Kate's Nuggets

Cultivating a Sense of Control When the World Feels Chaotic
Episode 15

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Every human being craves a feeling of being in control of our lives.

Control over our lives comes from being at choice in this moment about what we are going to do. We want to believe, we need to believe, that we are doing the things that we are in action, making things happen, moving things in the direction that we want to go.

We need to believe that we can handle whatever arises. If we don't believe that we can handle whatever arises, we need to get a sense of control by preventing things we think we can't handle. And most of what is happening in the world, in good times or bad times, but especially in bad times, is out of our control.

If we look really carefully at what we can influence, it is limited and closer to our little bodies, or big bodies if we're big people, but in the grand scheme of things, we all have little bodies compared to nature and the cosmos, and there's a lot that is outside our control.

So, we need to find our sense of capability and control and security in our ability to react to what happens, in our ability to choose how to react to what happens. And to do that, we need access to the messaging systems in our bodies that tell us, as accurately as possible, what is going on in the world right now.

One of those messaging systems is our emotional processing system. Our emotional processing system is a messaging system. It is a messaging system that is making a judgment about what is going on right now. It's a guidance system making suggestions about how we might want to react, and it is processed through our body. We have five major emotions.

Mad, sad, glad, afraid, and sexual. We feel all these emotions as messaging systems in our bodies. It's easiest to know this with our sexual emotions. We feel that in our erogenous zones. We feel our attraction to other people physically. We become aroused.

We also feel the other feelings through our bodies. Fear tends to be in our bellies. We get a clenched tightness in our gut. Anger is more often in our jaws or our hands, across the shoulder, the back of the neck, it is that sort of upper body, shoulder, arm, jaw range. Sadness is in our upper chest, our throats, our eyes, our faces. It's a little higher in our body than anger. And joy and gladness tend to be sort of core feelings in our spine. And there's often a sense of openness right at our center, depending on how strong that happiness, gladness, joy, is. It can go from being a nice small heart-centered kind of feeling of openness in our chest. It can run along the spine, or it can feel like it's expanding out into the universe.

And these are messaging systems. Fear tells us there's something we need to pay attention to that might be dangerous. There is something unknown that we need to pay attention to.

Fear doesn't tell us, "That is dangerous." It tells us, "Wake up, that might be dangerous." Anger tells us something important is being harmed. Anger has an energy to it that is about taking action. Anger is, in psychological terms, referred to as a secondary emotion. Underneath anger almost always is sadness. There's a hurt, and then the energy to do something to stop that hurt from existing is in anger.

Gladness, joy, that's a sense that things are good, things are okay. Depending on the quality of that gladness, there can be a sense of everything's great. Everything's fine.

To feel feelings in a healthy way is to let them arise and pass through us. They are messaging systems and if we hang on to any one message, we don't get the next message because there's only room in our consciousness for one message at a time. Our emotional processing systems are designed to deal with this.

What happens with our experience of emotions is we stay conscious of the physical feelings that relate to the sensation that we label the emotion. They last about 90 seconds, long enough to get our attention and for us to start deciding how we want to react to them. Now, if we don't take any action in response to the feeling, 90 seconds from now, circumstances may not have changed very much. And so, the feeling that arises next may be very, very similar to the one that existed before.

If we learn to let those feelings pass through us and we let ourselves feel our feelings, we develop two things. One is we get a deeper sense of who we are in this world and what matters to us. And we get a sense of what is actually happening in the world.

And, if we let them pass through us rather than hanging onto them or resisting them, they become our friends. They just drop in to let us know something. They're just an information system.

Now, as human beings, we have a tendency to seek out things that feel good and avoid things that feel bad. And as I talked about earlier, this is a survival mechanism, and it is not bad. But it can go wrong because when we have a good feeling, we don't want to let it pass. We want to hold onto it because it's easier in our thinking to hold onto this good feeling than it is to create that good feeling in the next moment. Or we know from experience that good things don't last. So, we want to hold onto this for as long as we can because we want to avoid the feeling of let down when the good thing doesn't last. And it takes practice for most of us to let go of a good feeling and to let it pass.

But if we don't let it pass, we're resisting the next feeling. And if we are resisting the next feeling, we're avoiding reality. And if we're avoiding reality, then we can't react to reality, and then we have less control because we're actually not seeing things as they are. We're seeing things as we want them to be or as we're pretending that they are.

