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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.
This episode today is so many of my favorite episodes are.
I was actually suggested by a listener, a listener called Josephine who sent me this message, and she's given me permission to read it out loud and see if any of you may relate.
This is what she had to say...
Hi Gemma. It's been a while since I've felt any kind of emotion and I'm not trying to sound dramatic, I mean truly.
Happiness, sadness, excitement, they've all disappeared.
My childhood dog recently died and I felt nothing.
I got a big promotion that I wanted for a long time, also nothing.
One emotion I am feeling is fear.
Fear that I will never feel the same way again.
I can link it back to some really bad anxiety I had almost a year ago.
Around that time I started to intellectualize almost all of my emotions before I allowed myself to fully feel them.
And now I feel like I've ruined my brain by cutting off its pathway to expression permanently.
Please, any advice I need and would love for you to do an episode on how to actually feel my feelings.
So, I got this message and firstly, thank you Josephine for sharing but I got this message and I immediately knew I needed to talk about this.
In fact, I actually had a whole other episode planned for this week but this one just felt so much more like important because Josephine, like me too.
I am here with you.
I am experiencing the same kind of emotional blunting and the same kind of poor communication between me and my emotions.
You know, I feel happiness and I confuse it as something bad.
I feel sadness, grief, anger, stress.
I push it down and say, I'll get to that later.
I also much like you intellectualize my emotions as a way of getting out of feeling them, over analyzing every possible cause explanation and consequence until I'm exhausted.
And you know what? I don't feel particularly good about it and I don't feel like it's a particularly great way to live.
The absence of any negative emotions doesn't necessarily make your life a happy one because your emotions all use the same systems. All 34 ,000 distinct emotions we can feel are operating across the same neural pathways, across all the same cortexes of the brain.
And that's why nostalgia and regret feel so similar.
Passion and anger, trust and vulnerability, anxiety and excitement, grief, and gratitude, they feel very similar.
So you turn off one, you turn off regret, you turn off anger, vulnerability, anxiety, grief.
You also turn off nostalgia.
You also turn off passion, trust, excitement, gratitude.
I think a lot of us are finding ourselves in that very position where we've tried to feel, We've tried to manage our negative emotions in a way that's actually meant we prevented any intense emotion at all.
think a reason for that is that we're scared, not of our actual emotions, were scared of our feelings about our feelings.
Like let me explain this.
I know it sounds like a little bit strange but you know if I feel sad I feel like that's a bad thing and I feel like it's the end of the world.
If I'm angry I worry that something is wrong with me.
So it's not that the sadness is bad, it's not that the you know the grief or the anger is bad, it's that I believe that it's going to make me feel miserable or have some further consequence.
This whole experience, this whole pattern, this is known as metacognition or meta -emotions, my emotions, our emotions, about the possibility of certain emotions, and if that sounds complicated to you it most certainly is, and it's complicated for our brain, and it's difficult for us to work through that and feel like we can actually feel our feelings.
So the two big questions we're really left with is why?
You know, why does this happen and how?
How do I fix it? How do I convince myself I'm not at the mercy of my emotions and actually let them back in and feel human and feel connected again?
Well, my lovely listeners, we are going to discuss exactly that we are going to explore the psychology behind all of this and so much more be prepared to go deep maybe shed a few tears because today i really want us to all leave feeling in touch with at least one emotion we've been suppressing just one that's all i want at the end of the day so without further ado let's get into it So, we need to talk about this first. We need to talk about what being detached from our emotions actually looks like.
I was literally, I was about to say, what does it feel like?
But, you know, that's the actual problem we're dealing with.
What does it look like?
Not being able to feel your feelings essentially means you've put up some kind of wall between you and the actual feeling.
So it's not necessarily the absence of any emotion at all.
You are not broken.
The emotions are still there, it's just that when an emotion comes up, you might feel it for just a second, perhaps you notice it and then you start over -analyzing or you get freaked out that it's going to come out too large and too loud.
So you distract yourself or minimize or adopt any number of coping strategies.
After long enough you can no longer name what the sensation or emotion even is and in some extreme cases you might also take direct action to completely avoid the trigger.
