Kate's Nuggets

Feelings Need to be Validated, Not Obeyed
Episode 38

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:
Hello, today I want to talk about emotions and, in particular, I want to talk about how it is that we can best relate to our emotions so that we continue to be self-directed and autonomous and not driven by our emotions, but responsive to our emotions.

This is a really crucial element of self-leadership. If we are not in control of how we respond to our emotional reactions, we are victims of circumstances. This is the key to being able to create the lives and relationships and work situations and outcomes in general that we want. If we want to have influence on our environments rather than merely being influenced, we have to learn how to validate, honor and not be dependent on our reactions. We need to learn how to be responsive to our emotions and not emotionally reactive.

So let's just think a little bit about emotional reactivity. When we're infants, our behaviors are instinctive reactions to our emotions. We don't have any information about how the world works, so there's no point in slowing down to think about what's going on. We just experience something, we feel something, and we know that feels good, in which case we smile or giggle or enjoy it, or we know it feels bad, in which case we cry. And the cry is our first communication, it's our first response to what doesn't feel good, and our first response to what feels bad is to get somebody else to fix it for us. This is the dependent infant.

As we get more skills, we develop alternative options for solving our problems. We start to be able to roll out of the way of something that's poking us in the back. We learn to crawl and walk and run, and all of a sudden there are all sorts of things that we can move towards if it feels good or move away from if it feels bad. The more skills that we get, the less we need other people to do things for us. And in fact, part of the drive toward maturity is the drive to be able to do all of these things for ourselves.

The biggest emotion in childhood is frustration because the epitome of childhood is wanting to be capable of doing everything by yourself and not actually being able to do almost anything of it.

How many of us laugh now as adults when we look back at our childhood and think how committed we were to the idea of when I'm a grownup, I will be able to do everything I want? That is the epitome of childhood. The epitome of adulthood is coming to terms with the fact that we are interdependent with everything, and the best we can do in any given circumstance is to co-create from the circumstances around us. And so, we learn to become comfortable with the things that we can't control, and we learn to take action in the places that we can control, and we build our competencies and our skills throughout our lives to be able to influence more and more of what we want, including sometimes letting go of the hopes of changing things.

So, as we mature, we develop the skills to be able to get ourselves in action away from the things that we want to avoid and towards the things that we want to move towards. We also, and for most of us, this is unconscious, we learn how to relate to our emotions in a more conscious and self-directed way. We have an easier time doing something difficult in service of a goal that matters to us.

As we go through life, we get an enormous amount of feedback and information about which actions we take, create which results. And learning is the process of incorporating that information into our decision-making processes as we choose to respond to these circumstances we find ourselves in. And an enormous amount of that feedback and information comes through our emotions. The learning is integrated through our bodies and our bodies express that through our emotions.

Salespeople talk about the fact that buying is an emotional process. We justify it with cognitive thinking, but the actual, yes, I'm going to do this is an emotional sense that we're going to do it. It's an emotional reaction. So even when we think that we're processing things cognitively, we are processing things cognitively and emotional, and the emotion is the bigger driving force almost all the time. So, we need to learn how to relate skillfully to our emotions or we're going to get ourselves in trouble with our decision making.

Now, part of the problem with thinking is that conscious thinking is slow and energy intensive. So, we as human beings evolved to optimize our energy reserves so that we are ready to react when there are immediate threats that we have to respond to quickly. And in order to maximize our energy reserves, we default to the least energy-intensive decision-making process. And so, this leads to all sorts of cognitive mistakes. We answer the easier question rather than the one that was asked, and we hope that that's going to be good enough. We only hear things that confirm what we already believe, because changing what we believe to incorporate contradictory information is very, very energy intensive.

We assume we know what other people are thinking, because that way we can move through quickly, we don't have to go through the process of asking them and clarifying. And there are many more cognitive mistakes that we make when we are trying to preserve our energy.

And so much of the time, this is good enough. So much of the time, responding instinctively is a great way to go through life. But when we don't like the results of our actions, we need to interrupt the habitual responses to situations and reprogram our habits. We need to train our fast thinking. So, it's easy to think about instinctive thinking and fast thinking as just what is, but it's not.

The whole idea of neuroplasticity is that we can rewire our brains. We can reprogram the processes. We can generate new algorithms. And what we want is to be in a continual learning mode where we are continually improving our ability to get the results that we want in our lives, whether personal or professional, by training better habits. And we do this sort of one habit at a time because it's energy-intensive to change a habit.

And so train one. Then when that becomes unconscious and it becomes a habit, you have put that into the, now I can do that fast, so now I can work on another habit. How we change our habitual behaviors is we interrupt the chain that goes from stimulus comes in from outside, we respond to it in a body mind basis that uses all of the nervous system to take in the data, because that's the only way we get data is through our senses.

So, we take in the information about our circumstances from our senses and they get processed physiologically. And that goes through noticing the data, filtering out what seems important, taking our understandings of how the world works that are programmed in already, applying that to the new data and then extracting an action from that. And so changing a habit requires putting new systems, new algorithms, new processes in between the data that comes in from our senses and the action that we take.

Our emotions are right at the base of that process. Our emotions are a gestalt impression of the sensory data. And so, it's the first part of processing. And there aren't a lot of emotions. There are really about five basic emotions. Now, everybody who studies this lands somewhere in this realm. Some people put some other distinctions in, but everybody agrees that fear and joy and anger and sadness are basic feelings. Some people put disgust in there, some people put sexual feelings in there; they're just a few basics. And then there are all sorts of nuances because of course we're getting so much data through our senses all the time that it would be bizarre if we actually had so few categories that we plugged it into.

