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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 223, “How to deal with difficult emotions.” Before we get started, I wanna take a moment and center into an intention with you, if  you’re willing and you wanna tune into perhaps something that you’re feeling in this moment, that feels important for you, or a question or a longing or some type of nudge perhaps you’re working with… And as you do that, I’m gonna be setting the intention for the Empowered Relationship Podcast. And again, if some of this resonates – wonderful. I encourage you to incorporate it and contemplate it, and if it doesn’t, just feel free to let it pass by you.

These conversations, the tips, tools, resources, research that is offered to you on this show is all in service of supporting you in developing long-lasting, healthy, fulfilling, authentic relationship. We discuss the journey of long-term intimacy, and that sometimes we will feel challenged, threatened, insecure, and it’s really how we deal with that, perhaps even a conflict with our significant other… And even just widening the definition of conflict…

Just the other day I was talking with my husband and I was like “That sounds like a conflict”, and he was like “I don’t agree with that.” And really, it’s just two opposing needs or competing needs, or two different perspectives. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be adversarial, or an argument, but it could just be that it feels challenging because there’s differences at play.

So as we navigate long-term intimacy, knowing there might be challenges or bumps in the road, that it’s actually how we deal with that that actually determines the level of our success and deeper levels of intimacy. And if you’ve been listening to the show for any length of time, you’ve also heard me say and really speak to that when we turn towards this work, we have an opportunity to grow ourselves, and we simultaneously grow the capacity for our intimate relationship. And my hope for you is that you feel more supported, perhaps even more prepared and confident as you negotiate some of these challenges in relationship, as you develop yourself and develop your relationship.

If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com and there at the top you’ll see a navigation bar, and there’s a tab that says Podcast. If you click on that, you’ll have access to all the episodes and the show notes. So just click on the graphic that you’re interested in; the most recent episodes are at the top. Again, today’s episode is 223, “How to deal with difficult emotions.”

With today’s topic, how to deal with difficult emotions, I realize up until now I have provided a lot of different support and resources around this topic in general. I’ve also given more specific support as it relates to how to deal with anger, anxiety, insecurity, and many aspects of the unique experience of what we might be challenged with in relationship. And largely, this is what we’re up against when we feel difficulty, challenge, threat in relationship, is how to work with our feelings and our emotions, that might surprise us as we are cultivating long-term intimacy.

So in saying that, I’m gonna put a few links to previous podcast episodes, and I encourage you to check those out. I’ll be posting about emotional intelligence, and those are recent episodes; I’ll also be posting around how we tend to avoid pain and the trouble that that causes us in relationship. Also, the stories we tell, and how that influences our emotional experience… And I just also wanna encourage you to revisit some of the older podcast episodes if you have missed them, as I really try to do my best to offer a lot of context and tips and research and information related to each of those topics.

Having said that, I feel like I have really addressed emotions in general, in  a larger conversation, and then going into more specific emotions, but I don’t think I’ve actually offered a real nuts and bolts around how to deal with difficult emotions… And then I was really inspired with a book that I have read recently by Glennon Doyle, Untamed. So I’m gonna be reading a couple of excerpts from her book.

I also think that this is really important in the time that we’re in, and that many parts of the world are still really confronted, as we are in the U.S. in different states, with the Covid-19 and the pandemic… And what I’ve been hearing a lot of people speak to is how this time of reducing the amount of social interactions and actual activities because of the limitations has really offered an opportunity to see or notice tendencies in ourselves. And I’ve heard many people mention “I’ve just been watching and I’ve been learning that there’s certain things that I do, or why might I be doing that, or what am I feeling?” and there’s just a little more space to turn towards that inner experience.

