I can’t believe it’s already the last day of January! Usually, January is my least favorite month. Christmas is over and it’s just cold and miserable outside. But this year has been different. It’s definitely helped that we have had a very mild winter here at my house. I’m a fan of no snow on the roads.
Another thing that has made this January better than other years is that I have really enjoyed working on this “personal research project” of Feel 2018. It isn’t all rainbows an unicorns. But it’s nice to feel like I have an intentional focus for this year and it’s been fascinating for me to find puzzle pieces and put them together.
Since it’s the last day of the month, I thought I would compile a few of those puzzle pieces that I have recorded in my journal throughout the month and share some of my personal observations as I’ve embarked on this journey to increase my depth of feeling. Maybe I’ll try to do this at the end of every month this year. We’ll see how organized I am. haha.
Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash
I’ve noticed that music stirs up buried/suppressed emotions, when I open up my heart and allow it.
For example, at the beginning of the month, my daughter was really into listening to songs from the movie, Frozen. The song, Do You Want to Build a Snowman, is one that I have heard a lot of times before, but for some reason, with this new emphasis on leaning into my feelings, this song became a trigger for me. In the middle of the song, the little girls’ (Elsa and Anna) parents die. Of course, that’s not a happy part of the song, but it never really affected me much before because I would just gloss past it and not allow it to. But now, I have noticed that it brings up feelings of regret and sadness in anticipation of my dad’s eventual death (which hopefully isn’t anytime soon, but he is getting older and having more health problems) since I have never really had a close daddy/daughter relationship with him.
Allowing myself to really feel those emotions of regret and sadness isn’t comfortable. My gut reaction is to just push the feelings away, to take Elsa’s advice and “conceal, don’t feel”. If I pretend that the feelings aren’t there then I don’t have to face them, right? Well, instead of continuing to push those feelings away, I decided to lean into the feelings that the song stirred up for me. I allowed those feelings of regret and sadness to sweep over me, every time that my daughter would play that song.
And you know what, a few days later, during my morning routine, I had a stroke of inspiration.
I started thinking about how I could work on improving my relationship with my dad and that one big thing is in how I think about my relationship with him. After all, a relationship is really mostly in my head. It’s what I think of the other person and what I think about our level of connection that determines how close I feel we are.
I had the thought “How would I show up in certain situations if I believed that my dad and I had a good/close relationship? Would would my actions be?”
It just so happened that he was having foot surgery that day. I asked myself “If I had a close relationship with my dad, what would I do to show him support and concern today?” I challenged myself to text him before his surgery and wish him luck and then to call him afterward and see how it went. Even though reaching out to him like this is super awkward and uncomfortable for me, I did both of those things. We ended up chatting on the phone for over an hour and had a pretty good conversation.
Over the past couple weeks since then, I have sent him random texts (even though he doesn’t ever respond) to let him know that we are still thinking about him and praying for his foot to get better. I even texted him to tell him that I had a dream that he flew all the way to our house just to fix our van (which isn’t broken in real life) and told him that my subconscious must know that he’s good at fixing anything.
I don’t know if I would have had this inspiration or the motivation to lean into the awkwardness of reaching out to my dad if I hadn’t opened myself up to really feeling regret and sadness about our disconnected relationship.
These actions that I took are not monumental. They may even seem inconsequential. But though they be little, they are moving me in the right direction so that’s all that matters. And if my dad died tomorrow (which of course I hope doesn’t happen), I could face his death with at least a little less regret, and the ability to feel more (wanted) sadness and grief than before. I plan to keep leaning into these feelings and allow them to drive my actions towards improving my relationship with my dad.
Another observation that I’ve had is that fear keeps me from feeling empathy.
One morning, when we were driving on the freeway, we saw accident that had just happened. My husband said, in a somber tone, “Oh, there’s an accident. Sad.” And I thought “You’re right, that is sad.” Because of my focus on leaning into feelings, I leaned into my feelings of discomfort and tried to step into the sadness for a minute and feel with the people that had been in the accident. I have a bit more empathy now that I’ve experienced a car accident of my own.
In the process I noticed that something that keeps me from allowing myself to feel with others is that it brings up feelings of fear and foreboding joy. In the process of leaning into those feelings of empathy I am reminded that if something bad/sad like that could happen to them then something like that could happen to me too. I think that I do this when I see car accidents, when I hear about serious illnesses, when I hear about divorces, deaths, etc. So in order to avoid those feelings, I just smother them and don’t allow myself to really feel with the other person that is hurting.
It was an interesting observation that I’m gonna have to think about more and allow myself to lean into those feelings and not forebode joy.
I’ve noticed that feeling (and especially resisting) shame produces some of my worst behavior.
