Processing Emotions

Thoughts vs Emotions

Once you start hanging around the world of thought work and intentional living, you keep coming across the idea of “processing emotions”, “feeling your feelings” and all sorts of things which make the intellectually minded of us (who probably are the ones reading these blog posts a bit uncomfortable.  I am going to try to break down a little bit of what processing emotions is not, why we should care, how to actually know when you are having an emotion and finally some ways we can process them.

Feeling Stuck

One of the easiest ways to know if there is an emotion you need to process is when there is a situation where you feel stuck.  This may be overt, such as when there is a sticky problem in your work or personal life, and no matter how many times you go around the options, you don’t see a creative or win-win solution.  Almost certainly, there is some kind of uncomfortable emotion which needs processing in this situation.  Likely, the way you are thinking about things is leading to this emotion at a subliminal level and until you acknowledge the emotion and process it, it will continue to impede you from getting solutions focussed.  Look for situations where no matter how hard you work on things cognitively, you still get the same undesirable options.

Fast Physical Changes

Barring true medical emergencies, fast physical changes are often a sign of unacknowledged, unprocessed emotions.  Hunger, nausea, headache, stomach ache, pains in various places – these come on quickly, are not clearly associated with a trigger, ebb and flow quickly.  This can be tricky, but remember that minutes don’t matter except in true emergencies (arterial blood!), in which case of course, do what you need to do.  If you suddenly find your physical wellbeing has changed, take a few moments, maybe with tapping or a brief meditation to reconnect with your body and see if the physical sensations subside when you pay close attention to them.  It is important to approach these bodily sensations with loving, compassionate curiosity and stay descriptive of them when you do this.  Remember, you are safe in these moments and you are trying to get a sense of whether these physical sensations are indicative of an underlying physiological or psychological process.  If the sensation dissipates when you pay close attention to it, there’s probably an emotion there that needs some work.

Repeating Unproductive Action

We all do it.  Argue with our spouse.  Nag the kids.  Overeat at family dinner.  Have one more glass of wine than we planned. Skip exercise one day.  Procrastinate our work tasks.  If this happens from time to time, it may well signal that there was some emotion which could have benefitted from being processed, but instead you buffered the emotion away, usually at a subconscious level.  But if this is a repeated pattern in your life, it can create results you don’t want – overeating, over drinking, overworking, overexercise, overshopping, oversleeping, overconsumption of social media – these are all clues to underlying unprocessed emotion.  This also applies to unproductive RE-actions such as yelling at your loved ones, rushing in the mornings after oversleeping, indulging in remorse eating after seeing the credit card bills from the overshopping.

Note – I call these actions unproductive to draw attention to the fact that they are not producing results you want in your life. Even if they do not produce much downside, they certainly are drawing energy and creativity from creating results you DO want in your life.

It is really important to recognize that with these repeated actions, it will almost never be a matter of deciding that you just don’t want to do the thing any more.  In the case of clear addiction, this can appear to be the case – sometimes a person will go from over drinking to drinking nothing – but I submit that in this case, the person has just created a hard limit on their actions without dealing with the underlying emotions whose unprocessed status is creating overdesire for alcohol and buffering in general.  This is why people often substitute one vice for another – overeating becomes overexercising or over drinking becomes overshopping.

What Next

Emotions are things which are felt in your body.  Most of us are capable of feeling the big ones – joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, anticipation, suprrise in response to big inputs – someone dies, we get a promotion, someone is grossly unfair to us, someone threatens us, etc.  But the truth is that we have thousands of emotions each day, most of them fleeting, in response to the thousands of thoughts we have.  It is not necessary to process or even acknowledge these ephemeral emotions.  They pass by us, move through us, and do not create undesired, unproductive actions leading to results we don’t want.  I will also mention that it is quite possible to hold two contradictory emotions in your body at the same time.  You may be holding your sleeping toddler and feeling joy and contentment and at the same time frustration that you cannot hop up and get some things done or have some alone time.

A good exercise to identify which emotions you need to pay more attention to is to start noticing common sensations in your body.  If you can name them, so much the better.  Is it anger for you? Panic? Sadness? Shame? Guilt? Usually at this point, it will be one of the more “negative” emotions.  Try to notice what your dreams are about, where your unconscious mind goes when left to its own devices.  What kind of things cause irritable reactions for you?  Rudeness?  Lateness? Why?  Is there a safety threat you perceive in certain situations?

Processing Emotions

I’m sure I will write more about this in future posts, so I will just touch on a few things you can do to help emotions move through your body and leave you free to be more flexible and creative

1. Say hello – I use this one with kids all the time.  When you notice that you are worrying, for example, you can say: “Hello anxiety.  You can come in for tea, but no staying the night.”
2. Get descriptive – If you have a few moments and a quiet, safe space, have a seat and close your eyes.  Describe to yourself exactly where in your body you are feeling sensation.  Get really specific – is the sensation moving or static, fast or slow, hard or soft, spiky or smooth.  Does it have a colour?  Does it radiate to anywhere else in your body?  When you get to the end of a description segment, take a couple of deep breaths, with absolutely no (this is IMPORTANT) intention of asking the sensation to dissipate.  Then describe it again, especially noting changes.  Sometimes you will be able to name the feeling at this point and sometimes you will not.  This whole process takes less than five minutes.
3. Move your body – I mention this one specifically because I find it is often misused as a buffering technique.  For sure, physical movement helps emotions move through your body.  However, there is an element of intention here.  You must not have the intention of distracting yourself from the emotion.  Nor can you be resisting the emotion – if you are mad at your boss, every footfall should express that anger.  Finally, it is important to avoid thinking the thought loops that lead to the emotion as that will create the emotion generation loop.  That said, there is something intensely therapeutic about moving through emotion because it harnesses the power of your body to deal with a body issue.

TL;DR

Identifying and processing emotions are key to living an intentional life.  You can find hidden emotions by looking for areas of your life where you repeat unproductive behaviour.  Emotion processing is a body based process, not a cognitive one.