And to actually have impact in what's going on in the world right now, and actually to be effective doing things in the world, we need to see the world clearly. So, we need to be willing to let go of the good feelings to let them pass through us, to know, to trust that we can handle feeling the bad feelings without being swamped and overwhelmed with them because they too will pass through us. And then when we have that level of detachment, we can make choices that make it more likely that what comes next will give us pleasant feelings.

We also, on the flip side, need to learn to be willing to feel the uncomfortable feelings, to feel the unpleasant feelings. Because if we don't let ourselves feel unpleasant feelings, we resist becoming aware of reality as it is. We become blind to things that are actually happening in the world. And if we build our lives around not feeling uncomfortable feelings, we limit our choices tremendously. We have to be willing to risk rejection to ask someone out on a date, is one of my classic examples. We have to be willing to feel the feelings and move through them.

Learning to feel our feelings is a journey for most of us. Depending on where we're starting on this journey, we have a certain level of willingness, a certain level of intensity, that we can experience without feeling hooked by our feelings into acting without choice or becoming reactive or overwhelmed.

One of the things that really helps if we're trying to build our capacity is to spend time with people who have more capacity than we do to hold that particular feeling without being hooked or triggered, who are willing to be in our presence while we feel that feeling, who are not reactive to it, who can hold their own center while we feel that feeling.

Now, this doesn't have to be a professional. It can be a friend. It could, however, be a therapist or it could be a coach or a yoga teacher or a meditation teacher. It could be a teacher of martial arts or dance. It could be a teacher of all sorts of things. What you're looking for is someone who can hold their calm and their sense of gladness in the world while you are feeling your feeling.

Part of the importance of feeling your feeling and not acting on it is that in our interactions with people if we just act on the feeling without admitting that we're feeling it, we take our feelings out on other people. And when we take our feelings out on other people, it requires a saint or someone really, really skilled to let us do that without either tolerating it and changing their behavior to try and stop us feeling that feeling or taking it in and internalizing it. And in both cases, those aren't great for our relationships.

So, if we want good relationships with people, we need to learn to feel our feelings without acting on them. We take responsibility for our own feelings and don't make other people responsible for them and don't dump our feelings on other people.

When we let ourselves feel our feelings and choose how to act, we get to choose so much of what kind of impact we have. If we choose a behavior and it doesn't have the impact that we want, that is likely to trigger a feeling of disappointment. And if we can feel that disappointment, and in the moment not be hooked by it, then we're capable of cleaning up that mess and going, "That wasn't what I meant. Here's what I was trying to accomplish."

When we can do that, then we can actually handle any way that people respond to what we do. And that is a sense of control of our lives, a sense of security and control, that brings ease and peace at a profoundly deep level. And it all starts by practicing feeling our feelings without holding onto them, running away from them, or acting on them. When we commit to feeling all our feelings and not resisting them, we become capable of so much more than we believed possible.

Learning to feel all our feelings is, of course, challenging and takes time. So, we have to give ourselves compassion and not expect perfection. One of the things that is truly important is to recognize that we do not need to be perfect in this regard to have good enough relationships. We can commit to being in partnership with people and learning and growing together to do this. If people are compassionate with each other and actively trying to improve and working together to get through the messes, you don't need to be good at this at the beginning. You can just keep getting better together. So, learning to feel your feelings is hard.

Learning to unhook is hard. Every small improvement that you make improves the ease in your life. Every small improvement that you make expands your capacity to handle new and different situations. As you grow more and more capable of handling uncomfortable feelings, you stop having to design your life around avoiding ever feeling those feelings. That competence to handle uncomfortable feelings allows you to move forward no matter what happens. It allows you to keep having a sense of your own competency and your own control no matter what is going on around you.

All human beings crave a sense of control, and the reality of the world is that most of what we will encounter is not in our control. We cannot control the impact that our actions have. We cannot control how other people react. We cannot control so many things that are influenced by random chance, by other people's actions, or by nature.

What we can control is what we do with what happens to us, and we can increase our ability to be at choice about what we do and our range of flexibility in any given moment. When we grow our capacity to feel our feelings and keep moving, we can feel the fear and do it anyway.

We can feel the shame and do it anyway. We can feel the sadness and do it anyway. We can feel the anger and not act on it. We can feel the sexual attraction and not act on it. We can feel the sexual attraction and act on it. We can feel the gladness and the joy and choose more of what brings us that feeling.

We gain control of our own lives and the ability to truly step forward into moving our lives in the direction we want to go.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.