You know if someone has hurt you or broken your heart you would perhaps consider and tell yourself well they don't even exist anymore and I'm never gonna think about them again.
Meaning that a lot of the you know deep grief or betrayal or the emotions that you should be working through because of that experience remain unhealed, remain untouched.
Maybe you're really struggling because you got like a terrible grade on a uni assignment and you're such a perfectionist and this is just like the most awful thing.
You might try and manage that and not feel the feeling by completely disengaging with your studies all together or completely ignoring any upcoming assignments because you don't even want to give the illusion of trying.
So this is known as avoidance and it's often a precursor to not feeling your feelings, not even putting yourself in the circumstances or the situations in which that might even be possible.
So when you feel out of touch with your feelings, when you're experiencing numbness, maybe a delayed emotional response, so something bad happens, you don't really think about it until a month down the line.
When you are avoiding emotional situations, when you're experiencing apathy, when you know you feel like yes you may not have been sad for a while, but you also haven't been happy, there is a word for this.
It's called emotional blunting or in medicine reduced effect display.
The best description I've heard of that describes what emotional blunting really is it actually came from a patient involved in a case study on this experience.
This patient was experiencing intense emotional numbing and blunting and she said, often what this makes me feel like is I feel invisible, I feel like I'm a ghost, I watch my family engaging with each other but there is an invisible barrier that keeps me from joining them.
This was what another individual had to say in a similar article.
The world around me often seems incredibly superficial, like I am simply going through the motions and can't connect to my environment.
If I was to reach out and touch that wall, or reach out and swim in the ocean, I wouldn't be able to feel it entirely.
So that is what happens when you cannot feel your feelings.
things, you just feel like both of these descriptions from two different patients, two different clients talk about something between them and the real world, something that has been put there a long time ago or because of a situation that they didn't feel like they can control.
So let's talk about the reasons why we may get to a place of being unable to connect with our emotions.
The first one that is very present is being stuck in survival mode or experiencing chronic stress now you may hear that and think I'm not chronically stressed.
I'm gonna skip this section.
I'm fine. I'm not burnt out.
I'm fine. You might not even realize that you are because recent research suggests that around seven out of ten of us, seven out of ten of the people listening are chronically stressed.
I'm gonna say that again, 70%.
When I heard that, and actually I heard it in Mel Robbins' new book, I was shocked, but the more I thought about it, I wasn't surprised.
Our brains were designed for a very different world than the one we currently live in.
We were really designed for a slower, less stimulating, less intense lifestyle.
And nowadays, is when we are constantly being debited with information, with a constant to -do list, productivity guilt, and then let's add on financial instability, uncertainty about the future, and oh no, you're in your 20s, so you need to have it all figured out right now.
That sounds exhausting because it is, and it takes a lot of mental resources to ensure that we don't just collapse in on ourselves like a dying star.
Something has to give in those situations.
It takes a lot of brainpower and willpower to keep up with that much mental activity.
And sometimes our brain thinks, well, if we can just dull our emotions for a little bit, if we can shut down our emotional processing systems, well, amazing, that's great.
That's one less thing to worry about while we get out of survival mode.
Obviously, that's not sustainable.
The reason many people end up in this state even after the stress has passed is because when they do allow themselves to feel their emotions, they are so intense after so many months or years of not feeling them that we kind of forget what it means to truly feel.
And it's yeah, the best what I can say is it's intense.
And so we fall into a bad cycle of feeling safer in our detached state because we are out of practice.
We are out of practice with feeling.
And so it's easier to revert to the other extreme of nothingness, because, you know, the whole system is now become dysregulated where the presence of even a slight emotion feels so profound after lack of exposure.
So I just said this one key word here, dysregulated.
Again, your emotional processing systems are still there.
It's not like someone has gone into your brain and scooped out a part of your cortex and been like, ooh, now you can't feel anything anymore, its dysregulation of a system that is still present and active.
So why has this dysregulation occurred other than chronic stress?
Well maybe it won't come as a surprise that it does begin way back in childhood for many of us.
Not all of us, but I think the majority of you can relate to the following series of events.
So as children, when we were angry, frustrated, trying to be heard, trying to get our point across, crying out of pain or sadness or exclusion, we were often shut down, either in subliminal or very obvious ways.
