved parents who modelled healthy expression and regulation of emotions. Parents who simply accepted and validated our emotional displays, and helped us co-regulate our activated nervous systems back to a relaxed baseline. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the vast majority of us born within the last century.
While some adults have learned to seek social support from trusted others to help them process their world, the reflexive action of many is to avoid, repress, and hold in their feelings. As adults, unless someone near and dear to us has died, it may be considered over the top to sob to a friend about the difficulty you are experiencing, and this is magnified ten fold if you are a man. This has led us to multiple generations with years of anger, hurt, and frustration crushed down inside them. That with which we do not release stays within us. The first thing we need learn is identifying, and then accepting our emotions. The next step is appropriately expressing and processing our emotional experiences in order to move past them.
This tool helps people appropriately cope with and express their emotions without feeling overwhelmed and avoidant. Avoidance of emotions is a natural response of our nervous system, and avoidance is driven by the primitive urge to flee danger, including emotional. Both physical and emotional danger are the same to the primitive brain. Coupled with poor coping skills, those who haven’t been taught any tools to cope with emotional overwhelm can, over time, hold more and more inside. This eventually leads to dysfunctional lives as the impact of repressing emotions tends to keeps building up over time. Enter addiction, dysfunction, and potentially even abusive behaviours.
TOOLS: FEELINGS WHEEL AND COPING STATEMENTS
LEARNING TO identify and cope with EMOTIONS (instead of avoiding when OVERWHELMED)
First, learning to identify and accept your thoughts and feelings. Using a feelings wheel first can help you pinpoint what might best describe what you are feeling.
Use coping statements to make the emotions more tolerable
Optionally, consider writing them down in even more detail. Journaling is a very important introspective tool that can help you self process your thoughts, feelings, triggers, and more.
The path to healing starts with awareness, and awareness, at times, can be difficult. Build your coping tool box and allow yourself the space to explore, one small step at a time.
The power to find wholeness is within you.
-Rachel