And the other reason why I felt inspired to bring this topic to you today is I hear many clients lament and express fear and apprehension around how to deal with difficult emotions. It’s almost this plea of like “How? How do I do this?” and it’s so foreign. And this is also what I have found; you guys hear me talk periodically about shifting criticism in relationship, because that’s often a major complaint and a major contributor to relationship breakup and divorce… And that we often get stuck in these critical, defensive loops that are so damaging to the bond. And oftentimes – this is just one aspect – someone who might resort to criticism is more comfortable being in the intellect; and that can come from many reasons of how we might have been raised, and the values there, or perhaps the inability or lack of capacity of turning towards the emotional attunement. So we just learn that the emotional space isn’t that safe, or isn’t that welcomed. So we go to the intellect. And look, intellectually, there are many benefits to being intelligent, being savvy, being critical, and being able to discern. A lot of times people use this skill for their career, and have made many advancements with this ability. But when we talk about relationship, most of the time unsolicited  (even constructive) feedback feels like criticism.

And where this gets really problematic is oftentimes when we are expressing a criticism to our significant other, most of the time it has to do with what we want, or what we need. And when we’re not aware of that, our partner can be confused and throw off, and then more problematically is distracted by the criticism and starts responding to the critical statement, rather than what we need. And that’s the thing that matters more. I’m not gonna go into great depth about that, but I’m just recognizing that a lot of times when clients reach out, this emotional space is scary to turn towards, and oftentimes it’s unfamiliar just because of the lived experience. We haven’t had a lot of practice at turning towards our emotions, and we don’t necessarily feel that that’s a productive or beneficial or safe thing to do. Or why would we do that, what’s the value in that…? So again, if you’ve been listening to this show for any length of time, you’ve heard me combat some of these myths in the episodes, in some of the philosophy that I bring to you… But I’m wanting to just offer a little more concrete guidance around this topic today.

What’s the difference between feelings and emotions? Oftentimes these words are used interchangeably. Now, feelings are what we experience consciously. This can even be the pain that we’re feeling in our body, but that’s not necessarily an emotion. Or we could be reacting and have a ton of feelings that we’re aware of, but we might not actually be in touch with the deeper emotion. So the deep emotion can be unconscious or subconscious for any length of time. It takes some level of understanding and exploring the depths to actually get in touch with these emotions.

And another thing that could be helpful – and this is where we’ve talked about beliefs, or the story we tell, or the narrative, or our fears, if you will, will often indicate to us the deeper emotions. So we can use feelings, we can use fears, our stories, our associations to kind of unpack and get closer to what’s the deeper emotion.

And this does take a level of inquiry and a level of exploration, and this is where a support person can be really helpful in offering a really safe space to go there… Because again, if we haven’t had the safe space to turn towards this emotion and it feels really unfamiliar, and again, we don’t have any maybe positive association of feeling our emotions or feeling our feelings, then we are stuck, and we sometimes feel terrified… And that’s one of the reasons why I felt really inspired to bring to you a couple excerpts out of Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed. This book is short, in memoir form, of her life and her process.

Her story is that she used alcohol and food — she talks about being an alcoholic and having an eating disorder. So we all have different forms of numbing, repressing, denying, self-deception, busy-ness. Again, these are all tactics of avoiding difficult emotions… But if we can start to recognize that they don’t go away, oftentimes the patterns amplify and become increasingly difficult to maintain. So this emotion can’t just resolve itself by being kicked to the curb.

I have some clients I’ve been working with recently, and the husband – gosh, his bravery and his courage to do some of this work is profound… And his tendencies are strong. And he talks literally about wanting to kill the part of him that has this emotion. And for him, this emotion feels uncomfortable.

He talks about feeling afraid that it’s gonna be a turn-off, or unlovable, or that he just feels off and not himself… And it’s (again) just really difficult to turn towards. Again, I’m not making light of this at all, I’m just talking about what happens when we don’t turn towards our emotion. It typically will run a course that continues to get more problematic.

This brings us to the first step, of dealing with difficult emotions. And that is to listen. With this, there’s a willingness to turn towards. If we have feelings that we’re aware of, and we really do listen, we can access some of our deeper need, our attachment needs, our emotion… And when we don’t listen, we possibly are denying, repressing, and can cut off certain parts of ourselves, and then that tends to run its course. We see the problematic effects of that in relationship.