The more aware I have become of my emotions, the more I have noticed when shame is driving my actions. For example, last week, my husband was out of town on a business trip (which thankfully doesn’t happen very often). And on one of those evenings, I happened to mention to someone on Facebook, in our neighborhood forum, that my husband was out of town. After I posted this, I felt really dumb because I had broken one of my unspoken rules of not announcing publicly when my husband is out of town. I’m kind of paranoid like that. Queue the shame and fear.
Well, a couple minutes later, my son and daughter came running into my room, fighting about something. Because of my fear (people knowing that I was all alone – with my kids – at home) and my frustration at myself for doing that dumb thing (which I was trying not to feel and trying to suppress) I was not a good mom in this moment of dealing with this sibling rivalry. I yelled at my son and got really frustrated with him. And then I rushed us through scripture study and prayer and sent them all to bed.
And then I felt even worse. Now I was feeling (more like trying not to feel, so suppressing and resisting) fear, shame (from the Facebook comment), and more shame (from taking my frustration out on my kids).
I sat on my bed for a couple minutes and tried to just process the emotions. I prayed and asked for forgiveness and for Heavenly Father to soothe my fears and to send extra angels to protect us while my husband was gone.
I started to feel a little more peace and comfort.
I went into the boys’ room and apologized to my son for how I had acted towards him. I told him that I was stressed about something else and had taken it out on him when he didn’t deserve it. I gave him a hug and then tucked the boys in.
A quote that I recently read in the book, Rising Strong, says,
“When we’re in shame, we’re not fit for human consumption. And we’re especially dangerous around people over whom we have some power.” -Brene Brown
This quote was really eye opening for me. I can definitely see how I am quick to blame when I am feeling shame, and it is not good, especially in my role as a mom. It’s easy for me to take my internal battles out, externally, on my kids (not physically, but verbally) and I get upset with them over little things and blame them for things that aren’t even a big deal.
Brene says,
“In research terms, we think about blame as a form of anger used to discharge discomfort or pain. The shame-blame combo is so common because we’re desperate to get out from underneath the pain of shame, and we see blame as a quick fix. If, for example, I suddenly realize that I missed an important conference call earlier, sometimes in a split second I’m discharging that frustration by yelling at my child or my student or my employee. I always say, “When we’re in shame, we’re not fit for human consumption. And we’re especially dangerous around people over whom we have some power.”
It doesn’t have to be something big – blame works to discharge mild discomfort, too. You’re late for work and you can’t find that shirt you want to wear, so you yell at your partner for hanging the dry cleaning in the wrong place in the closet. It doesn’t have to make sense either. It just has to give us some sense of relief and control. In fact, for most of us who rely on blaming and finding fault, the need for control is so strong that we’d rather have something be our fault than succumb to the bumper-sticker wisdom of “bad stuff happens.” If stuff just happens, how do I control that? Fault-finding fools us into believing that someone is always to blame, hence, controlling the outcome is possible. But blame is as corrosive as it is unproductive.”
*I wrote about more of my thoughts about shame here.
Here are a few more little observations that I’ve made throughout the month…
I’ve been trying to be more aware of my physical response when I’m feeling negative emotions. In tuning into my body, I’ve noticed that when a negative emotion arises, I seem to always have the same physical response… tensing up in my chest, in my shoulders, in my face. I’ve also noticed that when I feel a negative emotion, part of my physical response is to hold my breath and/or take shallow breaths.
So either I am not tuning in deep enough – and need to become more present and aware – to really see what is going on in my body for each individual (irritation, anxiety, frustration, shame, etc.) negative reaction, or my go-to physical response is to tense up and “shut everything off.” Like I “slam the door shut” to my little heart house and the physical response is shutting off/tensing up.
Sometimes I will notice my physical response before I’ve even noticed that I’m having a negative emotional reaction to something deep inside. And that physical response for some reason makes me feel like I have to rush and push harder… even if there is no real reason for my rushing. For some reason, my body will think that it has to rush and get more done. I think it’s a subconscious way of using work as a buffer so I don’t have to face whatever I’m feeling. I’ve also noticed that when I am trying to rush, or pack extra chores in, even if I don’t HAVE to rush, I get easily worked up with the kids when they want my attention and I freak out at them. I think it often goes back to that shame/blame combo.
Another interesting observation that I’ve noticed since becoming more familiar with my physical response to negative emotions is that when my phone vibrates to notify me of something, I notice a physical response, like the response that I have to a negative emotion. It’s like a warning goes off in my brain. I think notifications are meant to trigger that response – like an urgent need to attend to. It’s been interesting for me to notice this and it helps me to gain some leverage and become an agent over my phone in choosing to respond to the vibrating notifications, rather than just reacting because of the physical response that it triggers in my body.
Anyway, this is just a sampling of the things that I’ve been learning and noticing so far this year. I’ll keep posting more as the year goes on. 🙂