There are all sorts of things that we think of as feelings that are not actually feelings. We might say, I feel abandoned, I feel abused, I feel attacked. I feel provoked, I feel pressured. I feel intimidated, I feel let down, unappreciated, unheard. I feel rejected, I feel neglected, I feel cheated. None of those are emotions. All of those are a judgment about somebody did something to me, and the result is, I feel hurt, sad, angry.

We have these emotions. We can't choose what we feel. There is a process that happens that we are not in conscious control of, which is that something happens outside us and our sensory organs register that that has happened. There's a change of light, there's a change of temperature, there's a change of smell, there's a change of something that is registered by our sensory organs. And the momentary collection of senses is an emotion.

That emotion, it's bundled together from all of those senses, and we are conscious of it for about 90 seconds. Emotions are messaging systems about how the outside world has changed because we need to be able to respond to changes, and so the emotions give us a picture about here's how it is right now, here's how it is right now. Here's how it is right now. And most emotions last about 90 seconds, because that's how long it takes for them to sort of come to consciousness and for us to be able to process and decide whether we're going to react to them or not.

Now, many of us have experiences of feeling the same way for hours, and so how can I say that emotions only last for 90 seconds? Well, if nothing changes during those hours in the circumstances or in our behavior, the message is going to be the same every time it comes up. So every 90 seconds you're going to get the same message unless you change something.

This is how we get into ruts and we wallow, is because we don't change things. If the situation is what it is, we just had a fight with our boyfriend, we just had a bad review at work. If we don't do anything with that and we just sit on our couch and think about what's going on, we are going to notice over and over and over and over and over again, the same feelings. We will probably then add to it the, I can't do anything about it and I'm not doing anything about it, and now I feel incompetent and I feel impotent, and that's just going to make things worse.

One of the things that we need to know is that if we change what we do, if we take action, we change the circumstances that our body then is responding to when we have an emotion. So, we change our feelings by changing something, by doing anything we change our feelings a little bit.

So, we can't choose what we feel, we can choose how we respond to them. And one of the things that we can do that changes how we respond to them is we can change how we interpret them. So for these feelings that are not feelings, let's say I feel sad because I was misunderstood.

Using old language, I might have said I feel misunderstood. Changing the way I interpret it, I can say I feel sad because I like to be understood, and I was not understood.

Now I've put myself into an interesting position. If I want to be understood and I was not understood, what can I do differently to increase the likelihood that I'm understood? Here's a possibility. Now I've got a communication problem that I can use my communication skills to change how I say things, to maybe improve that sense of understanding. Or I can honor the fact that I feel sad because I was not understood, and I can decide that it doesn't matter all that much, whether in this particular case, this person understands me or not, and I can decide to just feel sad and not do anything about it. And then I can let it go and move on to doing something else.

So what I just reflected back there was a process of validating having the emotion. I feel sad that I was not understood. But I don't need to be controlled by whether I feel sad or not. I can make a decision about how I want to respond to the sadness based on how important it is to me to be understood and how many skills and other resources I have available to try to be understood.

Now, the thing that's really important is that we do actually need to pay attention to our emotions, and many of us are not practiced at feeling our feelings. Many of us have been trained into paying attention to what other people feel and think, making other people comfortable, and not actually noticing what we feel. And so it's really important to start learning how to notice what we're feeling.

The ideal state of relationship with your emotions is that while you're in conversation with people, or while you're going around your business, there's a part of your brain that is checking in with how you're feeling and consciously reporting in, I'm sad, I'm happy. And part of you that's just focused on accomplishing your tasks at hand and that they're simultaneously both alive. Having those both active at once is a practice. Some people on the other hand, only feel their feelings and can't take action while they're feeling their feelings. They become overwhelmed by their feelings.

In both cases, the solution is, notice your feelings and choose what action to take. And if you are somebody who tends to be overwhelmed by your feelings, noticing the part of you that says, oh, I'm having a feeling, I'm having a feeling, I'm having a feeling. And naming the feelings, you can strengthen the part of you that can take action while you are feeling a feeling.

And for those of you who default into action and don't know what you're feeling, what will help is a practice of reflecting what am I feeling right now, and not what am I feeling in terms of misunderstood and judged and unwanted and used, and all of those kinds of things. No. What am I feeling in my body? What are the physical sensations in my body? Am I sad? Am I angry? Am I disappointed? Am I frustrated? Am I happy? Am I feeling sexually aroused? Am I feeling disgusted?

Disgusted is a weird one, because it can have a judgmental piece to it, but disgusted is actually a taste thing that happens through our senses. It's actually a thing that happens when we taste something and it's gone rotten, or it's got some of the flavors that if evolutionarily are tied to poison, we can actually have that visceral, I'm going to throw up feeling because our bodies need to physically throw up in order to get the poison out of our systems. And so that disgust is a physiological response, and it can happen in response to people in situations that aren't about taste, but it's that part of our nervous system. It then also becomes a metaphor, and that's when it becomes a judgment as well. So disgust is a little funky.

A great way of developing awareness of your emotions if you're not used to feeling what you feel, if you're not sure what your feelings are, is to set some random reminders on your phone or put some notices around your space so that you see them at random times that are just used as a moment to reflect. You see it and you say, oh, right now I'm feeling sad. Right now I'm feeling happy.

If you do this practice, what you will notice is that it doesn't matter what you're doing, and it doesn't matter how conscious you were at the time of how you were feeling, you are having an emotional experience all the time. You're just not always bringing it to consciousness. If you are having an emotional experience but not being driven by impulsive reactivity, then you can decide how you want to proceed based on what's important to you.

End Theme and Credits:
If you're enjoying Kate's Nuggets, please share it with your friends, and please write a review on iTunes so other people know what they would get if they listened too. Thank you.
To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
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.