So the couple that I was just mentioning – he has a difficult time expressing to his wife what he wants and needs emotionally. His vulnerability. And when he cuts off that part of him, it doesn’t go away; so when he feels trust, or he feels threatened, or he feels some level of upset, he doesn’t actually have a way to deal with it, so then it becomes this big, almost fight or flight or freeze kind of outburst, because he’s been asking it to be held; it’s kind of like the dam breaks when he gets to a place where he can’t contain it.

We all are wired this way, that when we get activated to a certain level, our automatic nervous system kicks in, and that’s where the fight, flight or freeze response happens, and that’s why there’s a real strong suggestion that when we’re really activated or triggered — the last episode, David Richo was talking to us about using the triggers. I loved that phrase of “the trailhead.” It’s the beginning, it’s the sign, it’s the signal that alerts us to “There’s something really beautiful here”, if we take the opportunity to go down that road.

So with this couple, he goes into that fight or flight, he’s triggered or activated, but all the more executive functioning and our higher-level capacities are offline. So when he uses his willpower — he’s incredibly bright, so he’s able to function at an incredibly high level… And it’s very steeped in his intellect and his willpower and his discernment, and those are all beautiful choices. But again, if he’s neglecting his emotional part, he can’t control that. None of us can. When we feel that emotional override, that’s so primal. And so this is where people talk about “I saw red”, or “I said and did things that I can’t even believe that I said and did”, or “I didn’t even know I had the capacity for that.” Or “That’s not me.” And this is where relationship, good and bad, will bring us to places that perhaps we were unfamiliar with, or didn’t really have connection with.

My own story, if you’ve listened to some of the earlier — there’s an episode where I talk about what got me into doing this work, and there’s also an episode much later (and I’ll post those on today’s show notes, if you wanna take a listen), where I talked about grief, and  my own personal contact with my own fear of abandonment… And I was not aware of it at all, until relationship triggered me to such an extent, and I was willing to turn towards it. Then I got to excavate and unpack that and access those deeper layers, that were fueling all of my behavior, but it was unconscious.

So I kept repeating patterns that I wasn’t ultimately happy with, but it was because I was cutting off a certain part of myself.  So the work that I’m doing with this couple is trying to safely, in a paced way – because I think it can be too overwhelming sometimes to turn towards this, but… In a way that he can start to incorporate and start to almost hold the hand of him, the part of him that’s vulnerable, the part of him that feels really young – and that’s specific to his background – and start to almost be with that part in a different. Instead of wanting to kill it, to kind of hold the hand of that part.

Okay, so step one – listen. Be willing to turn towards. And part of my hope too is that in these episodes I’m offering stories and examples and research and theory to give you a different paradigm. A lot of times this is different than what we were taught growing up, different than our lived experience, I also talk about culture… And if you’re in a more industrial culture, and mainstream is about productivity, about success, about achievement, independence – that isn’t in support of the feelings often. It’s “How do we set that aside and how do we perform?” And that’s great, I don’t have any argument against that; it’s just when we look at the whole spectrum of living and particularly relationship, we cannot deny our emotions.

We can actually, again, befriend them, and they can be valuable, and they can benefit us to have a more fulfilling, long-lasting, successful and really authentic relationship… Because it’s not about doing and saying the right thing, it’s about generating and really being in connection. When we look at real relationship, it’s “I’m allowing myself to be fully seen, and I’m really seeing my partner”, as again, we develop the capacity to do that.

The other thing that I encourage people to consider if this is new in the practice of dealing with difficult emotions more intentionally and more mindfully, is that feeling have a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s a lifecycle, if you will, and a lot of times people are afraid that if I turn towards my emotions, they’re gonna start to overtake me. They’re gonna override my everything, and they’re gonna start running my life. And again, when we’re in that reactive state, it can feel strong and we can, again, do and say things that we’re not proud of, or we wouldn’t have said had we been a little more regulated. So that’s, again, where we want to take at least 20 minutes to remove ourselves from the interaction, or whatever is triggering us, and really focus on regulating and calming, so that we can get all of our systems  online, and then we can really start looking at “What’s going on here? What am I feeling? What is that telling me?” and I’m gonna talk about that in a moment.