We were hushed, we were scolded, we were yelled at, even punished.
I remember one time, I think I must have been like 6 years old and I don't know we were like on the playground, something, someone like pushed me.
I was like feeling excluded.
We were like playing some game and everyone kept running away from me.
And I was really, really sad about it.
And I felt so lonely and I went up to a teacher and I'm sure I was annoying her, like I'm sure, I'm sure I was annoying her.
But I was crying to her being like, no one wants to play with me.
Like no one wants to be my friend.
And she was like, ah, get over it.
Like just go away and get over it.
Like life is unfair.
And that's a distinct part of my memory, and those reactions, the reactions we have of parents, teachers, adults in our lives, is one of the primary ways we learn what is and isn't appropriate when it comes to our emotional reactions.
Unfortunately, we often end up learning that big emotions are unacceptable and may even result in an uncomfortable outcome or you know a bad outcome for us.
From those repeated experiences because if it happened once I'm sure it happened again and again, we actually begin to deny those emotions ourselves and over time that act of suppressing our feelings becomes an unconscious automatic process.
We don't need someone else to do it for us and eventually you don't even realize that you're doing it.
Let me give you some of those unconscious ways we still revert to to suppress our emotions that you might not even realize you're doing.
The first one and I think this is massive major huge in our 20s abusing alcohol to dampen our anxiety, dampen our insecurity, our fear or our stress.
This one is I think the most popular for people in their 20s, because drinking is so socially acceptable but alcohol is also, you know I'm gonna say this and I don't want to be misconstrued.
Alcohol is a fantastic way to not feel your emotions and it's a fantastic way in the moment to feel less stressed and to feel a little bit happier and to have that buzz in the moment.
Afterwards you begin to associate those happy momentary feelings with the alcohol and you start pursuing the buzz over and over again meaning that obviously alcohol takes such a toll on your brain, such a toll on your body, but also you have this huge catalog of memories and experiences that just go untouched and unprocessed, but don't go away.
So alcohol is one of the ways that we manage not feeling our feelings.
The other one is overworking.
You know, you feel a negative feeling come up, you immediately start working, you start working late, you commit to more and more things.
That feels satisfying in many ways and is you know well again socially acceptable in today's hustle culture.
Does it mean you process your emotions?
No it doesn't, it's just a distraction.
This next one is also one that probably a lot of you can relate to, especially during this generation and it's escapism through TV shows or social media.
I was having a conversation with someone recently where well we were talking about death and we were talking about grief.
And as it was getting rather heavy, we were both sharing, you know, we were both bonding.
She picked up her phone, and she started like aimlessly scrolling and like playing Tiktoks out loud.
And I was like, it wasn't rude.
I was just like, oh, I'm so sorry, you know?
Let's stop talking about this, like if you wanna talk about something else, I totally get it.
And she like looked up from her phone and she was like really surprised, and she was like, pardon?
And I was like, Oh, you know, like, I just, I didn't wanna be weird about it, but I was like, oh, you know, you're on your phone, and you probably don't want to talk about it.
And she looked at her phone and she was like, I honestly had no idea I was even doing that.
She was like, I had no idea I was even on my phone.
And she was still like kind of semi engaging in the conversation, but at the same time, she was like scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
And I was like, we both like were sitting there being like, wow, wow, that's just like a complete, like the presence of social media is just like dulled your emotional response, and in some ways, perhaps you're leaning on that in many situations without even realizing.
Our phones are like an emotional shield because they can pull us in with all their dopamine offerings and make us feel great and distracted in the moment, but disconnected in the long run.
Finally, one of the ways that we avoid feeling our feelings my personal favorite overintellectualizing, Over -intellectualizing every emotion and rationalizing it to the ninth degree so that we never have to feel it.
So, let me explain the psychology behind why we do this.
Psychologically intellectualizing is linked to something called cognitive avoidance where our brain is essentially trying to bypass distressing emotions by shifting focus to logic and reason, creating that kind of sense of detachment because our emotions are not sensations.
They're not things that are happening to us.
Their ideas. Their abstract concepts.
