Feel the feels to ease emotional indigestion

In this weeks’ blog post I want to consider our emotional world & the ways that we process our emotions & I want to ask you -

Do you find that you spend your day rushing yourself through your emotions?

You are busy right; you really don’t have time to be getting all emotional about stuff.

• That patronising email, your unhelpful workmate or bullying boss – those work triggers that just have your shoulders rising & your heart racing, but you’ve got to push it down because you are far too busy & well, showing that you’re fuming is just not the done thing.

•  Coming home to dishes in the sink, trash overflowing or just the blank lack of interest in how your day has been – those relationship triggers that make your heart sink with the feeling of just feeling unseen; unheld but you push it away because, well what’s the point, it’s not going to change, no point in getting all wound up into an argument.

• Then the kids are arguing, another tantrum & the banging & shouting has your skin just tingling your so jarred but you’ve just got to blot that out because, well because you need to just get in there & sort it out.

Finally, you fall into bed exhausted - just another draining day & you just need to get your rest so you can steel yourself for whatever tomorrow’s going to bring but body heavy & eyes scratchy with tiredness your mind has got different ideas for the night ahead.

• Suddenly that nonsense at work is back with full force & you’re are running it over again – what they said, how you responded, what you could or should have done differently; how you will handle it differently next time & you feel that sick feeling in your belly that says why don’t I stand up for myself a bit more.

• Right behind it, coming back up with a bubble & churn you revisit that invalidated feeling when you didn’t have that conversation about your relationship because you just didn’t have the courage or energy for the argument that might ensue & the heavy feeling fills your belly as you wonder how it got to be this way. You’re both so tired these days & you yearn for those heady early days & you feel the heaviness spread to your heart.

• Then with a jittery shiver you start thinking about your frustration with the kids, were you a bit sharp or do you let them get away with too much? Burning self-judgement shoots through you, you are not the Mum you thought you would be, you know you should be & you wish you could be.

Your mind is churning - overthinking & anxiety & the gush of cortisol & adrenaline is coursing through your body & you know it’s going to be another sleepless night & you will rise tomorrow, put your big girl pants on & just suck it up all over again because … well, you are too tired & you just don’t have time for all that emotional stuff.

Sound familiar? I know I spent way too long in this mode.

Have you ever thought that all that this late night (or even all day every day lets be honest) regurgitation of the catalogue of outrages, injustices & challenges & frustrations is actually a form of emotional indigestion.

We’ve choked down so much undigested feelings that we need emotional Rennie just to quell the reflux.

Unpicking the daily aggravations just feels too overwhelming – too many angles, not enough time & don’t even mention the energy - so we distract ourselves with social media; a glass of wine, zoning out in front if the TV, an offload with a friend but somehow the churn is still there, swilling about inside & sitting heavy in your chest every time you have a quiet moment to yourself & with your life, & that quiet moment is the moment when you want to sleep.

Sometimes the right message at the right time to help you really notice what’s really going on.

I first thought about my own relationship with my emotions when I was sitting with a parent who was struggling with her child’s behavioural issues.

My gut said her child was feeling big emotions he didn’t know how to name & as we spoke about this, I could tell that the parent didn’t know how to name those emotions either.

It made sense, she had had a difficult childhood & she coped by keeping herself very busy, never pausing to feel because feeling felt like the most dangerous precipice in the world.

As we worked through naming emotions, a technique I'd used with my own child, I felt proud of being able to share a skill but then I realised I had a chasmic feeling myself because I suddenly noticed how many times a day I shook off feelings of anger, frustration, sadness, not even allowing myself space to name them because I couldn’t cope with the tumult they brought on; how often I shoved myself through feelings of inadequacy, inferiority & quaking anxiety denying the feelings were there or brutally blaming or invalidating myself for having them because I had a queue of clients & cases – people who needed me - & I just had to crunch it to get through the day.

My job at that time had a massive big-girl-pants requirement. To be honest I can name it now: emotional bypassing really felt like a prerequisite of the role & I realised emotional indigestion had been afflicting me for years.

I knew I needed something different & wow, retraining in holistic therapies & finding somatic healing has been & continues to be like daily manna from heaven for me.

