Therapy grounded in real inner work and genuine human connection.
When you are beyond stressed, there are very few self care remedies that you feel like doing. Even if they are going to do wonders for you like exercise or breathing or meditation. Honestly, when I am beyond, I could care less about what is …
I think we go into parenthood with the intention of showing love to our children and staying calm when our children are upset or misbehaving. We plan to parent in such a way that our children will only need to be told to do something …
We all know that there is no “there” to get to where everything is perfect, when we are fully evolved or have our life set up perfectly so that everything is gum drops and rainbows.
There is always going to be another day where there is a challenge.
Because you are human. And you are designed to constantly grow.
Yup, you are still going to be mad, frustrated, irritated, disappointed if things are not going your way.
This doesn’t mean this is a license to treat people or yourself badly.
It just means that you see and accept the feelings. That could literally take 15 seconds. Or, depending on what it is, might take a little longer. For ways to manage when it is taking a little longer, go here, here and here.
Don’t ask yourself too soon because you will hate the question if the feelings still want to at least be acknowledged.
Yes, your life is FOR you. Set up and designed for your highest growth.
Be patient because it might take a minute to come together. But it will, especially with practice and being conscious of what your challenges (growth opportunities) are at any given moment.
Yesterday morning, I woke up feeling good, did my meditation and was ready to head to the gym for my favorite spin class. It is a competitive one and you have to be there on time to compete and be on the board.
I left on time.
At every turn, there was more and more traffic. I felt my blood pressure rising. I tried to stay calm, but I was behind every slow driver (and I yelled at a couple of them). No matter where I went.
I caught what was going on. I reluctantly accepted that I would not be getting to class on time. This makes it sound easy, but I was not being easy. There was some legitimate upset.
I allowed my frustration and disappointment to be there and I knew that I would metabolize it through my body while I was spinning (even though I wouldn’t be able to compete).
It’s for me because I’m working on being more in command of my emotional responses to outside circumstances. That doesn’t mean not noticing things or not feeling, it means having command over the degree of impact. In my words, I am working on my sovereignty.
Not an easy feat being an empath and a Highly Sensitive Person!
I know this is small, but this is something I look forward to in my week. So this was perfectly set to challenge my skills since I have been making progress.
Taking the perspective that everything is designed for your forward motion changes the speed of your progress toward your goals. It takes the air out of the things that seem to get in your way and helps you stay productive through difficulty.
While I shared about a minor incident, I want you to know there are loads of others that run deeper and are more serious. This is not the place to share about all those.
But I want you to know that this perspective has been a saving force as I have faced and watched others face important challenges.
Which means it can do the same for you.
When I was thinking about this post, a little scene from A League Of Their Own popped into my head: Well, in the world of emotion, sometimes there is lots of crying! But there is no trying, especially when it comes to feelings you are …
A new Art Therapy resource for Orange County! One Heart Counseling Center is excited to announce its new location in Costa Mesa, close to the 405, 73, and 55 freeways. Our new satellite office offers mindfulness based therapy, art therapy, and counseling services for children, …
-Mavis Mazhura
So, how are you supposed to tell the difference?
Are they getting in the way? Or getting you on the way?
–> We have emotions that are current.
[Hint: these help you get on your way]
–> We have emotions that come from the past. They might not have been fully resolved, which means current circumstances can bring them to the surface.
[Hint: these can get in the way or get you on the way]
–> We have emotions that are based on misinformation (assumptions that are not true, misunderstanding the meaning of someone’s communication, unhelpful or untrue thoughts).
[Hint: these get in the way]
Here’s the GOAL: The picture of emotional health and well being is to be able to allow and tolerate any emotion in the entire range of human emotion and allow it to process through your body and consciousness.
You do this by simply allowing it, acknowledging it, downloading any messages being given and acting on that guidance.
Easier to say than do. For sure.
These feelings are lighter, they don’t have a lot of strings. They are clear and likely easy to identify. These emotions usually will not cause a lot of chaos or upset. They resolve easily.
These emotions are here mostly to guide you in the present moment toward what you want or away from what you don’t want. They are here to show you your boundaries or maybe here to help you move through a certain stage of your life onto the next stage.
They arise, like a wave in the ocean and they are meant just to break (find expression) and resolve.
You can support this process by simply allowing any feelingto arise (that doesn’t mean you act on it, it just means you allow it to be present), acknowledging it(could be just inside yourself) and getting any informationfrom it that you need.
If the current emotions are leading you into a change that needs to be made in your life, it’s important to understand that this is likely a set of emotions that will come in waves over time. They will prepare you by potentially being unpleasant so that you find yourself wondering what changes you need to make.
The unpleasant feelings also motivate you and give you the energy to act on them because you want to resolve them.
That doesn’t happen in one day.