I'll give you some examples of this, um, going through like a big breakup or your first heartbreak and instead of grieving it, you might be obsessing over the psychology of attachment styles.
You might be over analyzing the entire history of your relationship, rationalizing exactly exactly why it wasn't meant to be and being quite scientific and dissecting every little moment that you had together.
You may also find that you overthink any kind of emotion that you're experiencing by saying why do I feel this way, what's the psychological explanation, what's the science, what's the new biology, when is it gonna go away, what's the timeline, instead of just saying this is uncomfortable, who cares why it's happening, I'll get through it.
I'll say it again. I am very guilty of this.
In fact I think my podcast is a reflection and is evidence of how guilty I am of this because I really did start the psychology of your twenties to break down the emotions I was experiencing in a rational logical way.
I was over intellectualizing them and I've definitely gotten better but I do find it's quite an interesting thing that often people who are over thinkers and who feel really big emotions really lean into intellectual resources or research or articles or fact or science as a kind of emotional crutch so they don't actually have to feel the thing so intensely.
And by doing this, what's actually happening is that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning, is dominating over our limbic system, which processes emotion, basically dulling our emotional response and providing temporary release from emotional pain.
Let's quickly talk about some other reasons for this detachment.
Trauma is one of them.
The emotions of the past are scary and terrifying and big.
And sometimes we are afraid that if we open that door, you may not be able to close it ever again.
Especially since we are not taught, really in any capacity in school, in life, how to handle big, uncomfortable emotions.
We can also experience emotional numbness because of our current environment or context.
Maybe it's a particularly stressful period at work, at school, you're experiencing grief, heartbreak.
Even when a situation is dangerous, people often emotionally shut down.
That's why you see a lot of people experiencing long -term shock, even amnesia during war, during natural disasters.
our brain is like we cannot handle this if we were to feel this all at once we would surely break so to survive physically and mentally let's just shut this off for a little bit finally the reason you might be experiencing emotional blunting is because of certain medications that also can create this sensation one of them being antidepressants now this is not to fear among or scare you especially if you are on any kind of antidepressant or considering it.
I'm currently on 20 mg of Lexapro a day and we have a complicated relationship but overall my Lexapro has helped me tremendously.
But I have however noticed that whilst it makes those hard distressing emotions less sharp and painful and biting, it does also make the good emotions feel a little bit less fulfilling.
like I remember being in Paris last year and being like what how I've never been to Paris before and this is beautiful and there's the Eiffel Tower and I was like I'm trying to get there I'm trying to get there like maybe I should be more excited and I just couldn't get to the point of excitement that I knew maybe three years before I could have gone to it also means I don't get to the levels of depression I could have gotten to so a win is a win but for some people they do find this quite difficult.
So what exactly are the consequences of not being able to feel our feelings?
The thing is, and I am gonna sound like a broken record, but our emotions haven't disappeared, we just aren't listening to them.
All the systems that make emotions possible are still there.
It's still firing as usual.
We have just wrapped them up in bubble wrap and layers of tape and said, okay, all fixed.
You know, it's it's better this way, we're just gonna leave it as it is.
But if you suppress something for too long, have a guess what's on the other side.
It's a huge eruption, it's like a volcano. Perhaps we would even experience what we would classify as an emotional or mental breakdown, where one day there's that final straw, that final thing that cracks you or your defenses slip or something so intense happens you can't cope, and again all the stuff that you have pushed behind the wall comes flooding in.
We do not want to get to that point, not just because it's paralyzing, but also because when that happens it doesn't matter what you're doing, who you are, where you are, your whole world stops.
It's like that quote you know, take a break before your mental health chooses when to take one for you.
That's exactly what I'm describing here.
Also, you know you're alive you're human this is part of the experience is to feel and feel very very deeply.
I think life is meaningless without that so I want that for you even if it's scary.
I really do I want you to have a full rainbow of human emotional experiences.
So what exactly should we be doing to slowly get back to while emotions and feel them deeply and accurately.
I'm so glad you asked.
Thanks for asking. Stay with us.
We're going to talk about it very, very soon.
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can't wait to sunbathe on the private island and the kids will be fine.
Girl, they're good.