But just on the first level here, of being willing to turn towards and listening to our feelings and perhaps our emotions, is that there’s an impermanence here. Almost a temporary being willing to tolerate some of this discomfort, again, in the interest of growth. And so if we contain and hold our mindfulness and our power and being empowered, we can really tap out at any time. We could say “Okay, I’m gonna turn towards my emotion and I’m gonna listen…” You can decide “I’m gonna do this for 20 minutes, I’m gonna do this for an hour, or 10 minutes”, and you can make an agreement that if at any time I get overwhelmed or I feel like I’m losing my sense of ground, I can turn away. Again, like I mentioned with my clients, I’m wanting this to feel safe for him. And as I said, in all honesty, this can be terrifying.

I have a couple that I’ve worked with for a long time actually, and the wife in the couple – she has felt way more comfortable with anger, and her family was really direct and really forthcoming about their opinions and their thoughts, and that’s how they resolved challenges – more through intellect and through content. And that worked for her; it’s what she’s familiar with. Well, what we’ve been exploring is that she’s actually more sensitive than perhaps she was even aware of, and that she feels things more deeply… And that one of the strategies of dealing with that sensitivity has been to be a little bit more removed, from even here husband and anything that’s really emotional and tender. She just has this philosophy that people deal with their own stuff, and I deal with my own, and I do that in private… And look, I get that there’s value in that, but when it’s so removed, it’s difficult to have that level of depth and intimacy, emotional attunement, and the soothing and the comforting that can come from that intimacy and that bond.

So if she’s been turning towards some of this, it has been so painful. And unfortunately, they have a level of history that makes this that much more complicated, because as she starts opening up to her feelings and her emotions, she’s recognizing how unhappy and how painful these dynamics have been… Where before, with the intellectual hat, she could rationalize and she could explain, and defend, and could make sense of it in those terms. But it didn’t really allow for this transformation.

Oftentimes we need to access that vulnerable emotion, the underbelly, to be in contact in this real heart-to-heart way. Again, not to burden anyone, or to be burdened. We’re not talking about feeling responsible for someone else, but we’re talking about being in real emotional contact, because that’s where we can feel that bond and that intimacy.

Okay, number one is to listen. It’s almost as if your friend were calling you up and saying “I really have something important I wanna talk to you about”, and it’s making that decision of “Do I have time? Do I have the emotional bandwidth, and can I turn towards?” Perhaps the response is “Yes, I am available. I’m listening.” So it’s almost as if we are doing that with ourselves.

Number two – this is the classic “Feel it to heal it.” This is the willingness to feel, to experience, and this is really hard, myself included; I talk this, I walk this, and I still don’t wanna do it often. It’s the last thing I wanna do sometimes, because it’s so uncomfortable. Why would we wanna feel and turn towards something that’s painful? And yet, the process is we have to feel it to heal it. And there’s a being with it. As I was saying with my client, almost holding the hand of that emotion or that feeling.

In previous podcasts I have mentioned mindfulness… And mindfulness has been applied to many different groups of people and types of concerns or issues, one of which is chronic pain and chronic illness. These are people that can’t, as much as they’ve tried to avoid chronic pain or chronic illness, they can’t. It’s with them, hence it being chronic. So what the research tells us, and the practice of using mindfulness, is (again) you become present with it, and it ironically lessens the pain.

There’s two podcasts that I published about avoiding pain, and I referenced a TED talk, and I’ll make sure to put that on today’s show notes, because he’s talking about mindfulness, and this very thing around how we anticipate pain or we relive pain from the past, and how being really mindful, and the experience of being mindful – how that changes our experience.