As I learned about somatic therapies, I learned to locate the emotion in my body; to feel & describe the sensations; to validate & pour love over my emotions allowing them to shift & release. Honestly at times I was like a kid with a new toy. Let it go was no longer just a song from Frozen; it became & is my daily practice. To find all the ways – physically emotionally & energetically - that I can to allow my emotional world to move through me so that feelings & their physical & energetic residues are not held within me.

An explanation from therapist Alex Howard really helped me explore my relationship with emotional digestion at an even deeper level. I noticed that often I was trying to move too fast in my desire to learn, process & shift. When it came to feeling the feels I realised at times I was behaving like I was on a catch up binge-watch rather than allowing myself to process & digest the plot & make sense of what was really going on.

Alex Howard frames this metabolising – processing – of our emotions in terms of digestion & he recommends slowing down & being aware of our processes of emotional digestion as the route to fully digesting our emotional experiences.

That emotional bypassing that brings on our emotional indigestion is like shovelling down fast food without even pausing to chew – of course it’s going to make you queasy.

We may eat healthy, we may practice mindfulness, even mindful eating but too often we really struggle to bring this level of mindfulness to our emotional life.

Do we take time to chew on our emotions, to break them down a bit? All the talking, reflecting journaling we may do is not self-indulgent, it's the mindful chewing of our experience that helps us to prepare ourselves & our emotions for the next stage.

Our period of digestion.

Just we need our stomach juices to break down our food, we need that slow time where we really feel & experience our emotion, where we practice the pause noticing where we are feeling the emotion, describing & validating each emotion & its sensations, allowing each emotion to move within us, absorbing & metabolising it, before we can.

Expel what we don’t need – the toxins & the waste

Absorb what we do need – the nutrition - the lessons, wisdom & the guidance from our experience.

If you want to improve your emotional digestion, learning to

Savour

Digest

Release

Learning to metabolise your emotions the healthy way through somatic & other holistic practices please keep following & look out for new posts as my website unfolds.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx

PS

Apologies to those clients I have had to reschedule or postpone work with its been a bit of a week & I'm aiming to be back on track next week.

PPS

For me this post holds deeper resonance this week as I‘ve had to lean in & practice what I preach diligently & consistently even though I have struggled health wise over the week. Sometimes it’s easy & sometimes even necessary to put some practices on hold when we are unwell e.g. I have had to let go of yoga practice but I found meditation, energetic & somatic practices along with meditation have helped me manage a dental & chest infection combination & the swirl of emotion that surrounds feeling unwell.

I am by no means dismissing pharmaceutical relief – I have needed both antibiotics & pain relief to manage my physical symptoms.

However, I also found 10 minutes per day of Vipassana meditation allowed me to focus on my breathing, exploring where I could feel my breathe & noticing that although I could feel chest congestion, I could manage my coughing more easily through breathwork. This along with creating a calming space of mindfulness helped calm my mind, allowing emotions to flow in a healthy manner – counterbalancing how my body felt.

Along with Vipassana meditation I used a tool called the emotions spiral that my own coach Samantha Jane taught me. You can learn more on how to use the emotions spiral at the moment in the current 12 Days of You series at https://sjtherapies.com/empowerherpreneur.  

The emotions spiral notes that our emotions rise from the deepest feelings of despair to the highest emotions of unconditional love. Sometimes we try to push ourselves to bright & ‘positive’ emotions at times when we are struggling but this is a form of the emotional bypassing I mention in my blog post.

This week I have sat with feelings of fear, overwhelm, pessimism & at times self-pity as I felt quite unwell. I have not tried to deny any of my feelings, instead witnessing & validating each one, noticing where I feel it & allowing myself to digest each time - exploring its origin, the ways that one emotion attaches to others. This needs a feeling a little higher on the emotions spiral – curiosity. Reaching for an emotion just a little higher on the emotions spiral rather than trying to jolly ourselves or dismiss ourselves for our feelings allows us to recruit other emotions a little higher such as self-compassion, creating space for hopefulness & gratitude – for me gratitude that I have both medication & holistic therapies to help me manage my health.