Exactly. While they hang in the kid's club with Mickey Mouse, we can do our thing and do it well.
All day. Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play.
I think we need to begin this section by myth busting what feeling our emotions is and is not because if you haven't done it for a while, I think there can be a lot of hidden misconceptions options that aren't particularly useful about the truth around emotional expression and emotional connection.
Feeling your feelings, it is not being a slave to your emotions, it is not being excessively emotional in a way you cannot control, it is not a sign that you are weak or too sensitive, it is not a reflection of your strength or worth as a person.
Feeling your feelings does not mean the end of peace and serenity.
That is what your brain is trying to convince you but we have to ignore it.
Emotions do not equal unbridled chaos.
Here's what feeling your feelings actually means.
It means you are more connected to others.
The love that you may feel for people is deeper and you can fall deeper into your relationships with them.
It means more joy and moments of real deep contentment.
It means you can make beautiful art, write beautiful things, create beautiful things.
Feeling your feelings also means more energy and focus in general because you're not constantly using your finite cognitive resources to force something down that doesn't need to be suppressed.
It also means you get to be more human.
That's the biggest selling point for me.
In my mind I think accepting this and being like okay I'm prepared to feel my feelings is like the moment you're in these huge waves and this huge storm out at sea and you've been fighting and fighting and fighting and you are so tired from fighting and being rocked back and forth and you slip under the water and you think you failed only to realize like oh my god I can breathe under here this whole time I could breathe under here and wow look at all this cool stuff like it's beautiful under the water.
That's really the metaphor that I love for this.
So enough of that no more metaphors here are my actual tips for feeling your feelings.
Firstly it goes without saying go to a mental health professional if this is really really intense because they are going to dive into this for you in ways you cannot imagine and just give you so many fantastic individualized personalized recommendations and help and assistance.
So that's your first step.
But if you just want some more daily practices that you can do at the same time, well, I think firstly you've got to stop telling yourself that you're just an emotionless person.
There is literally no good that can come from that.
No one is born that way.
Seriously, tell me about a child who was born and didn't cry and didn't giggle or get fussy.
Emotional reactions are hardwired into us.
It's just that you maybe can't recall a time when your emotions were permitted.
And considering many of us can't remember anything before the age of three because of something called infantile amnesia, if you started if your emotions started being hushed and put down and scolded around that age or even earlier, of course you cannot remember a time when you had a serious connection to your emotions because by the time you were making conscious memories the damage was already done so when you hear yourself saying i'm just i don't feel my feelings that deeply i'm just i'm not that sensitive i'm quite cold i'm just a cold cold person i need you to ask yourself how did you come
by this realization who told you about that about yourself like who made you believe that and and also the fact that you're listening to this episode my friend." That shows that you know it isn't true.
Because you and your emotions obviously have a more nuanced and complicated relationship than that.
So after acknowledging, yes you are an emotional feeling, deeply feeling person, and that's okay, we need to get back in touch with the physicality of our emotions.
Often, and this is according to research at Columbia University, which I love to quote, the first way we feel our emotions is physically.
Think about when you were a child.
Before you were taught to suppress these parts of you, you felt your emotions all over in your body, in your nerves, in your fingers, in your face, before you ever had a word for it.
And there is this amazing study from the University of Alabama that talks about how most of us can name a physical sensation better than an emotion.
So we need to start there.
Try first by leaning into the embodied sensation of an emotion by asking yourself where in your body on your body this emotion tends to make itself known.
There is an amazing resource that I personally love called the emotion sensation wheel and it was created by someone called Lindsay Brahman, personally like I cannot recommend it enough.
Basically, if you're feeling tense, if your hands are numb, your foot is tapping, your lip is cold, you're hot, you're shivering, you feel electric, whatever it is.
Where you feel something in your body, which is often what we noticed first, you can trace that back to a feeling.
So this is actually called a somatic check in and it's really an incredibly important tool.
Honestly, when an emotion comes up, when you feel it in your body, give it a name but also treat it like a game.
Treat it like a challenge to collect your emotions, to feel as many of them as possible, like Strava.
I know this sounds strange to talk about like a running app that tracks your miles in an episode about emotion but sometimes when I'm like, oh, I shouldn't be feeling that, there's a bad feeling.