An excerpt from Glennon Doyle out of the book Untamed. It’s the chapter Feel:

“Key one, feel it all. On my sixth day of sobriety I went to my fifth recovery meeting. I sat in a cold, plastic seat, trembling, trying to keep the coffee from spilling out of my paper cup and my feelings from spilling out of my skin. For 16 years I had made damn sure that nothing touched me, and suddenly everything in the world was touching me. I was an exposed nerve. Everything hurt. I was embarrassed to tell anyone how much I hurt, but I decided to try to explain it to the people in that circle. They were the first people I trusted with all of me, because they were the first people  I had heard tell the whole truth. They had shown me their insides, so I showed them mine.

I said something like “I’m Glennon. I’ve been sober for six days. I feel awful. I think this awfulness is why I started drinking in the first place. I’m starting to worry that what was wrong with me wasn’t the booze, it was underneath it. It was me. It doesn’t seem like being alive is as hard for other people as it is for me. It just feels like there’s some kind of secret to life I don’t know; like I’m doing it all wrong. Thanks for listening.”

After the meeting ended, a woman walked over and sat down next to me. She said “Thanks for sharing. I relate. I just wanted to tell you something that somebody told me in the beginning. It’s okay to feel all of the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again. You’re not doing life wrong, you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is really hard; feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

I did not know before the woman told me that are feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything.  I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought happy was for feeling, and that pain was for fixing, and numbing, and deflecting, and hiding, and ignoring. I thought when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness, and I thought I was supposed  to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.

That day I began returning to myself, fearful and trembling, pregnant and six days sober, in a church basement with shitty floors and lights and terrible coffee, when a kind woman revealed to me that being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything. From that day forward I began to practice feeling it all. I began to insist upon my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time and the energy for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, and a little less present.

In the past 18 years I’ve learned two things about pain. First, I can feel everything and survive. What I thought would kill me didn’t. Every time I said to myself “I can’t take this anymore”, I was wrong. The truth was I could, and did take it all, and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of  other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain, but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn. What I learned was that I’m like a burning bush. The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn, and burn, and live. I can live on fire. I’m fire-proof.

Second, I can use pain to become. I’m here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself, again and again, forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.

Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain. That the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts, it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy and numb. Numbness keeps us from becoming. This is why every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain – don’t avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become, and you are here to become. Like Buddha, who had to live his life of comfort to experience all kinds of human suffering before finding enlightenment. Like Moses, who wandered 40 years in the dessert before seeing the promised land. Like Westley from The Princess Bride, who said “Life is pain, Highness.” Anyone who says differently is selling something. Like Jesus, who walked straight towards his own crucifixion. First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising. All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our own resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first. There is no glory except straight through your story.

Pain is not tragic, pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain, and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid – missing my own evolution, because I’m too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming. Because what scares me a hell of  a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing at all.

These days, when pain comes, there are two of me. There is the me that is miserable and afraid, and there is the me that is curious and excited. That second one is not a masochist. She’s wise. She remembers that even though I can’t know what will come next in my life, I always know what comes next in the process. I know that when the pain and the waiting are here, the  rising is on its way. I hope the pain will pass soon, but I’ll wait it out, because I’ve tested pain enough to trust it. And because who I will become tomorrow is so unforeseeable and specific that I need every bit of today’s lessons to become her. I keep a note on my bathroom mirror, “Feel it all.” It reminds me that although I began to come back to light 18 years ago, I resurrect myself every day, and every moment that I allow myself to feel and become. It’s my daily reminder to let myself burn to ashes and rise new.”

The first step to dealing with difficult emotions is 1) listen and be willing to turn towards your feelings and your emotions. 2) Feel it. And as Glennon Doyle would say in her book Untamed, “Feel it all.”

Again, if you want access to today’s show notes, you can visit today’s episode, 223, “How to deal with difficult emotions” and this is part one. In the next episode I will share three more tips to offer you in how to deal with difficult emotions.

To access the show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click  on Podcast, and Podcast is in the top navigation bar. Once you click on podcast, you can see all the episodes listed there. Again, the most recent ones are at the top. Again, today’s episode is 223.

Thank you so much for listening. I always appreciate spending time with you on this very important topic. Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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