So, if you find yourself repeatedly being frustrated, angry or disappointed, that is a clue that it is a set of emotions that is likely asking you for a change. Understanding that these waves are coming through will help you resist spiraling into places you don’t need to go.
They usually feel more intense than the situation warrants.
It can feel like a flood of intense emotion or lots of tears.
Or, it can be a total shutdown. Like, you refuse to talk about it with anyone, do not want to think about it and want to hide it in 100 miles inside the earth.
If you catch yourself in this intense emotion and you suspect this might be bringing up some feelings from the past, you are already ahead of the game. Just your awareness of what is happening is a massive step and offers some relief.
Get some perspective by taking some space from the situation. Walk your dog, work out, go watch a movie, catch up with a friend and don’t talk about it, just….take your mind somewhere else.
When you’ve gotten some space from the feelings: Reflect, write or talk about the issue.
Ask yourself: When have you felt this way before? How is this situation the same or different? Is there anything here for me to learn?
If it is the same as other situations and it is repeatedly coming up, that is because your emotional system wants to resolve whatever is not healed.
Don’t ignore it. Resolving it may be something that needs to happen for you to take the next steps towards your goals.
I have had many situations where I have had goals and there was an unresolved issue (tangle of trapped emotions) blocking the way. Once it resolved, I was able to get where I wanted to go.
In growing my business, I had to address a lot of self worth issues. Layers of them. Not exactly fun.
But paying attention to my feelings when they came up and addressing these issues (processing unresolved emotions) is a big part of why I was able to break through and reach some of my important business goals.
If stuff from the past keeps coming up and stopping you from living as you wish, a therapist can definitely help.
If you have done a fair amount of personal growth work and you want to really get to the stuff that you are holding onto on an unconscious level, I can HIGHLY recommend working with an Emotion Code practitioner. I have personally done this work and I have gotten underneath things years of therapy has not. It’s amazing.
It might feel very chaotic and like your mind is all over the place. You might feel like you can’t organize your thoughts. You might be in a zone of blame and judgement.
Again, your reaction may seem bigger than the situation warrants. That usually means that you are not seeing things clearly. There might be an assumption that is not true, you might be misunderstanding the meaning of someone’s communication/actions or you might be experiencing unhelpful or untrue thoughts.
You want to check if there might be an assumption that is not true, a misunderstanding of the meaning of someone’s communication/actions or unhelpful/untrue thoughts.
If you are not sure, that’s a good time to ask a level headed friend, mentor or counselor.
There are times when I ask “can I borrow your brain for a second? What do you see here?”
Usually the person I ask sees things differently and seeing from their perspective helps me see where I have misinterpreted something.
This is where you want to ask yourself if you might have a pattern of taking things personally or maybe have adopted a critical mindset.
If this keeps coming up, it’s a good time to talk to a therapist or ask a close friend for reflections. It could be a phenomenal growth opportunity.
Trapped emotions from the past and emotions based on misinformation are part of what give emotions a bad reputation. The truth is we were designed very well and emotions are meant to be a resource, not a hinderance.
Consider that we probably would not have that many trapped emotions if we learned early on in our lives about how to use our human emotional system properly.
That’s a great motivation to work through this stuff if you are a parent or plan to be one! Set your kids up for emotional health by getting yours on track.
Even if you are the picture of emotional health today, there are probably some emotions in the past that will be triggered by what is happening now.
Current circumstances will bring up feelings from the past because it is an opportunity for that trapped emotion to get processed. If you know about that, it helps so you can just let those guys through.
Once emotions get processed through, you have more and more clarity and ease in life. There is more space for enjoying things. You have energy for your purpose instead of emotions getting in the way.
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Clarify that although the feeling is OK, the behavior that resulted is not. Be clear that the specific consequence is for the behavior, not the feeling. Expand on the scenario above by saying, “Everyone feels anger and it is OK to be angry, but it is not OK to throw your toys. You are on time-out for throwing your toys.”
Offer them or model a suggested alternative behavior such as taking deep breaths, counting to ten, physical activities such as running or hitting a pillow, or even yelling into a pillow.
Praise them when they use the coping skills, practice the coping skills with them, and praise them whenever they use feeling words in their communication with you.
Just as they need to learn their abc’s in school in order to read and write, they need to learn how to understand their feelings before they can learn to respond to them more positively.
We as parents are their to help teach them what to do with their feelings.
**Written by Chelsea Derossi, M.A., MFT, ATR, Child and Adolescent Specialist at One Heart Counseling Center**
Anger and guilt are similar in the sense that they experientially disclose true boundaries and values. Not just our intellectual constructs of them. That’s the beauty of emotions, they bypass what we “think” or “expect”. To be fair, that can also be the challenge of them. They can …