I want to avoid this, I think no, no it's like I've got some cool like stamp book or like a passport where I'm trying to collect all the emotions.
and it's like, this is a game, I'm learning here.
I'm collecting experiences that remind me that I'm human and that I'm alive and that my environment impacts me and that I can reach out and touch and feel everything.
And, you know, I am here and I don't know, it's moving and shifting into a place of wonder, but also having a beginner's mindset about it as well.
If you're not at that stage yet, that's totally okay.
If you're not at the stage, but you still want to feel something I want you to try a practice called a sematic release I recommend a whole lot of tips of this part on this podcast you know I do two episodes a week there's a whole lot of advice being given but this one has to make my top three of the things I personally use so medic release I'm gonna use the Harvard definition here because I like it the best Tsomatic release allows your body to express deeply painful emotions and experiences by using your body as a medium.
If trauma is stored in the body, that's where it should be targeted.
And sematic by the way, I should say is the Greek word for body.
So yes, essentially it's the release of emotion through the body.
Sematic release could include something I like to call crazy dance.
I love Crazydance. And if I'm feeling like really down or crap or numb, I like put on a song in my headphones and I just like move my body ridiculously, and I mean, like that's the aim of the game for it to look like Crazydance.
The song I'm loving for this right now is, I was like should I make something up?
No, I'm gonna tell you the truth, it's Tambourine by Ave. And I need you to listen to that song and understand why, if you know what it is, as you understand why I'm a bit like, ah, that's a bit of an embarrassing song to say, but I love like early 2000s music for my crazy dancers.
And I just find that anything I'm feeling in my body is so much better represented for me right now through that kind of expression.
For other people, it's stretching, it's yoga, it's a practice movement or pattern of movements that they've made themselves whilst they're breathing to really connect with an emotional state to really flow through the intensity of an emotion.
It's running. It's anything that makes you feel in touch with your body.
You know if your favorite way to avoid feeling your emotions is to over -intellectualize them like me, talk therapy sometimes just isn't useful anymore because it just gives you further opportunities to do that.
This is what I found.
I just don't need to talk about my problems at this stage in my life.
I don't need to dig any deeper into the past, I don't need to talk through it anymore with the therapist like I've done it I've done the work and I'm at a stage where anything a therapist says I've promised you, I've already over thought it at 2am in the morning.
I've already rationalized every single dimension and way of seeing this thing and that's not arrogance.
Like truly these people are a lot smarter than me.
It's just that you know that's how my brain likes to think about things and it puts in a whole lot of time to try and trying to help me avoid feelings by rationalizing them away.
I really wish it wasn't that way but what I found is that the best way to counteract the plateau that I had reached in my therapy journey was to start actually getting into where my emotions felt physically and providing or pushing for emotional release and catharsis through exercise, through dance, through movement, swaying with an emotion it really really helps.
My third strategy for feeling your feelings is one that I think will hopefully stop you from being afraid of what that would mean and it's called the 90 second rule.
So this was created by the neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bocc -Taylor.
She's pretty well known for having a major stroke when she was in her 30s and she was already a neuroscientist and basically using herself as like a test subject to understand the brain better through her experience.
She also did some pretty amazing research looking at how long our emotions actually last. And she found that most of the time an emotional reaction cannot last longer than 90 seconds unless we keep retrigging it with our thoughts.
i .e. by overthinking or not letting it go, or not allowing yourself to feel it properly so it keeps returning again and again and again.
But basically what that means is that when an emotion arises for you, set a timer for 90 seconds and just sit with it.
Find a cozy spot, breathe, feel.
It's going to feel scary and like the emotion is gonna take over and then You realize that it won't end suddenly 90 seconds is up and it's passed You cannot be frightened Anxious in the depths of grief sad, whatever it is, you cannot be like that forever Not even continuously for more than a few hours, even if it feels that way, you know according to dr. Jill Not even for more than 90 seconds so because of that it's okay to let yourself feel knowing that this emotion isn't going to consume you because it just has no way of doing that.
Again, make your mission here.
Your mission here right now is to explore every emotion like some great traveler who is able to come back and tell people about what they found and make great art and write about it and tell our stories about it.
This emotion cannot hurt you.
There's a fantastic TED Talk I love called You Are Not At The Mercy Of Your Emotions.
Your Brain Creates Them that I love to watch when I need this reminder as well.
This reminder that you can tap into your emotions and let them give you a rich, sensational, emotional, interpersonal experience without losing control.
My final big tip for getting back in touch with your emotions is to voice memo or film yourself when you are having a particularly intense emotional experience but keep it just for you.
I'm going to explain why that's important and why I love doing it.
When I went through my first major breakup when I was in my like early twenties late teens maybe even I can't even remember at this stage.
Obviously I was devastated.
I was So, so sad and just torn apart and I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat and everything was a mess and I started filming myself in those moments.
I started filming myself, you know, walking around my campus, going on a hike, crying and talking about where I was at in this like journey to get over this person.
It was so raw and it was so real and it was just for me.
That's the important part.
it was just for me that it really just allowed me to be like there's actually this is kind of beautiful.
This is kind of beautiful and I'm really just giving myself permission to feel this with no shame and no blame and I'm watching it back and I'm seeing exactly where this is touching me and exactly where this is impacting me.
I actually still have those videos and I know it sounds really, really bizarre but I think the beginning stages of feeling your feelings is like grabbing onto any glimmer or shimmer or instance of the possibility of an emotion and just grabbing it and letting it take you wherever you, it needs to take you.
Like I think about Tinkerbell in a weird sense and I know that's a weird thing to bring in here but this like flash of light and this like flutteriness of this fairy thing and this small thing and that's your emotions and in In the early stages, if it's sitting with you, if it's passing through, grab it.
Even if it's not an emotion you particularly want to feel, grab it, document it, make it known, let yourself sink deeply into the experience because it is a human one.
And remember, please avoid distracting yourself when this comes up.
Avoid distracting yourself through escapism, through alcohol, through work, through the need to rationalize your emotions through, you know, endlessly, keeping yourself busy.
It is a such a, you know what the reason that we want to do it is because for a while it is such an effective strategy to do that.
That's why you're doing it, because it does actually help.
It helps you right now, it will not help you in the future.
And I see a lot of people the older they get lose more and more of who they are, because For so long they've suppressed their emotions that as they get older it none of it just feels as special anymore, and they just don't really know.
I just feel like they're not really having the depth of experiences and they're not really searching for emotions and sensations the way that people really should be in this life.
So that's not so much a psychological perspective.
It's more of a spiritual value -based perspective or belief -based perspective that I have that any time you try and convince yourself and say, this feels terrible, this feels awful, I shouldn't be feeling this.
Ask yourself, well, if I shouldn't be feeling this, why is this emotion even around then?
Why does this emotion even exist?
Because if it wasn't useful or helpful, if there wasn't some specialness to it, it wouldn't be here, and yet it is, so I'm gonna honor it, I'm gonna feel it.
That's all I have time for in this episode.
I really hope that it helped you.
I hope that this dissection of, you know, this dissection of this experience of emotional blunting and emotional numbness, I don't hope that you can relate to it but I hope that if you can relate to it you got something out of it and you can implement these strategies and that you feel sane.
And that bringing it back to the very first thing I said at the start of this episode, I hope that you're leaving this feeling in touch with just one emotion that you're going to be having today.
Make sure to send this episode to a friend, a family member, a colleague, a partner, whoever who may need to hear it.
If you've made it this far my loyal listeners, I know there's like a group of like 50 of you, 50 to 100 and always make it this far, I want you what's the emoji for today?
What's an emoji that represents feeling your feelings?
Oh I think you should do a crazy dance emoji, whatever you think like crazy dance looks like.
Drop it in comments so I know you've made it this far.
Leave your questions, your episode suggestions down there as well, I love engaging with you in that space because you know it's not like Instagram or TikTok where anyone can jump on board, it's just the listeners of the show so I'll see you down there but until next time please make sure to follow along, give us a five -star review pre -order my book because it comes out in less than a month which is wild and we will talk about that a whole lot more but until next time stay safe, Be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very, very soon.
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